The Future of the Cookie

This paper is provided to acknowledge and address the limitations of the traditional cookie for providing persistent user privacy choices and tracking in our evolving multi-device, multi-environment digital landscape (discussed in this paper the “state management” challenge). Presented here is an initial examination of the various solution classes of state-management technologies currently and potentially available, as well as their efficacy as measured by the needs of disparate stakeholders. This paper lays the foundations upon which best practices for implementation for each state management solution class may later be constructed.

The scope of this work is to define guiding principles for stakeholders, evaluate each state management solution class against these principles, and to educate the reader on the current state management landscape. The . . .