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Scanning of Special Cookies

Last updated on August 5, 2024


Special cookies are difficult to identify and manage for cookie compliance. This is because of their non-standard naming structures or behaviours. CookieYes utilises advanced techniques for scanning special cookies accurately using the cookie scanner.

There are mainly two types of special cookies:

Unique Identifier Cookies:

Unique cookies have names that include some consistent identifier, such as a session ID. These cookies contain long unique strings like IDs or hashed values as part of their name. For example:

_hjSession_XXXXXXX

The _hjSession_ portion identifies this as a unique cookie used by the Hotjar analytics service. The XXXXXXX represents a unique session ID string.

Random Cookies:

Random cookies have automatically generated names that have no consistent identifiers. For example:

Hm_lpvt_1fc983b4c305d209e7e05d96e713939f

This is an analytics cookie set by Baidu to record the most recent access timestamp.

Here, 1fc983b4c305d209e7e05d96e713939f is just a random string and is not suitable for a cookie report because the actual cookie name of every visitor will be different.

The Cookie Scanner automatically identifies and saves these random cookies as a generic pattern in the Cookie Report, ie the above cookie will be saved as Hm_lpvt_*. This prevents new session cookies from being added to the Cookie Report after each scan.

To manually add a special cookie, follow our step-by-step guide on how to manually add cookies to the appropriate cookie category based on the cookie’s functionality.

To continuously improve cookie detection, contact us in case our scanner fails to recognize a randomly generated cookie, and we’ll include it in our cookie dictionary.

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