GDPR sent shock-waves through Europe in 2018, but many US companies were able to get by without much trouble. But now, the state of California has passed a new bill titled the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), which is set to go into effect on January 1, 2020. The official set of rules and guidelines for this law have yet to been set, which is leaving advertisers on edge as for what’s to come.

The problem is that the California state legislature is still deciding and taking public comment on what should and shouldn’t be included in the law. The official guidelines may not be released until after the January 1, 2020 implementation date.

Companies however cannot wait until January 1 to begin making changes in order to comply with the CCPA. One of the more controversial aspects of the law is that it allows for a 12 month look back window that could penalize companies that hold personal information of California residents from January 1,  2019 on. If your company currently complies with GDPR, you should be in the clear. However if your company hasn’t made necessary changes to data collection policies you could face penalty. The best thing to do is immediately make appropriate changes and show complete willingness to comply with any data privacy laws.

Are 3rd Party Cookies No More?

It’s not just governments that are cracking down on privacy, companies like Apple are becoming more strict as well. Apple recently released Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) 2.2. This new update will now limit cross domain tracking on the Safari browser to just 24 hours, instead of 7 days.

This means for example, if you click on a Facebook ad at work on a Wednesday but don’t end up purchasing the product until the weekend, that ad will not get credit for the sale. This greatly complicates advertising attribution which is already a challenge as is. In addition, this also means retargeting customers beyond the 24 hour time window may become more difficult as well.

The solution? Using server side cookies, rather than relying on 3rd parties like Facebook for tracking. This means we may very well see a boon in server side analytics and tracking software, as they will become increasingly necessary to maintain accurate advertising attribution and retargeting.

As if the digital marketing landscape wasn’t complex and constantly shifting enough, the new wave of privacy crackdowns will mean that advertisers will have to reassess what the best marketing channels for 2020 and beyond will be.

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