Cookiebot finds strange cookies.

Harald

• May 14, 2020 12:23

We are currently evaluating cookiebot for our site and for the first while every scan looked "good" and more or less expected ;-). However, a few month ago cookiebot started to report cookies, we have no clue where they are comming from. These cookies apparently have the name and value in the form of (for example) "_ts1589290872898", which evaluates to a micro timestamp of the day the cookiebot-report was created. In April cookiebot reported more than thousand of such cookies and for the last scan in May it reported nearly 300 of such cookies. Cookiebot reports these cookies as coming from our own host, but this can't be true. I wonder if somebody else experienced a similar issue or if somebody has a clue what could go on or how we could identify a service that actually sets those cookies. And in the worst case: what can we do if we are unable to identify them to still serve a compliant website?

Thanks, Harald

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  Spas – vConnect – Community Supporter

  • May 15, 2020 12:29

  Hi Harald,

  Cookiebot does not create/set any unexpected or unnecessary cookies on your domain, also you could check all additional information about the cookies in the scan report. In the report generated by Cookiebot you could find information for each cookie or tracker identified, you will be able to see where on your website it was first found by the scanner, what type it is and where applicable – in what line of the source code the script setting the cookie is located.
  However, you could find more detailed information about this following the link: https://support.cookiebot.com/hc/en-us/articles/360004269614-Why-does-your-scanner-find-cookies-and-trackers-that-I-cannot-myself-find-on-my-website-Where-do-they-come-from-
  
  When a website is being scanned, the Cookiebot scanner crawls it looking for all types of cookies and tracking technology. Please check this article in order to find out which types of cookies and tracking technologies Cookiebot scanner will find while scanning the domain.
  
  It is also possible Cookiebot to find a large amount of cookies on your website, but these cookies or third party cookies to be set by pull in ads from external networks. This scenario is possible if your website redirects users to other external websites and you have masked the URL so that it appears to the user that the user is still on your website, then the Cookiebot scanner will include these cookies in the scan report in order to provide transparency of the cookies and trackers in use.

  Its really hard to say what is the exact issue and what might went wrong without seeing the domain in question, since this is something unusual and could be caused by several things. This issue could be also caused by some JS function on your website which creates cookies based on timestamp in your local storage. If you want you could share your domain so we could investigate it more detailed. 

  Regards,
  Spas

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  Harald

  • May 17, 2020 10:07
  • Edited

  Turns out, that cookiebot was right and i was wrong. After having a closer look and deobfuscating some third-party ad-related javascripts, i was able to identify the service that was responsible for this. Sorry for the noise and thanks for your detailed answer!

  Best,

  Harald

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