


Other uses of third-party cookiesīeyond behavioral targeting, third-party cookies are currently being used to perform a number of tasks online, some examples of these include: While this was happening, privacy-focused browsers also released tracking prevention updates to limit the functionality of or block third-party cookies. Regulations like GDPR and CCPA have mandated publishers to give users control over the decision to accept or reject cookies, which has in turn given rise to a new breed of software called consent management platforms. Third-party cookies came under scrutiny due to user privacy concerns linked to their use. Second-party cookies are not created like first-party or third-party cookies and technically don’t exist, but when a company transfers its first-party cookies to another company via a data exchange or a direct data partnership, they get classified as second-party cookies. These cookies are used for cross-site user tracking, retargeting, behavioral targeting, and a few other things. Third-party cookies are created by websites (domains) other than the ones that a user is visiting directly, hence the name “third-party”. These cookies allow website owners to preserve user login status, save content preferences, collect analytics data, and perform other useful functions needed to keep the website operations running smoothly.

third-party cookiesĬookies are broadly categorized based on who created them:įirst-party cookies are created directly by the website (domain) that a user is presently visiting. Apart from this core functionality, cookies are also used for behavioral targeting, which forms the backbone of the ad-supported model of the web. In a nutshell, cookies are what make the internet stateful instead of stateless.Įach time you return to a website and it remembers your login details, content preferences, the items in your shopping cart-it’s because that information was previously written and saved in a browser cookie as a text file.
