82% of Browsers will soon be blocking Cookies by Default

The latest moves by Google and Firefox show how inevitable it will be that 3rd party cookies will be blocked as standard, leading to and end of the current web infrastructure as we know it.

Google, Apple and Firefox are hitting the nails into the Cookie Coffin

Google have announced that in an upcoming release of Chrome it will be possible to start blocking 3rd party cookies, and Firefox have announced that they will now start to default block all 3rd party cookies as Apple’s Safari has done for some time.

An article on The Drum goes into some detail on Google’s privacy updates, including:

... give Chrome users the ability to see the third-party cookies tracking them across the internet, and then give them the ability to avoid them.

PCWorld covers Firefox’s lates moves in more detail, including:

Firefox 67.0.1 and subsequent versions will have Enhanced Tracking Protection turned on by default, blocking all known third-party cookies within Firefox.

Privacy has now become a major factor in why people buy into one ecosystem or another, say iOS versus Android. This has driven by years of creep when users who hit just a single website might have their details sent to 100s of different destinations, without any clear oversight of how that data is going to be used.

Why did this happen?

A quick look at the what happens on a single Daily Mail page (chosen at random), see Ghostery image below, shows how just a few seconds on one page leads to your personal information being sent to 93 locations, and during the course of a news reading session that goes up to 100’s of companies, most of whom you know nothing about.

The same page on a browser running privacy protection loads up in 3.5 seconds (versus 145 for the un-protected version). It means that up to 97.5% of the time it takes to load up the Daily Mail page is spent on it either targeting you with ads, or extracting data from your browser, and sharing it with 3rd parties.

The Cookie Pincer

In the EU we finally have a legal framework to protect our individual privacy and data rights, but it is clear that it is not fully delivering on the goal of us owning our own personal data. It has lead though to Cookie Preferences being introduced on most major sites used in the EU, meaning users can turn off cookie tracking across 100,000s sites.

Most other users around the world have no comparable protection which means there’s a real opportunity for browser makers to create a competitive advantage by building privacy protection into their browsers.

The End is in sight for 3rd Party Cookies

At Affino we have been highlighting that 3rd Prrty Cookies, and the entire ecosystem around them have been under threat for some time. It means that companies who legitimately use 3rd party analytics solutions, messaging solutions, audience tracking, personalisation, social sharing and much more are increasingly unable to do so.

An example being a WordPress site as the main hub for a companies’ web presence, with 3rd Party Messaging, Google Analytics, Facebook buttons for Social sharing, and any number of ad, jobs, event, registration, ecommerce, and other plugins. Increasingly all the non publishing elements are now no longer working.

This is leading to a loss of revenues, engagement, and broken workflows for most companies and is going to become much worse over the coming year. We can be fairly certain that if the current trends continue it will mean that the way companies have built up their web presence for the past decade, using multiple platforms loosely tied together using JavaScript and cookies is coming to an end.

Only web presences which have 100% 1st party cookies, which do not rely on 3rd party cookies, will still work reliably on all devices and browsers in the very near future. If you are not planning for that eventuality, then expect to see your audience engagement and revenues severely restricted in the years to come.

To find out more about Affino can help you crack the cookie and privacy problems get in touch.