Every time somebody says "cookies," my brain goes straight to the Cookie Monster. Or a warm chocolate chip cookie. Can you relate?
When I sat down with privacy expert Jodi Daniels on the Marketing Smarts podcast, we laughed about that. Then she painted a picture that wiped the smile right off my face.
She asked me to imagine a stranger following me all day with a notepad. Writing down what I wore, where I got coffee, what I ordered for lunch, what I watched that night. That's how she explained third-party cookies.
And I'll be real honest with you. For the first time, I thought, "That's creepy."
Here's the twist. When we recorded that episode, the whole industry was bracing for a "cookieless future." Google planned to pull third-party cookies out of Chrome, and marketers were sweating.
That didn't happen. Google changed its mind, and a lot of teams breathed a sigh of relief and went right back to business as usual.
Hear me on this: that's the wrong lesson. Let's talk about the right one.
Wait, Didn't Google Kill Third-Party Cookies?
Short answer: no. Here's the quick timeline so you're working from facts, not headlines.
- January 2024: Chrome restricted third-party cookies for 1% of users. That test was the only phase that actually rolled out.
- July 2024: Google stepped back from full removal and floated a user choice prompt instead.
- April 2025: Google confirmed there'd be no prompt. Third-party cookies stay on by default in Chrome.
- October 17, 2025: Google retired most of the Privacy Sandbox tools built to replace cookies, citing low adoption.
So as of today, third-party cookies still work in Chrome. Case closed, right?
Not even close. Safari and Firefox have blocked third-party cookies by default for years, privacy laws keep spreading, and the people on the other side of your screen are more aware of tracking than ever.
The "cookieless future" was never really about one browser. It's about a world where you only get to track people who say yes. That world is already here.
The Person With the Notepad
Let's go back to Jodi's analogy, because it's the heart of this whole conversation.
Picture yourself on a walk, and you notice someone behind you taking notes. "If after the first 30 seconds you notice this person behind you," Jodi said, "you probably would stop and say, what on earth are you doing?"
Now imagine they follow you all day. Coffee shop. Office. Lunch. Gym. Home. That's what cross-site tracking has done online, quietly building profiles like "mom in Atlanta" or "likes luxury cars."
Jodi knows this world from the inside. Before she became a privacy expert, she worked in targeted advertising. Her words: "I stalked you for cars. You're welcome."
Here's what I want you to walk away with. When humans see the notepad, most of them want it gone. Any strategy that only works when people don't notice isn't a strategy. It's a liability.
How We Got Here: A Few Bad Actors and a Lot of New Rules
Jodi summed it up with a lesson we all learned in kindergarten. A few people misbehaved, so now everybody has rules.
The modern rulebook started with the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which took effect in May 2018. It applies to anyone targeting or tracking people in the EU, even a US business. As Jodi put it, even a solo blogger with a global audience had to pay attention.
What made GDPR different? Jodi called it "an individual first as opposed to a company first law." The person comes first. Not the business.
And the rules haven't stopped coming. Here's where things stand in 2026:
- United States: There's still no federal privacy law. But about 20 states now have comprehensive privacy laws in effect, with Indiana, Kentucky, and Rhode Island joining on January 1, 2026. Several states also require websites to honor Global Privacy Control, a browser signal that says "don't sell or share my data." [LINK: IAPP US State Privacy Legislation Tracker]
- United Kingdom: The Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 relaxed consent for some low-risk cookies starting in February 2026, while raising the fines for getting cookies wrong.
- European Union: A proposal called the Digital Omnibus would move cookie rules into GDPR. It's still being negotiated, so it hasn't changed anything yet. Consent remains the default for marketing and tracking cookies.
Quick note: I'm a marketer, not a lawyer. Your obligations depend on where your audience lives and what you collect, so bring your legal team or a privacy pro into the room.
Here's the bottom line. Whether Chrome keeps cookies or not, privacy keeps moving forward. It's not going backward.
First-Party Data Is a Relationship, Not a Form Field
If you can't rent someone else's notepad, you have to earn your own data. That's first-party data: what people share with you directly through forms, purchases, emails, and conversations.
Everybody's talked about first-party data for years. Jodi's point is sharper. The goal isn't just getting first-party data. It's getting accurate first-party data.
She shared a story about a coffee shop. Buy a coffee, get a receipt, and within a week you're getting emails asking for your birthday so they can send a coupon. "I don't know who you are and what you're gonna do with that information yet," she said.
So what happens? People give a fake birthday. Or they pick whatever household income bracket "sounds lovely."
Now your team is segmenting, personalizing, and reporting on data that isn't true. Garbage in, garbage out.
Here's the fix: match your ask to the stage of the relationship.
- Early: Ask only for what you need to deliver what you promised. An email address for the guide. A first name for the welcome.
- Middle: Once you've delivered value, ask for context that helps you help them. Role. Biggest challenge. Topics they care about.
- Later: When trust is real, go deeper. Timeline, budget, who else is involved in the decision.
In HubSpot, progressive fields on forms can help, so returning visitors see new questions instead of the same ones. [LINK: progressive form fields → HubSpot forms how-to on Sidekick blog]
The question to ask before every form field: have we earned this yet?
Your Preference Center Is a Save, Not a Formality
Jodi told a story that hit me right between the eyes. She bought nursery furniture from a company years ago, and her kid is long past the crib. The emails? Still about nurseries.
Her choices were simple. Keep getting irrelevant emails, or unsubscribe from everything.
"I might not want what you're giving me, but I still like you," she said. "Just let me decide what it is I wanna hear from you."
Think about how hard you worked to get that person on your list. Then think about how easily you lose them because they couldn't say, "Less of this, more of that."
A real preference center lets people choose topics, frequency, and life stage. It turns "unsubscribe from all" into "here's what I actually want." In HubSpot, that starts with your subscription types and email preferences page, and it deserves more attention than most teams give it. [LINK: subscription types → Sidekick guide or HubSpot Knowledge Base]
Real talk: I deal with this almost every week with the folks we help. Hearing Jodi made me ask whether most of us are thinking about preferences all wrong. Most preference centers ask which emails. The better ones ask where you are in your journey.
Then make sure those choices sync to every system that sends a message. A preference that gets ignored is worse than no preference at all.
Patience Is a Marketing Strategy
I asked Jodi a question that felt off the beaten path: how important is patience?
Her answer: incredibly important. The challenge is that executives want immediate results, because we've all been trained to expect everything right now, on our phones.
But buying cycles don't care about our impatience. A shirt might be quick. Cars, Jodi noted, typically turn over every three to seven years, and B2B deals can take months.
Here's the payoff. Jodi said good first-party data can actually shorten the funnel and the trust window, because you know who you're talking to. "But if you push too quickly, then you're gonna mess the whole thing up."
She also gave us a test I love: the "scratch your head test." If someone opens your email and thinks, "Wait, why did I get this?", you failed. They're one click from gone.
So, leaders, measure the relationship, not just the click. And remember Jodi's other line: marketers are here to sell stuff. Patience isn't the opposite of revenue. It's how you get revenue that sticks.
The Pothole: Thinking the Tool Will Save You
When I asked Jodi about the biggest potholes for B2B marketers, she didn't hesitate. It's believing the shiny technology will solve everything.
The consent management platform of the month. The CRM "on steroids." The customer data platform (CDP). The data clean room.
Quick translation on that last one. A data clean room is a secure space where two companies combine data to find overlap or run a campaign, without either one handing its personal data to the other. Jodi described it as merging data in a more "privacy happy" way.
These tools can be great. But they only work as well as the data you feed them. If you're hoping for "magic with the little fairy wands," Jodi said, it's not going to happen.
There's a privacy catch, too. Before you share data in a clean room, make sure it lines up with your own privacy notice and your contracts. Otherwise you'll build the whole plan and then hear "no" from legal.
One more 2026 note. Server-side tracking and conversion APIs are popular ways to keep measurement working. They're useful, but they don't replace consent. If a human said no, the tool doesn't get to say yes for them.
Success Starts With Clean Data
So what does winning look like? Jodi's answer was refreshingly unglamorous: a clean data set.
Not data in one database that never syncs to another. Not a preference center where someone picks options A and B, and the email tool never hears about it. Clean, connected, trustworthy data.
Get that right, and everything on top gets better. Your segments. Your account-based marketing. Your CDP and clean room. Your AI tools, too, because AI is only as smart as the data you give it.
This is the part I get fired up about. Data hygiene isn't the boring part of marketing. It's the foundation every other part stands on.
How to Navigate a Cookieless World One Step at a Time
This is how we'd walk through it with you at Sidekick. One clear step at a time. Don't try to do all five this week.
Step 1: Audit what's tracking your visitors. List every cookie, pixel, and script on your site, plus who added it and why. You can't respect a choice you don't know you're making for people.
Step 2: Set up consent the right way. HubSpot's cookie consent banner can run as a notification, opt-in, or opt-out banner, and the opt-in version keeps HubSpot cookies from loading until a visitor says yes. If you run Google Ads or Analytics for EU or UK visitors, connect Google Consent Mode v2 as well. Then test that your banner actually honors every choice.
Step 3: Map your data asks to the relationship. Pull up every form. For each field, ask: do we need this now, and have we earned it?
Step 4: Rebuild your preference center. Give people choices by topic, frequency, and stage. Save the subscriber instead of losing them.
Step 5: Clean and connect your data. Pick your single source of truth and fix the sync issues. Then, and only then, add the shiny tools.
Questions to Sit With This Week
- If your customers could see your notepad, would they feel served or stalked?
- Which form field are you asking for before you've earned it?
- What would your list look like if "unsubscribe from all" became "send me less of this"?
- Are you buying tools to avoid fixing your data?
The Bottom Line: Trust Is the Strategy
Third-party cookies survived in Chrome. Great. But the marketers who flourish over the next five years won't be the ones clinging to them.
They'll be the ones who build relationships people actually want to be in.
When I asked Jodi for her final words of wisdom, she didn't name a tool. Tools will keep changing, she said, and AI will keep changing everything. Her advice: understand your customer, put them first, remember that it's all about trust, aim for a lifelong relationship, and ask for help.
