Become DATA focused – Create your walled garden
Three thousand years before the first cookie was ever baked, an old nurse discovered something about recognition that EU bureaucrats still don’t understand.
The Mark
Eurycleia was a simple woman. Plain. Functional. The kind who kept her head down and her hands busy. She’d served this household for forty years — nursed the prince as a baby, watched him grow into a king, waved goodbye when he sailed for Troy.
Twenty years had passed since then.
Now she knelt before a ragged beggar, doing what she’d done a thousand times before. Washing the dust from a stranger’s feet.
Her fingers moved over his foot.
And stopped as she touched something she recognised.
A deep old scar but now a clear mark. A wound from a boar hunt when he was young — a wound she had cleaned and dressed herself, decades ago.
Her hands began to tremble.
She looked up. Past the dirt. Past the weathered skin. Past twenty years of war and wandering.
Odysseus.
That mark was his “cookie.”
Not a tracking pixel. Not a retargeting tag. Not a surveillance mechanism. Just a simple identifying mark that said: I know you. You’ve been here before. Welcome home.
Plain. Functional. The kind of thing you ignore — until suddenly, it’s everything.
For twenty years, the suitors had been devouring his household, courting his wife, assuming the king would never return. But the moment recognition happened — the moment that mark connected past to present — everything changed.
The rightful king could reclaim his house.
The Coconut
Here’s what Rory Sutherland — the advertising legend who’s spent forty years studying why humans actually buy things — says about trust:
“Trust grows at the speed of a coconut tree and falls at the speed of a coconut.”
For years, cookies quietly did their job.
Slow. Steady. Growing trust between websites and visitors. Every return visit, a little more recognition. Every purchase remembered, a little more personalization. Every preference stored, a little better service. Ring by ring, like a tree growing.
The first HTTP cookie was invented in 1994 by Lou Montulli at Netscape. He needed a way for websites to remember shopping cart contents. That’s it. A simple tool for recognition.
For two decades, this humble mechanism helped websites remember their visitors. Small businesses could see who came back. E-commerce sites could keep items in carts. Personalization became possible. The early internet grew up on cookies the way villages grew up around wells — they were just infrastructure.
Then the EU oven got too hot and burnt the cookies!
THUD.
One regulation. One panic. One overcorrection.
Twenty years of slow-grown trust. Dropped like a coconut.
The Toaster Problem
Let’s be honest about what actually happened.
People didn’t hate cookies. People hated being stalked by toasters.
You looked at a toaster once. Maybe you even bought it. And for the next six weeks, that toaster followed you across every website on the internet. Facebook. News sites. YouTube. Your friend’s blog about pottery. Toaster. Toaster. Toaster.
That was creepy. That was the problem.
But here’s where it went wrong: the EU regulated the mechanism instead of the misuse.
It’s like banning locks because some people got locked out of their houses. Or outlawing memory because some people remembered things you’d rather they forgot.
The behavior was the crime. The tracking across dozens of unrelated sites. The building of shadow profiles. The selling of attention to the highest bidder. The relentless, context-free, borderline-stalking retargeting.
But cookies took the blame.
And now? According to a 2023 eyeo study, 94% of users find cookie banners annoying. A Pew Research study found 68.9% of people just close or ignore the banners entirely. Only 3% actually customize their cookie settings.
Nobody wanted this “protection.” They just wanted the toaster to stop following them!
The Proof Nobody Talks About
In October 2022, Brave browser — used by over 100 million privacy-conscious users — quietly rolled out a feature that automatically blocks and hides cookie consent banners.
No opt-in. No announcement tour. Just… gone.
Nobody protested.
And more importantly, nobody noticed till they used another browser. Just silently gone.
The most privacy-focused users on the internet, using a browser specifically built to protect them, had their cookie “protections” silently removed — and they didn’t even notice. Or care.
That’s not a feature people valued. That’s a bureaucratic solution to a problem nobody had.
Meanwhile, the actual privacy-invading infrastructure? Still humming along just fine, thank you. The difference is, now it requires logging in instead of dropping a cookie.
The Castle Keepers
Here’s the irony that should keep you up at night.
Apple — the self-proclaimed champion of privacy, the company running “What happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone” ads — killed third-party cookies in Safari and implemented App Tracking Transparency.
Noble, right?
Except Apple has: Apple ID. The App Store. iCloud. Apple Pay. Apple TV+. Apple Music. Apple Fitness. Apple News. An ecosystem where hundreds of millions of users are logged in constantly.
Apple didn’t kill tracking. Apple killed tracking they didn’t control.
Google — yes, the surveillance capitalism poster child — kept delaying cookie deprecation in Chrome for years. Even they could see that a cookie-less world just concentrates power further. Into walled gardens. Into logged-in ecosystems. Into the hands of companies big enough to have their own identity layers.
When the castle is secured, you can burn the bridge.
The Shopkeeper’s Blindfold
Roy Sutherland tells another story. He walked into a shop he’d visited a hundred times. Spent thousands of pounds there over the years. And the shopkeeper treated him like a complete stranger.
“It felt wrong,” he said. Like something fundamental was broken.
Because it was.
“Ordinary human beings desire relatedness and reciprocation and recognition with the people with whom they do business.”
That’s not marketing theory. That’s human nature.
The local grocer who remembers you like your apples sweet. The barista who starts making your usual when you walk in. The hotel concierge who already knows which room you prefer.
Recognition isn’t surveillance. Recognition is service.
And the EU essentially decreed: “Cover all marks. Blindfold your shopkeepers. Treat every returning king like a vagrant.”
Now your website has amnesia. Every visitor is a stranger. Every returning customer starts from zero. Every loyal buyer gets the same generic experience as someone who wandered in by accident.
The suitors are feasting while you can’t even recognize who belongs in your own house.
The Water, Not The Food
Here’s where most people get confused.
Everyone’s arguing about cookies. Cookie banners. Cookie consent. Cookie alternatives. Cookie this, cookie that.
Cookies are the distraction.
Think about survival. No food for five days? Uncomfortable. Hungry. Unpleasant. But survivable.
No water for five days? Dead.
Cookies are food. Annoying to lose. Frustrating to deal with. But ultimately, a tactical problem with tactical solutions.
Data is water.
No data for five days — no tracking, no recognition, no memory of who visits your site, what they do, or whether they come back — and your business is making decisions blind. Your AI has nothing to learn from. Your marketing can’t optimize. Your website can’t improve. Your customer relationships can’t deepen.
As we explored in The Seven-Year Itch You Cannot Scratch, you can’t harvest insights from data you never collected. The businesses that waited lost years of potential intelligence.
The cookie drama is noise. The data question is survival.
It’s time to stop focusing so much on cookies and focus on COLLECTING data – and trust that in the near future there will be a solution to this problem.
The Servant’s Entrance
Odysseus didn’t walk through the front door.
Think about it. He’d been gone twenty years. The suitors controlled his hall. Walking in announcing “I’m the king!” would have gotten him killed before dinner.
So he came in disguised. Through the back. Let the recognition happen quietly — through marks and memories — until he was ready to reclaim what was his.
Server-side tracking is your servant’s entrance.
The browser wars rage at the front gate. Safari blocking. Chrome deprecating (eventually). Firefox restricting. Everyone fighting over who controls the door.
But the servant’s entrance? That’s your server. Your database. Your infrastructure.
When a visitor lands on your WordPress site, inPIPE — that’s Seresa’s WordPress plugin — captures the event directly. No browser intervention. No cookie consent chaos. The data flows through your kingdom first, then routes wherever it needs to go: GA4, Facebook, Google Ads, BigQuery.
The browser isn’t the gatekeeper anymore. You are.
First-party cookies still work — because they’re on your domain. Customer IDs live in your database. Transaction history stays in your control. Recognition happens through your infrastructure.
This isn’t dodging privacy. This is privacy done right. The data relationship is between you and your customer — not brokered by ad networks, not surveilled by third parties, not scattered across the internet following people around with toaster ads.
The Data Trees
Here’s what the next five years look like.
AI isn’t coming. AI is here. And AI is hungry.
As we covered in Who Stole AI’s Dinner, that hungry AI shows up ready to learn — napkin tucked in, fork and knife at the ready — and your data table is empty. Not because you couldn’t collect. Because you were too busy arguing about cookie banners.
Seresa coined a concept we call “Data Trees.” The principle is simple: you can’t harvest fruit from trees you didn’t plant.
Every day you’re not collecting data, you’re not planting. Every visitor who comes and goes unrecognized is a seed blown away by the wind. Every transaction that doesn’t flow into your own database is a tree that never grows.
The businesses planting data trees today — capturing clean, complete, first-party data — will have years of insights to harvest when AI needs feeding.
The businesses still fighting cookie battles will arrive at 2027 with empty warehouses and hungry AI systems.
The Rains Have Just Come. This is planting season. Don’t miss it arguing about which shovel to use.
The Homecoming
Remember where we started.
Eurycleia, the old nurse, washing the feet of a beggar. Her fingers finding the mark. Recognition flooding in. The king, home at last.
That’s what data does. That’s what recognition enables.
Not surveillance. Not stalking. Not creepy toaster ads chasing you across the internet.
Just… knowing. Remembering. Serving.
The customer who came back for the third time deserves to be recognized. The loyal buyer who’s spent thousands with you deserves better than “Welcome, new visitor!” The returning king deserves to enter his own house.
Cookies were imperfect tools. But they solved a real problem: humans want to be recognized.
The EU broke the mechanism. Apple locked the gates. Google kept everyone confused. And small businesses — the ones without walled gardens, without logged-in ecosystems, without billion-dollar identity platforms — got caught in the crossfire.
But here’s the thing.
The mark doesn’t have to live on the visitor’s browser anymore.
It can live on your server. In your database. Under your control. Recognition built on your infrastructure, feeding your AI, growing your Data Trees.
That’s not a workaround. That’s how it should have been built from the start.
The Ground Is Yours
Stop apologizing for cookies.
Seriously. The world is tying itself in knots over consent banners and browser deprecation and privacy theater — and you don’t have to solve any of it.
Seresa found ways to create digital fingerprints identifying 30-40% of returning visitors. Not through surveillance. Through server-side recognition, first-party relationships, and data that flows through your kingdom instead of someone else’s living room.
The technology exists. The infrastructure is proven. The path is clear.
The only question is whether you plant today — or keep waiting for perfect weather that will never come.
Trust grows at the speed of a coconut tree. Twenty years of cookies, slow and steady. Then it falls at the speed of a coconut. One regulation, one panic, done.
But here’s the secret:
Coconut trees grow from coconuts.
What fell can be replanted. In better soil. With deeper roots. Under your control.
The mark that Eurycleia found wasn’t a surveillance tool. It was proof of identity. Proof of relationship. Proof of home.
Your data can be that mark. For every customer who returns. For every visitor who belongs.
Plant your Data Trees today. Collect the data. Recognize your returning customers.
The king is ready to come home. Make sure you know him when he arrives.
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