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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.
So the cookie is dying. The article says nothing about how we will be tracked in the future. Or how we are being tracked now when I reject cookies.
It means they've found easier ways to fingerprint you. [PDF] Marketers don't want generic "cookies" they want specific, verified identification.
They're going to have a better spy network than is legal for most governments to have.
Fingerprinting is replacing tracking and has been for at least 10 years when I was very peripherally involved with testing a company that did it for work.
It's one way they get you with cookies once you've "cleared" them and they are able to reattach the same ones as before.
EFF has testing: https://panopticlick.eff.org/
And yes, multiple fingerprints can be attached to a single user. You have 10 unique devices and all 10 of those fingerprints get attached to you after logging into a site or account. It can take awhile, but you can't block it.
Slight changes are accounted for, profiles updated. It's not as "fool-proof" as cookies, but that's not really a requirement.
Bitcoin!! You forgot Bitcoin you insensitive cod
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.
The big WTF-are-they-talking-about clue was revealed in this line of nonsense: "Cookies don't really work on mobile." (Wut?) The paragraph basically goes on to explain they're expecting many users to stop using web browsers altogether, and just run native apps that request ads by user id. Basically, the problems that cookies were invented to solve, are already solved by the apps having their owmn version of local storage (and without all those pesky controls and options that web browsers give to users).
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Actually, it's just a big WTF, followed by oh they are sprouting shit in order to get a few clicks (including mine, sadly).
They are saying no advertiser will be using cookies in 2 years because people are moving from browsers to mobile apps. Lets turn this around: they are saying that in two year no advertisers will bother tracking people who use browsers. So in two years I can stop blocking Facebook, uninstall Privacy badger because the web will be sweet and innocent again. Ohkay....
For what it's worth, the page carrying this bullshit installed 3 cookies of its own, plus 7 from twitter. It is true google analytics, sail-horizon, and crwdcntrl didn't install cookies. The injected their tracking data directly into the page using javascript.