PAGE Inspector: Building the best cookie database

Update summary:

• A major update of cookie classifications (incl. descriptions and vendor privacy statements).
• You can Edit these and export into your own compliance documents.
• Remember – you can even audit your competitors…! 

Building a high quality cookie database takes time, but it is the quality of information that counts. During May we added over 200 new cookie classifications to our PAGE Inspector product. Our target with this update is to achieve 90% auto classification of all third-party vendor cookies found.

Why we are building our own cookie definition database

Initially I considered integrating with one of the many cookie databases available online e.g. cookiepedia.co.uk, cookiedatabase.org. But to be perfectly honest the information in such db’s is either superficial, missing, or horrendously out of date. For example, try to find these cookies in those databases: __rtbh.uid (RTB House), _ttp (Tiktok). 

Verified Data depends on good quality information for its decision tree logic. And that database of information needs to be constantly updated. In the end to solve this challenge, I decided to build our own cookie database – and is updated at least monthly. 

How we approach cookie definitions

For all discovered/audited cookies, I personally do the leg work of tracking down the vendor, identifying official documentation, reviewing it for their descriptions and purpose (some vendors are opaque with this), and finally classifying the cookie as either: Necessary; Preferences; Marketing; Statistics; Unclassified. 

In that final step, we try to base our cookie classification on the vendor’s description – because some vendors are transparent in this regards and ultimately they are the source of truth in terms of what their cookies are for. However, many vendors in the adtech / martech sector are quite opaque in detailing any specific cookie information. In those circumstances, we look at the intent of the vendor/tool.

For example, a vendor with a benign cookie called lang that is used to store a user’s language setting, maybe labelled as “necessary” by the vendor. However, if the tool’s purpose is to target and profile users for ads, then all its cookies will be classified by Verified Data as “marketing”. We consider that the safest and most reliable approach.

Why data quality is important

For a website owner, discovering and classifying cookies is the first piece of the compliance puzzle – and it’s a GDPR requirement. A PAGE Inspector audit verifies not only what cookies are being set, but critically if those cookies match the user’s consent choice – a unique feature of our tool. So if a user consents to only allowing cookies for “statistical purposes”, an audit with that consent selection should match cookies categorised as statistics only. Similarly, if a user selects Reject-all, only strictly necessary cookies should be set, and so forth. If there are any data leaks, you have a compliance failure.

Hence the cookie database needs to be of the highest quality – not bot generated.

Read more about the PAGE Inspector features.

As always, please provide your feedback so we make our tools better for you. Please either add your thoughts in the comments, or email me direct at hello ‘@’ verified-data.com.