France's privacy investigator, the Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL), recently spent a week organizing a "cookies sweep day" to examine compliance with its guidelines on cookies and other online trackers. Beginning in October, the CNIL will also be conducting onsite and remote inspections to verify compliance with its guidelines on cookies.
In parallel with France's crackdown on privacy, data protection authorities across the European Union are taking similar efforts. This raises the question of whether we may be looking at a digital advertising world without cookies.
Facebook recently launched a new advertising platform that links users' ad interactions to their Facebook accounts rather than cookies. While this may be just as invasive, it addresses several issues. Firstly, cookies are an ineffective way to track advertising reach. Many users regularly delete cookies, resulting in an overestimate of the number of users being exposed to an ad. Studies show that in the United States, this overestimation could be as high as 2.5 times. Secondly, most people use more than one device. Since cookies do not identify unique individuals but rather visits from unique devices, this compounds the overestimation problems when advertisers track consumers using cookies. Finally, many users may be using the same device, making it difficult for advertisers to track individual users.
While Facebook's new platform likely makes people feel just as uncomfortable, users have the right to opt out of Facebook. This could be a workaround to privacy laws and pose a serious threat to the current structure of cookies-based digital advertising.
Sources: http://www.natlawreview.com/article/france-about-to-embark-cookies-sweep-day
http://online.wsj.com/articles/facebook-extends-reach-withad-platform-1411428726
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