What are cookies?
Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari already have removed the use of third party cookies. And now also Google will follow their example.
This is of course important when a major player like Google takes this step. Their browser possess more than 60% of the global web browser market share, it is the end of cookies as we know them. And it will have will have a major impact on all business.
Everyone that wants to recognize the impact removal of the cookies will have has to understand what cookies are.
How and why cookies was created?
Best way to understand what cookies are is to learn from the history. So question is why was cookies invented and how come cookies are considered so scary?
Understanding how the cookies works!
Recording customer behavior and interest
Immediately you enter the pharmacy a camera starts to follow you. Every step you take, every aisle of product categories you walk in and every product you watch, examine is recorded.
As a woman that recently gave birth you need some menstrual protection and painkillers like Advil or Paracetamol. Possibly you need something to stabilize your bowel and resorb for your fluid and salt balance. Then you also need a new shampoo because you recently got dandruff due all stress. You lift one up and and you read “removes lice and gnats and prevents lice infestation” – that was wrong. Then you find another schampo for dandruff, that you where looking for. You keep shopping… Cortisone, various creams against scars, stretch marks, psoriasis, and something to reverse diabetes.
When you go to pay, the cashier asks for your email adress and perhaps som other contact details. Otherwise, you can’t buy anything. Then you provide the information, pay and walks out of the store.
The main purpose for pharmacy to do the recording is to understand customers’ shopping behavior to optimize their result. Or as the pharmacy would right fully say, – to give customers the best service.
And to give their customers the best service they want to “come closer to you as a customer”. Therefore they also let facebook take part the recording. Actually it is their camera and the cookies they place is their facebook pixel. And what you most probably are not aware of, is that you as customer have approved that facebook automatically get the recordings when you provided the pharmacy your email address.
This would be unthinkable if it was a pharmacy on the street. It would not be legal. But the scenario is an example of how online pharmacies typically operate.
Sharing personal information
In som cases pharmacies have not only let facebook do the recordings but also sent all individual information about customers to Facebook. The pharmacies when asked about this clearly had no idea what they did. And their customers certainly had no idea that Facebook could now use their information.
That’s the case in Sweden. Apotea and Apohem sent information about hundreds of thousands customers to Facebook. The former government owned pharmacy now called Apotek AB sent information about more than a million customers – source
And in USA it was revealed 2022 that 33 out of hundred biggest hospitals shared information with facebook using the pixel. Meta thereby has access to the private medical data of millions of people without permission and has used it to serve targeted medicine and treatment ads on Facebook – source
How normal is this?
In the example we are talking about pharmacies. The question then arises: is it normal for online businesess to send information like this to Facebook. No one knows; even Faebook has no idea.
Trying to quantify this issue, we can look at an estimate from 2020 with the number of transmissions made from health-apps alone. It was then estimated to be more then one billion transmissions every day – source
The information is there but no one knows where
The main concern is that facebook has no idea where the information is so they can erase it. To understand this we use the parabel that facebooks used in an internal document that has been leaked. Trying to describe where and how information is stored they describe it like this. Picture a big lake of information. And that information is like ink.
“You drop just a tiny drop of your ink into the lake. The ink does not vanish, it is still in the lake, but it can’t be found. It is spread in the water”.
If you think that most negative information have been towards Facebook you are correct. But it is not because they do something completely different from others. It is just that their information is so much more sensitive than others.
Considering this it is not strange that legislators tighten the room for how information is can be collected and used. It is strange that it took soo long time. Problem is though, that now responsibility is transferred to visitors and site owners. Read more
Cookies explained in one min!
So now you know how cookies works and why cookies was created. The sharp one noticed the cookies in the image. And also that they started off with one and then went up to three. The cookies are divided into first-party, second-party and third-party cookies. Facebook pixels are basically the same as third-party cookies, but with the difference that the pixel handles personal data.
Every time you visit a website small text files are stored.
These files contain information about your browsing activity, preferences and interactions with the website. Those text files are what we call cookies.
First-party cookies
First-party cookies are created by the website being visited and are used to store user information like language preferences, usernames, and passwords. They enhance user experience by providing personalized content and remembering important details for future visits.
Second-party cookies
Second-party cookies they come from another website but serve the same function as the first-party cookies, often they are from websites in partnership.
Third-party cookies
Third-party cookies are set by unrelated domains, mainly for tracking and advertising across websites. I would prefer to call them crumbs because they are the ones leaving your footprint all over the digital world.
Furthermore, they are stored on your device at use such as computer, laptop mobile phones and TV. But also, all other devices we use to send or receive information e.g. your car, your smart home etc.
More about third party cookies
Third-party cookies are set by domains unrelated to the website the user is currently visiting. They are typically used for tracking and advertising purposes by advertisers, ad networks, and analytics companies. Third-party cookies can track users across multiple websites to build profiles for targeted advertising and content personalization.
While gathering the cookies together they can create a detailed profile of users, mapping out their online activities and building a digital fingerprint.
Read more!
More about cookies
Customer loyalty & New customers without cookies and tracking
Find out how to easily generate both new customers, enhance customer loyalty without use of cookies or tracking.
No cookies makes site owners responsible
As the third-party cookies are removed and tracking will still exist, responsibilities are moved from browser to site owners!
No more cookies – what are the alternatives?
We will give you an understanding of how the removal of third-party cookies will impact your digital marketing. And what is the alternative.
Sales: your ultimate conversion
The conversion rate is vital for any business because it measures how effectively a company achieves its goals, such as
Returning visitors – customer engagement means sales!
Sure, it’s fine to get a lot of new visitors but returning visitors indicate overall brand engagement and customer loyalty.
