Third-party cookie phase-out faces delays, inconsistent browser policies, and complex compliance challenges. Marketers must adopt privacy-first, consent-auditable, first-party data strategies, avoiding dark patterns to build trust, ensure regulation compliance, and remain competitive.
The third‑party cookie was once a cornerstone of online tracking and advertising. But as we close in on a possible post‑cookie era, the fate of third‑party cookies remains tangled in delays and uncertainty. So, what’s going on—and what can websites do to stay ahead of a changing cookie landscape? What does the future of consent management look like?
Google famously pledged to phase out support for third‑party cookies in the Chrome browser, investing in its year-long “Privacy Sandbox” experiment, only to move the goalposts again, abandoning its plans for changing its approach to cookie tracking.
As the deadline for cookie phase-out has shifted repeatedly, the scope of the Privacy Sandbox has likewise shifted from requirement to project – making it more or less irrelevant in practice. Meanwhile, other browsers like Firefox, Safari and Brave have already taken action on third-party cookies. Firefox handles third-party cookies through its Enhanced Tracking Protection feature; Safari manages cookies with Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP); Brave handles cookies with default blocking and ephemeral storage.
This mishmash of approaches to third-party cookies leaves a perplexing mix of browser capabilities and policy stances. Without universal enforcement, advertisers and publishers can’t build consistent strategies for tracking or consent.
Different browser approaches to third-party cookies create a legal, compliance and enforcement headache and leave marketing strategies feeling underbaked because of subsequent inconsistency, limits on data collection, and complications with adherence to privacy regulations.
Let's break down some of the key issues:
Privacy regulations like GDPR or CCPA require transparency and consent, but enforcement may differ based on local interpretations or technologies used. Marketers need to make sure compliance is achieved even when browsers block or mask tracking, making it harder to validate consent or prove data provenance. As more data privacy laws come into effect globally, and existing laws shift to, in many cases, provide broader protections to consumers, compliance will only grow more complex, meaning that businesses and their websites will need to take even greater care to adhere to regulations.
For marketers, finding consistency in a jumbled assortment of cookie-handling behaviors in different web browsers will become increasingly difficult. As different browsers take different approaches to cookies will lead to fragmented data sets, leaving marketers with no single, consistent way to track users and considerably reduced possibilities for personalization.
Similarly, this inconsistent data creates unreliable campaign performance data. For example, one user journey might be trackable from end to end in Chrome but completely obscured or fragmented in Safari, making attribution and reporting murky and untrustworthy. Losing visibility with the absence of third-party cookies also makes attribution of conversions and ad engagement across platforms next to impossible.
In case where cookies do disappear, many companies rely on other technologies as workarounds, including fingerprinting and server-side tracking. While some of these are accepted as constituting first-party data, which is fair game because it is owned by the website owner/operator, some methods fall into a legal and ethical grey area in terms of GDPR, CCPA and ePrivacy compliance, especially where consent is not necessarily sought, users are not fully informed or cannot opt out easily.
All of this also creates a ripple effect across the ad tech ecosystem, which relies on third-party cookies to run effect ad networks and retargeting tools. These, as well as the organizations that depend on traditional third-party-driven ad tech, will need to rethink the approach with shifts toward contextual or first-party data strategies (or hybrid approaches alongside third-party cookies, where these cookies continue to exist).
This inconsistency undermines everything marketers and website owners have come to know about user tracking and ad performance and indeed more broadly about cookies.
While Google may have put the brakes on phasing out third-party cookies, most marketers and website owners are nevertheless moving toward privacy-first marketing standards. This is not just best practice, given the growing privacy consciousness of consumers, but is also a more consistent way to manage inconsistency from big tech. If it’s unclear what direction companies like Google will go, and with regulatory boundaries tightening up, it makes sense to move to a privacy-by-design approach to marketing and tracking to remain more stable and resilient in the face of the fickle, disruptive whims of big tech decisions.
Given this near sea change, what do website owners and marketers need to think about and know heading into this new and confusing landscape for cookies and consent? What steps can they take to future-proof themselves?
Even if browsers make tracking harder, regulatory and privacy laws still apply. Take enforcement: regulators in the U.S. and Europe are getting serious about cookie use:
In April 2025, the California Privacy Protection Agency fined American Honda $632,500, and the California AG filed a $1.55 million settlement with Healthline over non‑consensual behavioral tracking
Seven U.S. states have created a privacy regulators consortium that highlights cookie‑banner “dark patterns” – where “accept all” is easy but rejecting cookies takes multiple clicks. Connecticut and California authorities are flagging these UIs as non‑compliant.
In Europe, regulators continue to criticize deceptive consent banners. Users often get nudged to accept cookies without proper granular choice. Worse still, data shows that a large chunk of websites dump third‑party cookies even before consent is given—in 2017, studies revealed that 65% do this, breaching ePrivacy Directive rules. By 2024, cookie compliance had not improved much, with almost 58% failing to delete cookies after consent was withdrawn.
Even if users click “reject”, their preferences aren’t always honored:
Nielsen Norman Group notes that in many cookie‑permission designs users' choices go unrespected.
Various studies show that more than 80% of sites fail to present symmetrical cookie choices (equally easy accept/reject), violating GDPR, ePrivacy Directive, and CPRA principles. Data protection authorities, such as France’s CNIL, have begun cracking down hard against websites that do not make rejection of cookies as simple as accepting them.
This is the tip of the iceberg in terms of how user trust is eroded and legal compliance gets undermined.
Users are fatigued. Every website a user visits entails another requirement to consent to cookies, and these cookie banners in their many variations can – but should not – demand a high level of engagement to get to informed rejection or consent. When fatigue sets in, people either accept everything or just ignore banners. In the US, according to one study, around 40% of users automatically consent. This leads to either over-collection or under-collection of data, both harmful to user experience and business planning.
With third-party tracking in flux, what’s the alternative? First-party cookies won’t fix everything, but they are one part of a future-proof strategy:
Server‑side tracking, combining analytics and CRM, lets you tie user sessions directly to your domain
First-party cookies align with privacy regulations and are inherently more transparent.
But to succeed, you need clear user journeys and trust signals, not dark patterns.
Whether you use first or third‑party cookies, you need a clear and auditable consent strategy:
Pulling all these pieces together to make the changing cookie landscape make sense and work for you, here are some considerations to keep in mind:
Consent‑first consent management platform (CMP): Choose a CMP that supports granular control aligned with privacy laws and logs preferences.
Adopt server‑side & first‑party analytics where possible: Shift from third‑party pixel-based tracking. Build owned-data insights using server-side events, under user-specified consent.
Transparency with users: Make consent visible and revocable. Let users find a consent dashboard or reset choices easily.
Regular audits: At regular intervals that make sense for your business, scan your site for rogue trackers and check logs for compliance.
Privacy-by-design: Lockdown third-party integrations, and align design and development with privacy as a core value.
Don’t wait for cookies to fully crumble—or for regulators to dictate the terms. Even if the third-party cookie era seems postponed indefinitely, enforcement is happening now. And so are lawsuits, fines, and reputational losses.
Keep snacking on those cookies—but only if you own the jar. You can build your consent-forward, first-party data foundation now. Invest in clear, symmetrical consent mechanisms. Audit your trackers. Earn genuine customer trust.
When the dust settles, you’ll be not just compliant—but competitive. Cookie disruption can be a gateway to a privacy-respecting future for your brand and your users.
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