Your customers don’t hate cookies. They hate feeling watched. Consumer research consistently shows a split reaction: 62% find retargeting ads creepy (Business Review, 2022), yet 50% say personalized ads help them discover products (Merkle, 2021). If people truly hated all tracking, that second number would be zero. The distinction matters for every WordPress store owner: your customers aren’t rejecting your analytics—they’re rejecting the surveillance economy that follows them across the internet.

Here’s the thing most privacy discussions get wrong: they conflate essential site functions with advertising surveillance. Your shopping cart cookie? Nobody cares. That shoe ad following them for three weeks after one Google search? That’s what triggers the privacy backlash.

The Real Source of Consumer Privacy Anger

Cambridge Analytica was the watershed moment. Before 2018, most consumers vaguely knew they were being tracked. After the scandal, they understood exactly how—and they didn’t like it.

What actually bothers consumers isn’t complicated:

• Being watched: The feeling that someone is always looking over their shoulder
• Data sold without consent: Learning their information was traded like a commodity
• Ads following everywhere: 54% of US consumers felt cross-device ad following was creepy (Cheetah Digital, 2020)

What doesn’t bother consumers:

• Sites remembering their login
• Shopping carts saving items between sessions
• Preferences being stored for return visits

The eMarketer headline captured it perfectly: “Consumers feel followed around by ads.” Not “consumers hate websites remembering them.” The distinction is everything.

You may be interested in: How Ad Networks Hijacked Cookie Technology

The Retargeting Problem: When Advertising Crosses the Line

50% of US adults say ads promoting the same products over and over are the most off-putting advertising behavior (LoopMe/eMarketer, 2021). Not ads in general—repetitive ads that signal surveillance.

The mechanics make it worse. Third-party cookie match rates run only 40-60%, meaning the ad networks don’t even do surveillance well. You browse running shoes once, and suddenly you’re seeing running shoe ads on news sites, social media, and weather apps for weeks—sometimes for products you already bought. The technology is simultaneously invasive AND inaccurate.

This creates a paradox revealed in the Merkle Consumer Survey: 44% said personalized ads feel invasive, while 50% said personalized ads help discover products. Both are true. Consumers want relevance. They don’t want stalking.

The cookie consent banner you agonize over? It’s treating a symptom, not the disease. Your customers aren’t clicking “reject all” because they don’t want your site to function. They’re clicking it because they’ve learned that “accept cookies” often means “let ad networks follow me everywhere.”

What WordPress Store Owners Get Wrong

Most WordPress stores respond to privacy concerns by over-restricting their own analytics. They strip out tracking, reduce data collection, and then wonder why they can’t attribute conversions or understand customer behavior.

This solves the wrong problem entirely.

Your customers want privacy FROM advertisers, not FROM you. The first-party relationship between a store and its customers is fundamentally different from third-party surveillance by ad networks. When someone buys from your WooCommerce store, they expect you to know about that purchase. They don’t expect that purchase data to end up in a profile sold to the highest bidder.

You may be interested in: Cookie Alternatives Are Worse: Why Fingerprinting and Universal IDs Create New Privacy Nightmares

First-Party Data: The Ethical Middle Ground

First-party data collection—information gathered directly from your customers on your own website with their knowledge—operates in a completely different ethical space than third-party surveillance.

First-party data collection means:

• You know what your customers bought from you
• You can see how they found your store
• You can measure which campaigns drive actual revenue
• The data stays in your control, not scattered across ad networks

What it doesn’t mean:

• Building profiles by tracking people across unrelated websites
• Selling customer data to data brokers
• Enabling ads to follow users everywhere they go

The technical distinction matters. When you use first-party server-side tracking, events flow from your WordPress site to your server to your analytics platforms. At no point does a third-party script load in the user’s browser to beacon their behavior to advertising networks.

Implementing Tracking That Respects Privacy

Server-side tracking lets you measure what matters—conversions, attribution, customer behavior—without participating in the surveillance ecosystem that consumers reject. Data flows through your infrastructure first, giving you control over what goes where.

Transmute Engine™ exemplifies this approach: a first-party Node.js server running on your subdomain (like data.yourstore.com) captures events from your WooCommerce store and routes them to GA4, Facebook CAPI, and other platforms. Your customers interact with your domain, not third-party tracking scripts. You get accurate conversion data. They don’t get followed across the internet.

Key Takeaways

• 62% of consumers find retargeting creepy—but they’re not rejecting all tracking, just surveillance behavior
• First-party vs third-party is the distinction that matters—your customers accept the first and reject the second
• Over-restricting your own analytics solves the wrong problem—you lose data while the surveillance economy continues
• Server-side first-party tracking is the ethical middle ground—accurate measurement without cross-site surveillance
• Cookie consent backlash targets ad networks—not your shopping cart or login functions

Ready to track conversions without creeping out your customers? Explore first-party server-side tracking at Seresa.