MeasureCamp Bratislava - The War Room - ITP 2.1 Reviewing the short term solutions and anticipating the next moves

By Alban Gerome posted 04-08-2019 01:57 PM

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Good evening and greetings from London,

It has been a while since I last posted a link to my latest MeasureCamp. This can only mean one thing, yes I will be "on tour" again but only attending MeasureCamps in Europe. Last Saturday was the first one of the year for me with Bratislava. I took the opportunity to collect info and thoughts about ITP 2.1 or Intelligent Tracking Prevention, a Safari feature that caps the expiry of cookies to 7 days. If you wonder how that will impact you and your web analytics reports, it could inflate your unique visitors if they tend to come back every 7 days or less often. If most of your customers are completely addicted to your website and check in at least once per day then the deck is probably not for you.

So we have been witnessing an arms race of sorts. There are immediate solutions, some of which may work for you but the ITP team will not be resting on their laurels. You can bet they are meeting to discuss internally what their next move is going to be. I am betting this is going to be restrictions. But as in most arms race a victory from one side rarely last forever. Tension builds up, a fissure happens and then 2 and then 10. We see this with antibiotics followed by microbial resistance, Germany forced to pay reparations after WW1 fueling resentment leading to WW2. Cookies will mutate into something that could well become much harder to control than what we have today, putting privacy in jeopardy.

Without further ado, here's the link to my latest MeasureCamp on SlideShare below:

https://www.slideshare.net/AlbanGrme/itp-21-the-war-room

Thanks,

Alban
#Event

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Alban Gerome

04-14-2019 03:57 PM

At MeasureCamp Amsterdam I presented the same deck above but expanded upon my conclusion. Another chap called Leandro if memory serves also talked about ITP 2.1 and reached a different conclusion. So in a nutshell 2.1 could unfold two different ways it seems.

In my view, we would have a Streisand Effect whereby the arms race would lead to tracking capabilities that defeat most anti-tracking techniques like microbes that have developed resistance to most antibiotics.

Leandro, again apologies if I remember his name wrong, contended that customers could become collateral victims of this arms race. Essential features of web programming would cease to work and break websites. When you log in to a website you do not need to log in to every page. Your browser remembers it somewhere. That's stored in a cookie.

So perhaps we might have a situation where customers notice that browsing with Safari, and soon Firefox, websites do not function too well. This breeds a lack of trust and people might start switching to another browser that may not think too much about their privacy but at least gets the job done,

In the meantime, a new browser called Brave, based on Chrome, but with ad blocking enabled by default, all blocked by default too and Duck Duck Go as its default search engine, had 1 million active users as of Jan 2018 and the latest figures are 5.5 million active users.

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