Bad News for Marketers: Are Tracking Cookies Headed for Deletion?

In recent months, the heat has gradually been turning up on the practice of using tracking cookies to monitor—or, depending on your worldview, ‘spy’— on visitors to your website. Internet Explorer 10, first released in fall 2012, was the first major browser to include ‘Do Not Track’ as a default option, and there’s still a fair amount of confusion over both the compliance requirements and best practices surrounding the movement.
Some, like the Ad Man quoted in this VentureBeat article, think the tracking cookie is not long for the world. “It’s going to go,” he says. “I think it will take five years to kill it.”
His reasoning is that people find it creepy and invasive, and given an easy enough way to do so, will opt-out en mass.
If that’s true, it’s seriously bad news for marketers. If the cookie goes, say your goodbyes to Google Analytics. Give your best regards to targeted and re-targeted ads, you won’t be seeing them again either.

Online Marketers Could Be in for a Rude Awakening

For all practical purposes, the death of the tracking cookie puts online marketing back into the stone age, also known as ‘traditional media.’ Without the context of knowing where your visitors have been and where they’re going, you might as well be in the billboard business.
So if you’re an online marketer, should you put in your two-weeks notice now, or take a gamble and wait until next month?
Well, as we all know, the one inexorable truth of new developments in technology is that they always result in more privacy for their users.
Oh wait no… my mistake… it’s the exact opposite of that.
The public’s thirst for sharing minutia about their daily lives seems virtually unquenchable, drawing comparisons by one 28-year-old billionaire to Moore’s Law. Put it this way: if you really hated cookies, where would you rant and rave about it? Right next to the pictures of last night’s dinner on Facebook, right?
Look, I consider myself a fairly private person. Other than the occasional blog post (Jonathan Crowe will come find me if I don’t write it), my online footprint is pretty minimal. It would take a pretty sophisticated algorithm to tell the difference between my Twitter account and a spam bot.
But even I don’t really give a damn if a website tracks me anonymously.
You really want to track me? Great. Now you know that in the past day I read 12 ESPN articles speculating on the Bruins playoff chances, and 1 E! article speculating on the name of Kim and Kanye’s baby (which I totally clicked on by accident). What possible damage could someone do with that information, and what possible motivation would they have to do it?
Compared to the slim benefits of saving basic preferences when I visit a website for the first time, it’s just not worth it to me to disable cookies, no matter how easy they make it.
If technological developments are at all related to the preference of users, and I believe they are, cookies are here to stay for a very long time. You’d better know your way around a Google Analytics account.