Within the infrastructure to create and store first-party cookies, it’s possible for third-party tech to camouflage as a first-party cookie, taking advantage of the longer storage time before first-party cookies decay.
But Apple is wise to this camouflage attempt. Its WebKit team, which operates the codebase for the Safari browser, made a tweak that will treat a subset of first-party cookies as third-party cookies and boot them out after a seven-day period. The reason? According to Apple, they can “cloak third-party requests as first-party and store cookies in the first-party context.”
The move caught ad tech’s attention, even though it feels like the latest in a cat-and-mouse game between vendors and Apple over its decision to all but bar third-party tracking.
Plus, with Apple’s moves to preserve privacy perceived as having an ulterior motive (it has a growing ads business), the company is under growing scrutiny, including in France over how its practices in the advertising realm could be anticompetitive. The French Competition Authority is weighing antitrust action against Apple.
The context conundrum
It seems like publishers can’t catch a break when it comes to data leakage. For years, they have had to contend with third-party cookies tracking their readers across the web, using what they’re reading to better target them. Now, their sites are being scraped to create contextual segments, and publishers once again feel out of control as others package and use their sites’ contextual data.
The Association of Online Publishers had enough. The UK industry body wrote an open letter condemning the practice and calling for publishers to be compensated for this use of their intellectual property. We discuss what publishers think of the letter and the practice.
If the AOP fired the opening shot, who else might take up arms? We discuss how publishers, buyers and industry trade groups could add momentum to this pushback against third parties packaging publishers’ contextual data.
