Safari Announces Third-Party Cookie Blocking: How This Impacts the Future
Organizations relying on third-party cookies to facilitate the collection of user consent must make the shift to capturing first-party data to remain compliant and strategic.
Organizations relying on third-party cookies to facilitate the collection of user consent must make the shift to capturing first-party data to remain compliant and strategic.
This week, Apple announced important updates to its Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) functionality for Safari, now blocking all third-party cookies by default. Apple has been working towards the blocking of third-party cookies by default since 2017.
“This is a significant improvement for privacy since it removes any sense of exceptions or ‘a little bit of cross-site tracking is allowed.’”
– John Wilander, Apple Engineer
This update comes almost two years before Chrome’s third-party cookie blocking planned for 2022 and emphasizes the important shift in the web technology landscape.
Three Main Takeaways: The Impact on Consent Management for Marketers and Publishers
Let’s look at the impact of this change as it relates to how consent is captured online today.
- It’s no longer feasible to use technology to capture the user’s consent and depend on a third-party cookie to enforce those consent preferences. Previously, if a user’s consent was captured and stored in a third-party cookie, that cookie would follow the user to different domains and properties and make their consent preferences known.
- With the enhancements made to Safari’s ITP, marketing or consent management platforms can’t rely on the use of third-party cookies. Historically, third-party cookies have been used to track various attributes about website visitors including website, marketing and consent preferences.
- The importance of first-party data cannot be understated. Both Publishers and marketers must strategically capture data, consent, and other preferences directly from their visitors and centrally store that information to respect a user’s choice, which ultimately builds trust with the users.
Apple’s Safari changes to block third party cookies by default signify the beginning of a broader shift in web technology. Organizations must adapt today to keep their privacy programs compliant.
CookiePro Auto-Blocking Technology
When it comes to respecting the consent given to control tracking technology on a website and passing the necessary consent downstream to AdTech vendors, the task can appear daunting.
Using CookiePro’s Auto-Blocking technology, you can capture consent and automatically detect and block the tags firing on your page. Frameworks such as the IAB Europe TCF and IAB Tech Lab USP Privacy String for CCPA can also be leveraged easily to communicate consent preferences with third parties without the reliance on third-party cookies.
Leverage CookiePro Auto-Blocking to automatically scan, find, and block selected tracking technologies on your website until the visitor has provided consent. No extra coding or integrations required.
Watch this video to learn how CookiePro’s Auto-Blocking Technology works.