Managing Privacy and Compliance in a Cookieless World

Introduction

With enterprises inclining towards a cookieless business landscape, managing privacy and compliance with transparency become the need of the hour.

Moreover, various legislation, including EU’s GDPR and California’s CCPA, are becoming increasingly stringent regarding businesses collecting, storing, and managing consumer information.

Hence, businesses need to gear up for the new reality and ensure they create a perfect harmony while adhering to the regulatory compliances and delivering a seamless user experience simultaneously.

But, how would businesses swiftly adopt the change? Because almost every business is reliant on cookies for personalized user experiences and going cookieless all of a sudden could be stressful.

So, how can businesses adopt this new shift while ensuring they remain compliant and do not compromise user experience while collecting crucial data?

Let’s look at some crucial aspects that businesses must adapt to remain compliant and grow in a cookieless world.

What Does Cookieless Mean? Who’ll be Impacted?

Before learning about cookieless, let's understand what cookies are and how they’re helping businesses derive growth.

Cookies are small portions of data stored on a user’s web browser, and websites utilize these cookies to enhance user experience through personalization.

Businesses have been using cookies for decades since they help them understand their consumers better and further help them plan a winning strategy for their business growth.

Now talking about going cookieless describes a marketing process through which marketers aren’t relying much on cookies. In a nutshell, cookies aren’t collected for marketing purposes.

The multinational technology giant Apple has already adopted the cookieless architecture. Apple’s Safari web browser is considered the only web browser that delivers the highest level of privacy to its users.

However, just like Safari, Google has also planned to jump on the cookieless bandwagon and is working to enhance privacy and compliance for its users.

So, what does this entire scenario portray?

Though consumers are concerned about how their data is used online and demand more control over it, major companies are already blocking third-party cookies, thus impacting customer privacy and compliance.

However, on the other hand, blocking third-party cookies that are majorly used for marketing, personalization, and new customer acquisition purposes would undoubtedly impact many businesses online.

Since we’ve discussed all the aspects of a cookieless world, let’s talk about what online businesses can do to prosper and stay compliant.

#1. Transparency leads to consumer trust.

One of the crucial aspects that business owners need to understand is that transparency is the key to winning consumer trust.

Trust has to be earned, for which online businesses should be transparent about the collection, storage, and use of consumer data.

Unless businesses don’t offer complete transparency, earning consumer trust would be an uphill battle since the ones offering full transparency would be on the right path to meeting the privacy and compliance regulations and would eventually have users that share their details without any hassle.

#2. Incorporating progressive profiling.

Since businesses won’t be able to rely much on cookies, progressive profiling could be the game-changer for them as it allows users to gather crucial information gradually.

Progressive profiling is the method of collecting personal information about the client step-by-step. It helps the digital marketing team streamline the lead nurturing process by gathering increasingly specific client data without hampering privacy and compliance regulations.

Progressive profiling allows marketers to collect critical information about their clientele and build unique consumer personas. It helps determine where a particular consumer is in the buying journey and decide the best course of action to move them towards the final purchasing stage.

And yes, all these things can be done by taking the user's consent so that they need not worry regarding their privacy.

#3. Crafting rich consumer experience.

A rich consumer experience can help businesses build trust, encouraging them to share their data even if cookies aren’t collected.

As we all know that the attention span of users is decreasing consistently, businesses that aren’t able to impress their users in a couple of seconds would lose the game.

Hence, businesses relying on conventional user interfaces that bombard users with a lengthy registration form would lag behind their competitors. An intelligent user interface that collects data gradually by adhering to the privacy and compliance regulations and doesn’t hamper user experience is undeniably the need of the hour.

In a nutshell, businesses can ask for users’ consent if they deliver them a flawless user interface where users can quickly access the consent banner and customize their preferences.

Final Thoughts

The cookieless world isn’t hyped since more and more web browsers are following the trend ever since Apple’s Safari has taken stringent measures regarding the collection of third-party cookies.

Businesses that deliver personalized experiences based on user cookies would now have to find alternatives. Hence, the aspects mentioned above could help them deliver rich consumer experiences and maintain privacy and compliance even in challenging situations.