How Data Restrictions Are Fragmenting Customer Experience — And the Path I'd Take Instead

There is a comfortable version of the story about the decline of third-party tracking: that privacy regulation and the fading of the tracking cookie are simply a win for customers. Less surveillance, more control, fewer ads following people around the internet. I broadly support the direction of travel. But I think the story leaves out something that matters — the same forces are also degrading the customer experience itself, not only the marketer's ability to measure it.

For roughly two decades, the implicit arrangement was that brands assembled a single, coherent view of each customer by stitching together signals from across the web. Much of it was done without meaningful consent, and that is a fair criticism. But it did produce a kind of continuity. The brand "recognised" a person across devices and channels, remembered where they left off, and could at least try not to treat them as a stranger each time they returned.

As that stitching becomes harder — cookies deprecated, identifiers restricted, platforms more closed — the coherent view fragments. A brand may now see a customer on its app, separately on its website, separately again in an email tool, and separately once more inside whatever advertising platform it relies on. These fragments often do not connect reliably. From the customer's side, the result is not really privacy. It is incoherence.

Most of us have felt it. The ad that keeps promoting a product you already bought, because the system serving it has no idea the purchase happened. The brand that treats a long-standing customer like a first-time visitor because recognition broke somewhere between channels. The offer that contradicts the one you saw yesterday. These are not edge cases so much as the predictable output of a customer view cut into pieces that no longer connect. There is some irony in it: rules intended to make the experience less intrusive can, in practice, make it more repetitive and disjointed.

The instinctive industry response has been to try to rebuild the broken picture by other means — probabilistic matching, fingerprinting-style techniques, data clean rooms, and increasingly elaborate ways to reassemble the old view within the new rules. I understand the impulse, but I am sceptical it is the right long-term bet. It tends to treat regulation as an obstacle to route around rather than a signal about where the customer relationship is heading, and it can leave a brand one ruling away from having its workaround closed off.

The more durable path, in my view, is to stop trying to reconstruct a comprehensive background view of the customer and instead build a smaller, transparent, consented one. First-party data gathered through a genuine exchange of value — you tell me what you actually want, and in return I make the experience meaningfully better — is less complete than the old picture. But it has two properties the old model lacked: the customer knows about it, and the customer chose it. Over time, I think that trust tends to be worth more than the marginal precision lost by not knowing things a customer never agreed to share.

There is a more interesting possibility worth considering, and it connects to broader shifts in how digital identity might work. What if the customer, rather than the brand, becomes the place where the coherent view lives? Instead of every company quietly assembling its own partial profile, the person carries their own context — preferences, history, consented credentials — and chooses what to present and to whom. The brand becomes the recipient of a profile the customer controls, rather than the keeper of one assembled in the background. That would invert much of the architecture of the last twenty years, and I am genuinely unsure how ready the industry is to think in those terms.

What I am reasonably confident about is that the answer is neither nostalgia for the tracking era nor an indefinite effort to recreate it indirectly. The fragmentation is real, the customer experience is suffering for it, and I believe the brands that do best will be those that rebuild continuity through consent rather than through background reconstruction. So the question I will leave open is the one I find most challenging: if you can no longer quietly assemble a complete picture of your customer, are you prepared to ask them to share one — and to be worth the asking?

The above reflects my personal views only and is intended for informational and discussion purposes. It does not represent the position of any employer or organisation.