Once No. 1 Concern, Swift Downfall of Cookie No Longer Advertisers’ Main Worry

"It was an all-hands-on-deck, five-alarm fire,” Zaneis said last week. Today? “It’s kind of a dull siren in the background,” he said. “The fire has largely gone out, but there are some embers there.” With no federal legislation passed, the diminished prominence of the DNT discussions and less-aggressive stances from browser companies like Microsoft and Mozilla, “the cookie is certainly alive and well,” said Marc Groman, president of the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI). While a sudden transition no longer looms, mobile tracking and cross-device trackers will eventually usurp the desktop browser-based cookie, industry representatives said. “It’s an evolution, not a revolution,” Zaneis said.

Conflicts between advertisers and browsers erupted throughout 2012 and 2013 as several browsers -- most notably Mozilla’s Firefox (http://bit.ly/1qM43Oz) and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (http://bit.ly/VVzDwL) -- moved to block third-party cookies. “If you do away with cookies and have one ad ID that is controlled by one of the major providers, then that will kill this industry of third-party trackers,” David Jacobs, then-Electronic Privacy Information Center consumer protection counsel, told us in late 2013. Concurrently, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)-based DNT talks were debating whether to move forward with a definition of “tracking” that advertisers believed too-heavily favored first-party over third-party data collection, thus squeezing out the third-party cookie (CD June 28/13 p7). “The confluence of those three things [was] making the users of third-party data very nervous,” said John Montgomery, chief operating officer at media investment company GroupM, last week.

But in the year-plus since, Mozilla and Microsoft have eased up, ad officials said. Mozilla has not yet integrated default third-party cookie blocking into subsequent Firefox iterations and advertisers decided to not honor a default DNT signal from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Zaneis and Montgomery said. “I think the browsers largely have backed away,” Zaneis said. Microsoft and Mozilla declined to comment. While the W3C DNT talks are still chugging along -- the group issued for public comment a tracking preference expression (TPE) document (CD April 25 p9) -- attention and participation have waned, ad officials said. “The immediate threat of those three things,” Montgomery said, “they haven’t come to pass."

The W3C TPE document, if widely adopted, would let users curtail the use of cookies, said a group co-chairman, Justin Brookman, also director of the Center for Democracy & Technology’s Consumer Privacy Project. The document “allows cookies for narrow purposes like fraud prevention and attribution,” he said. “That issue is closed.” The W3C process still has major input from companies like Adobe and Apple. Ad officials weren’t anxious. “I don’t think it’s going to go anywhere,” Montgomery said. The TPE document as written is “unworkable,” Zaneis said. “Nobody’s going to follow the W3C standard -- period."

But companies continue to work on non-cookie tracking strategies, observers said. So far, rhetoric has outpaced technology, Groman said. “It might be marketing materials were ahead of reality a bit.” Companies big and small saw the rise of mobile and wanted to create platform-neutral, possibly proprietary, tracking abilities, Montgomery said. Cross-device tracking was a popular conversation topic among NAI members through 2013 and 2014, Groman said, but little was settled. “I'm still working with companies on business models around cross-device,” he said, “and working on what technologies will be effective.”

Large companies like Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft have copped to developing their own tracking technology (CD Oct 11 p16), creating another worry for cookie-reliant third parties, observers said. “Across industry, small businesses and publishers, there’s still this concern around who controls the data,” Groman said. “We can’t have gatekeepers who own the technology,” Montgomery said. Apple, Facebook and Google didn’t comment.

Ultimately, the cookie standoff has “sped the pace of change” for an ad industry that needed the push, Zaneis said. Multiplatform tracking is inevitable, and the ad industry must confront the business, interoperability and privacy complications the shift presents, Zaneis said. W3C, Microsoft, Mozilla and others “raised these issues in a meaningful way,” he said. “I just want to sort of say ’thank you.'” While the cookie remains a “fundamental building block of the Internet” -- necessary for basic e-commerce functions like a shopping cart -- “we need to evolve,” Zaneis said. The possibility remains that the dormant embers “could always erupt into a full-fledged fire,” he said.