Slashdot Mirror
The Slow Death of the Internet Cookie (axios.com)
Sara Fischer, writing for Axios: Over 60% of marketers believe they will no longer need to rely on tracking cookies, a 20-year-old desktop-based technology, for the majority of their digital marketing within the next two years, according to data from Viant Technology, an advertising cloud. Why it matters: Advertising and web-based services that were cookie-dependent are slowly being phased out of our mobile-first world, where more personalized data targeting is done without using cookies. Marketers are moving away from using cookies to track user data on the web to target ads now that people are moving away from desktop. 90% of marketers say they see improved performance from people-based marketing, compared with cookie-based campaigns.
It seems to me that there's an awful lot of misinformation here. Cookies have been given a bad name, because the moment they sprung into existence, they were misused and/or abused by advertisers and marketers. The reality is, cookies aren't going away at all... they're just being used more inline with their original intent, that's all. A cookie gives any standard web browser (including those on mobile devices) the feature of storing small chunks of identifying personal data ("login" data) for the user currently using that browser, in order to allow that user to personalize their experience on any given website. (If you're using a mobile app instead of a browser, than that app obviously doesn't need cookies; it can just use local memory natively to store your login credentials.) The abuse started when advertisers realized that they didn't need you to actively "login" to their service, in order to identify you and track you with cookies. Naturally, people don't like it when someone tracks them without first asking for permission... but that's not the cookies fault; they're just tools. A hammer is still intended to be used on nails, even when someone with no scruples uses it on your toes -- but nobody ever blames the hammer for that, and rightly so.
So in other words, "people based marketing" just means that the service you're actively logging into (such as Google, for example) has successfully established themselves as the primary marketer, and they've made arrangements to sell all of your activity to advertisers. Likewise, those advertisers no longer see much return-on-investment in doing the heavy lifting of attempting to gather all of that activity data themselves, in part because so many people have gone to great lengths to stop those advertisers from doing so. Which brings us back to simple the fact that: you're really the product that's being marketed, and the advertisers are the customers. (Which is just as it has always been, really.)
The more things change, the more they stay insane.
This sounds like an article that is justifying what Firefox is doing: dropping cookie management from the newest version. I don't agree, and I insist that Firefox keep some sort of cookie management facility.