In today’s world, people are demanding more privacy online. Major web browsers have ended (or are ending) their support for third-party cookies and there are increasingly more penalties for privacy law violations. It’s important to develop digital transformation strategies that boost your ability to collect and utilize first-party data.
Watch Christopher Harrison (CEO, FullContact) and Kevin Lazorik (Senior Vice President and Co-Founder, Hero Digital) discuss adjusting to a cookieless marketing strategy, embracing contextual privacy, and strategies for creating and supporting your own identity graph.
Summary
We sat down with Hero Digital to talk about what changes for marketers when the tracking infrastructure they have relied on stops working.
The session starts from a point we think gets missed: browser changes were a consequence, not a cause. Kevin Lazorik opens with survey data showing that most US adults were already blocking ads, blocking scripts or using a VPN years before any browser made privacy the default. Consumers had already decided. The platforms followed them.
From there we get into what to build instead. Our half of the conversation is mostly about treating personal data as a liability rather than an asset: collect less of it, encrypt what you keep, replace it with an identifier that cannot be reversed, and hold on to the recognition without holding on to the risk.
We close on where identity is heading, and take audience questions on what to do with a large existing store of personal data.
What We Cover
- Consumers moved first, browsers followed. More than three quarters of US adults were already using some privacy tool before any of this became default behavior. If you read the change as a platform decision, you miss that it was a response to what people were already doing.
- Personal data is a liability as well as an asset. Collecting more than you need adds risk to your brand and to your customer with nothing to show for it. The questions we start with are what you hold, why you hold it, and whether you will ever act on it.
- Zombie data is the first thing to look for. Long-established brands often hold sensitive information gathered decades ago, by a system nobody now owns, for a purpose that no longer exists. All risk, no reward, and the easiest thing to remove.
- You can keep the recognition and drop the storage risk. Encrypt the sensitive data at rest, protect and restrict the keys, and work from an identifier that cannot be analyzed backwards to reveal the person. Your personalization and measurement still work.
- First-party cookies are not going away. The change is about third-party cookies. Anything inside your own domain still works, subject to consent, which is why an abandoned cart still remembers what you left in it.
- Three models of identity are live at once. Siloed, where each company manages its own credentials. Federated, meaning single sign-on. And decentralized, where the individual holds their own identifier. All three exist simultaneously, which is most of why this moment feels confusing.
- Transparency is a design problem, not a legal one. Lazorik points to a company that publishes the faces and names of the people responsible for its data policy, including its outside advisors. The legal text is necessary. It is not what earns trust.
