After promising to phase out Cookies at the start of 2022, Google has gone back on its commitments as its replacement FLoC solution has been almost universally opposed by major industry players and regulators - and was certainly not compliant with GDPR or CCPA regulations. It leaves Google’s post third party cookie approach in tatters and with considerable work to build a new approach with broader industry and regulatory support.

Google’s Third Party Cookie support has thus...

We witnessed a number of paradigm shifts in 2020 on the road to the ending of 3rd Party Cookie support.

Apple in particular was highly active on the user security front - introducing default 3rd Party Cookie Blocking right across its software portfolio. iOS 14, iPadOS 14 and macOS Big Sur all ushered in a new age of user-centric protections - to help prevent third party exploits which happen all too frequently on the internet.

And while Apple’s Safari and Firefox’s browsers were the ...

PageFair and The New York Times recently published the most recent stats on adblocking globally. In the past year, the number of users employing ad-blocking software has risen to roughly 11% of the global Internet audience, equating to some 600 million devices.

Many companies have tried to outsmart adblocking or ban it in one way or another, but as we keep reiterating - adblocking is about far more than just mitigating advertising revenues. The risk of malware / malvertisements has ...

There’s a lot of misunderstanding about what ad blockers do, and about what their real impact is. Several different strategies have emerged to deal with ad blockers, from outright access blocking to gentle consumer petitioning. Yet there is only one genuinely successful way to deal with ad blockers - which is to serve up properly vetted ads natively.

I talk of ’properly vetted ads’ as the downside of programmatic advertising is the lack of significant validation - ...

Once more the dark side of advertising rears its ugly head, as the FCC fines Verizon Wireless $1.35 million for its ongoing use of unsolicited and covert ’SuperCookies’ tracking technology, fully intended to follow its customers’ movements right across the Internet. The new ruling likely mandates that both wireless and fixed broadband providers must get permission from users before tracking their behaviour online in such a manner.

The SuperCoookies being deployed are ...

Last Friday saw the official launch of Apple’s iOS 9 - which gives mobile users access to privacy controls on their browser - meaning an effective ad blocker / 3rd party cookie blocker for all those iPhone and iPad users. This will mean that many businesses which are heavily reliant on banner-advertising revenues, will need to recalibrate their approaches or suffer significant falls in revenue.

"iOS tools like ’Crystal’ give people the ability to remove mobile web ...

The above visual demonstrates the impact of Cookie blocking on a typical commercial website; all 3rd party services on the referenced site have been blocked by a privacy tool like Ghostery, meaning:

• No Ads
• No Registration / Sign Ups
• No Search
• No Social Sharing
• No Classifieds
• No Native Ads
• No Sponsorship
• No Analytics or Tracking
• No Personalisation
• No Video
• No Lead Generation

These are just some of the services that are typically rendered via 3rd party cookies, and all of these ...

Next Tuesday 17th March at the PPA, Affino is leading a briefing and discussion on the impact of privacy tools like Ghostery. Using such utilities on browsers, consumers can effectively turn off all 3rd party cookies, many of which publishers and media organisations are currently relying on to drive revenues via advertising, profiling, personalisation, search, lead generation, promotions and media serving amongst other third party services.

Our CEO Markus Karlsson alongside CCO ...