What are Third-Party Cookies and Cross-Site Tracking?
To understand what it is, we should comprehend the importance of third-party cookies and cross-site tracking. Let’s take an example: A user who first browses electronics site for a new gadget and later browses food blog site for dinner ideas. If both these sites load resources from the abc-tracker site and it has a cookie stored in the user’s browser, the owner of it can know that the user visited both the electronics website and the food blogs website, their activities on those sites, which web browser they used etc. This is called Cross-site tracking, and the cookie used by abc-tracker.com is called a Third-party cookie.
What is Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP)?
Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) was introduced in 2017 by Apple Inc.
This feature prevents the ability to track the users by securing the third-party cookies etc. It is primarily focused only on online privacy. It is an open-source browser, and many organizations are adopting it for their sites. We will further discuss the role of versions of intelligent tracking prevention in detail below.
Versions of intelligent tracking prevention (ITP)
Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) 1.0 and 1.1: In itp 1.0 and 1.1 versions, itp begins tracking the user, when they visit the site. The first-party trackers pretend to be third-party trackers and stay until the user comes back within 24 hours.
Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) 2.0 and 2.1: ITP 2.0 is an improved version of ITP 1.1. It was developed by Apple and Webkit together. ITP 2.0 blocks more cookie-based tracking than its predecessor, making it more challenging for third-party sponsors to gather information about visitors and track their conversions.
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How does ITP work?
Intelligent Tracking Prevention gathers statistics on asset loads. The statistics are placed into containers in the top privately-controlled domain or TLD+1. It characterizes third-party tracking cookies with the support of AI algorithms. For example: a user connects in the span of a day, it will make cookies useless. In any case, users don’t connect in something like a month, then, at that point, it cleanses cookies. If users visit that site and sign in occasionally, it guarantees cookies will not be shown continually to them.
Does itp have a positive or negative effect on businesses?
More or less ITP has a negative effect on businesses. With ITP, AdTech can’t recognize users on the web, which affects their performance. Now that Adtech fails to give results, which forces publishers to lower their ad inventory. Ad inventory represents ad revenue. Unlike publishers and Adtech, advertisers ITP has minimal impact. Yes, they face difficulty in targeting an audience, but they are adaptive. ITP has minimal effect on Martech. ITP targets only first-party trackers, and it is not their expertise.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Intelligent Tracking Prevention has secured the privacy of consumers. Recently, they have enhanced intelligent tracking prevention further, For example, itp versions 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, and 2.1.
But it has affected businesses, especially marketing agencies. Due to a lack of data, they are not getting authentic research, and that is affecting their revenue. But, It prevents companies from tracking competitors’ customers and encourages healthy competition.
