Being from Europe, it’s absolutely infuriating to go on a website and see a huge list of sites that have legitimate interest that I cannot reject with one button… I actively avoid sites that don’t allow me to turn them off.
Why do some websites that seemingly don’t need much more than analytics or don’t have much advertising on them, have a huge list of dodgy sounding business names that must be monitoring what your doing. Are they sites selling data?
In: Technology
I work in the advertising technology industry.
What you should understand is that the publisher of the website is responsible for categorizing the cookies they use.
Responsible publishers will only list things like their analytics tools or site preferences in the legitimate interest category.
Now, this is just a guess… but I suspect the people running the site you’re visiting did one of two things:
1) Threw literally every cookie on their service into the legitimate interest category, hoping that people would just accept it.
2) Did a horrible job setting up their consent management system.
Your instincts are correct; this sounds pretty shady.
As for the overall number of cookies… that doesn’t sound that outrageous. On a site that has a lot of advertising partners, the number of cookies can add up pretty quickly, especially if it’s a site that’s been online for a long time. Some of the cookies picked up by the categorization tool might not actually be in use any more, etc.
Even if there is not much advertising, today websites rarely manage their advertisements themselves. They are customers of one or multiple advertising networks and sell the advertising space to the highest bidder “just in time”.
And what do the ad networks do? They sell the space to *their* highest bidding customer. And all these huge partner lists are mostly the companies which could after these rounds of bidding potentially end up serving the ad. Because you cannot get consent “just in time”, so you get consent for all of them.
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