Microsoft Making Its Own "Cookies"

As Alisha mentioned in her post on Monday, cookies may be a thing of the past.  Cookies have become the target of regulators and privacy advocates and may simply become obsolete since they are irrelevant to video services (both on TV and via web).  As a result, many believe cookies may soon become extinct.

Microsoft has just announced that it is plotting its own strategy to survive in a world without cookies.  The new technology would be a tracking mechanism for the company to track users across all devices running Windows, including computers, laptops, tablets, smartphones, XBox consoles, as well as Internet Explorer and the Bing search engine.  Will this tracking technology not just face the same issues as the original cookie?

A Microsoft spokesperson promised: "Our priority will be to find ways to [go beyond the cookie] that respect the interests of consumers."  Consumers would be able to grant permission to advertising via this new tracking technology when opting into the traditional terms of service agreement for their devices.  Microsoft would then own this information and responsible for not sharing it with third parties.  Cookies, by contrast, are available for access by countless third-party companies to use for their own tracking and marketing purposes.  The new tracking technology would effectively consolidate information and power with the few companies who are launching their own proprietary tracking technologies (Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon).  The risk here is that it gives a huge amount of power to these companies which can potentially be exploited for unfair gain.

The other large advantage to Microsoft's new technology is the ability to run integrated advertising across all of a user's devices.  They could run a video ad on someone's XBox and follow up with email banners on a laptop, and so on.

In summary, there are large risks and benefits to this new tracking technology, which has the potential to cause significant change in the world of digital marketing.

Source: http://adage.com/article/digital/microsoft-cookie-replacement-span-desktop-mobile-xbox/244638/