How the Cookieless Trend Is Forcing Marketers to Adapt?
In recent years, companies like Google, Apple, and Mozilla have been gradually phasing out third-party cookies on browsers such as Chrome, aiming to strengthen user privacy protection. At the same time, Google has developed its Privacy Sandbox. Essentially, instead of allowing third-party websites to track users’ browsing behavior via third-party cookies, Chrome itself will handle tracking locally and provide websites with ads that are likely to match users’ interests.
What makes this particularly significant is that a large portion of Google’s revenue depends on advertising. Third-party cookies have long been used by many companies to track user behavior across websites in order to optimize their platforms and services. They also rely on these tools to allocate budgets and measure campaign performance.
As a result, Google’s announcement to phase out third-party cookies has sparked strong reactions. Many companies argue that this move threatens their business operations and advertising effectiveness. But the impact goes far beyond a few individual companies — it is fundamentally reshaping how the entire advertising and marketing ecosystem operates. The industry is now facing a critical turning point.
Losing the ability to track users across platforms not only drives up advertising costs, but also reduces the accuracy of personalization and campaign measurement. In this new reality, marketers are being forced to move away from identity-based data models and seek alternative marketing approaches that remain effective while also fully compliant with evolving privacy regulations.
Google is gradually delivering on its commitment to phase out user behavior tracking.
The Cookieless Shift: A Difficult but Inevitable Transformation
According to The Washington Post, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) believes that Google’s ownership of Chrome, combined with its dominant position in search, creates barriers to fair competition. Forcing Google to divest Chrome could open the door for new competitors to establish a critical gateway to internet search, thereby reducing Google’s current level of control.
However, separating Chrome from Google is far from straightforward and poses many challenges. Since 2018, Google has been offering Chromium as an open-source project, allowing other developers to build their own browsers on the same core infrastructure. This can be seen as a strategy to expand Google’s browser ecosystem and promote an open development model where multiple specialized browsers coexist alongside traditional ones.
In this environment, companies face increasing challenges in tracking user behavior across a fragmented browser landscape, threatening the stability and interoperability of today’s open web ecosystem. They are confronted with rising advertising costs while facing diminishing effectiveness:
Mis-targeted ads leading to lower conversion rates;
Difficulty in measuring ROI and campaign performance;
Growing legal risks for businesses that collect data using methods non-compliant with regulations such as Europe’s GDPR or California’s CCPA, which can ultimately harm both brand reputation and long-term business operations.
In response to these concerns from both businesses and consumers about data privacy, the cookieless trend has emerged to promote more transparent and sustainable marketing models that move beyond third-party cookies. Traditionally, third-party cookies have been used to track user behavior across websites, enabling ad personalization, campaign measurement, and user experience optimization. The cookieless movement seeks to replace these practices with more privacy-focused solutions.
Many companies are already adapting by experimenting with advanced technologies and deploying cookieless marketing strategies, including:
- Deterministic Identity-Based Solutions
- Probabilistic Identity-Based Solutions
- Contextual & Behavioral Targeting
- Browser and AdTech industry-led privacy initiatives: Privacy Sandbox (Google), Brave’s Privacy Preserving Ads, Apple Private Relay, Mozilla Total Cookie Protection
- Identity collaboration platforms: ID5, UID2, LiverampID, First-ID, Utiq, and others
However, these efforts are becoming increasingly constrained by tightening regulations and growing user resistance to being silently tracked.
To cope with the decline of cookies, many companies have begun adopting advanced technologies and leveraging identity collaboration platforms to maintain targeting and measurement capabilities.
Are Cookie Alternatives Just a Temporary Patch?
In reality, most alternatives to third-party cookies are merely temporary patches — designed to buy time ahead of their full deprecation, but still falling short of fully addressing the challenges of effectiveness, security, and privacy. As third-party cookies continue to decline and pressure mounts from regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, and CCPA, Data Clean Rooms (DCRs) are emerging as a promising solution in digital marketing.
DCRs allow businesses to collaborate on data in a secure environment while protecting user privacy through advanced Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs). This enables organizations to activate marketing campaigns that remain both highly targeted and fully compliant with privacy regulations.
The term “clean room” can sometimes be misleading. It is not a physical space, nor is it simply a place where data is “cleaned.” Instead, it refers to a controlled digital environment where parties can securely interact with data, under strict privacy-preserving protocols that ensure compliance and confidentiality.
The shift toward a cookieless world is not merely a temporary fix — it represents an inevitable transition. In this context, DCRs act as a bridge, allowing businesses to unlock the full potential of first-party data while securely combining it with second-party data from trusted partners. This enables deeper analysis, accurate measurement, and campaign optimization without violating user privacy.
To prepare for an uncertain post-cookie future, companies need to proactively build their DCR adoption roadmap now. The process should start with internal education and awareness, followed by pilot projects built around simple, well-defined use cases where ROI can be clearly measured.
From there, organizations can choose a deployment strategy that fits their needs — whether developing in-house expertise, collaborating with specialized partners, or adopting flexible SaaS-based solutions for faster implementation. Finally, it is crucial to establish robust data governance and legal frameworks to ensure regulatory compliance is embedded from the design phase of the system onward.
AIDatacy helps companies "patch the cookie gap" by embedding privacy protection directly at the data-in-use stage.
It’s Time for Marketers to Move Beyond Chasing Identity Data at All Costs
Rather than focusing solely on collecting user identity data at any price, marketers need to shift their mindset. The priority now is to build safe, transparent, and consent-based data ecosystems — where businesses, platforms, and consumers collaborate under shared trust and responsibility.
In Closing
As regulations tighten and personal data collection practices undergo profound changes, cookieless is not the end — it’s an inevitable turning point, one that requires marketing and advertising to restructure at the very core.
This is the moment for businesses to proactively redesign their data strategies around sustainable principles:
- User-centric approaches
- A shift toward first-party data
- The adoption of advanced privacy technologies
It is in this evolving landscape that AIDatacy was born.
We help businesses close the gap left behind by cookies, by embedding privacy directly at the data processing layer (data-in-use). But beyond technology, AIDatacy aims to serve as a true enabler of this transition — helping companies step confidently into a future where privacy is no longer just a legal requirement, but a new ethical standard and a measure of corporate responsibility.