My website uses _gs _gu _gw cookies
What are these cookies? Why are they used?
I tried looking for this information but can't seem to find it
This website lists all 3 cookies. It's a specific website policy, but as far as I can see those are cookies used by Getsitecontrol, so you can use that description for reference.
_gs Used to identify the users browser, operating system, IP address and the page on the website they are viewing.
_gu Used to distinguish users.
_gw Records widgets previously displayed to user.
Related
I'm not sure if this is the right stack to ask this in so if not please let me know!
I am trying to get a handle on what cookies are used on a site and what they are for. When I initially did a cookie scan I noticed a cookie names NID which was set by google.
I have tried to research this cookie and can see it is used by Google for advertising purposes.
But I am confused about why and where this is being set, the site I am looking at does not use advertising anywhere, although it does use embedded YouTube videos.
Can anyone shed any light on when and why this cookie is set?
according to Google
Most Google users will have a preferences cookie called ‘NID’ in their browsers. A browser sends this cookie with requests to Google’s sites. The NID cookie contains a unique ID Google uses to remember your preferences and other information, such as your preferred language (e.g. English), how many search results you wish to have shown per page (e.g. 10 or 20), and whether or not you wish to have Google’s SafeSearch filter turned on.
For me, the cookie was hammered incessantly by the url https://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=example.org Which was being used by CookieBro & FeedBro RSS feeder browser addons for retrieving icons associated with various domains. The cookie can be dropped by either an addon or by google itself.
I used cookie log via cookiebro addon for firefox & chrome to detect these cookies in realtime, its one of a kind. However I did not realize it was cookiebro dropping them until the next step below.
To see what background connection is occuring when these cookies are placed, enter the following firefox url: about:cache?storage=disk&context= and you will see when and where the google url being connected to.
It is said this cookie is for targeting & ADS and the google's settings are integrated to make the cookie inconvenient to delete for Google users.
Update: I have split my original question into two to let each one be more cohesive.
According to EU Article 5(3) of the E-Privacy Directive (a.k.a 'The Cookie Laws'), web sites that target EU users have to gain opt-in consent from users before they set a cookie.
See ICO Guidence
I am trying to square this with Google Adsense on my web site.
I would imagine that Google Adsense can serve ads without having to set cookies.
However, I cannot find any info on this (on the Google sites/settings panels) about how to relay information about the 'state of consent' back to Google during a page request. So, my only option seems to be that I should not embed Google tag code at all if the user has not explicitly given consent. Which seems a bit drastic.
Letting my serverside script set a 'hasConsentedToCookies=FALSE' flag in the JavaScript tags would allow me to instruct Google's services to run in a gracefully degraded fashion.
Is there a setting on Google Adsense to suppress use of cookies
for users that have not yet given consent?
If so, where can I find info on this?
No, there isn't a setting in Google AdSense. Google actually just released a note about changes to the consent policy in July 2015 pointing you to a Google site called Cookie Choices, which has information about EU consent as well as links to third party solutions for managing cookie consent functionality on your sites.
So the short answer is that you need to explore the third party tools and choose the one that best addresses your particular case.
I would like to set a specific cookie domain for my cookies, because this might solve some issues our site seems to have with IE8. Django seems to have a setting called SESSION_COOKIE_DOMAIN which can be set to obtain this. The problem however is that our site contains multiple subsites which have alternative domain names. So my question is, how can I manage this? I would like to have a standard cookie domain per domain, because I fear browsers like IE8 will reject cookies which aren't from the same domain (quicker).
I will do research myself, but I wondered if anyone perhaps has experience.
Update:
What I actually want to do is to make django store cookies for domain1 when I visit domain1.com etcetera for the other domains. I think it should be as easy as to use the current client domain when storing cookies. I doubt however that django offers such functionality without modification... Maybe I could build a middleware class that changes the global setting to the current domain..
Update:
This question and answer helped me out:
Changing Django settings variable dynamically based on request for multiple site
Thanks for help :)
Cookies can't be stored or retrieved for other domain names. In other words, if I am at yahoo.com I can't get the cookie for google.com. However, foo.yahoo.com and bar.yahoo.com can both retrieve cookies saved at .yahoo.com.
If you are running a website with multiple subsites, if they all share the same basic domain (i.e. site1.domain.com, site2.domain.com, etc) you should use that domain for SESSION_COOKIE_DOMAIN. But if they have different domains, it's basically impossible for them to share cookies without using some other method of getting the cookies. You can, for example, include images or scripts that point to a central site, and that site can store and retrieve the cookies, which are made available to the rest of the page via JavaScript.
If you must keep these alternate domain names, you can always set your web server to redirect immediately from these alternate domain names to the shared standard domain. This is easy to do with mod_rewrite.
I have an interesting conundrum.
We have a site that is a completely separate domain, we'll say http://www.x.com and our own site that is http://www.y.com. The y.com site is actually a classic ASP site, and we aren't converting it to .NET at this time.
The problem is that there is a link on x.com that redirects to y.com from a members area. We want to "authenticate" the user to make sure they are a member from the other site. If they are, they are directed to a members area on y.com. If not, they have to provide login information on y.com.
Cookies obviously don't work due to the cross domain security, but is there a way around this? I've also looked at a service for tokens, but I'm not sure exactly how that works in Classic ASP. Any ideas or suggestions?
What I did when I needed to pass information cross domain what so hash the information into one variable and pass the url/page as another variable as a post into a page on the y.com. That page would unhash the data, set the cookies and session variables, and then do a redirect or server.transfer to the page that was passed. The same can work going from y.com to x.com.
We have several websites on different domains and I'd like to be able to track users' movements on these sites.
Obviously cookies are not feasable, because they don't cross domain borders.
I could look at a combination of IP address and User Agent, but there are some cases where that does not work.
I don't want to use flash or other plugins.
Any ideas? Or am I doomed to rely on the IP/User_Agent combination?
You can designate one domain or subdomain to tracking and have it serve a 1x1 pixel image which you include in all pages you would like to track. Serve a cookie with the image, look at the tracking domain's server logs, voilà.
This solution requires no JavaScript, and works even if the user disables third-party cookies.
First, let's make sure the user agent is sending cookies:
If getCookie("c") == null then setCookie("c", "anyValue")
Then let the request finish (aka wait for next request)
Let's call our tracker cookie uaid.
If GET http://child.com/any-page and getCookie("c") is not null and getCookie("uaid") is null...
Redirect to http://parent.com/give-me-a-uaid?returnTo=http://child.com/any-page
On http://parent.com/give-me-a-uaid, check for cookie uaid
If not exists, create it and add it to response. If it exists, get its value.
Redirect to http://child.com/any-page?uaid=valueOfParentsUAIDCookie
Child.com sets cookie uaid with valueOfParentsUAIDCookie
Redirect to http://child.com/any-page
And of course, you are validating input, and white-listing your redirect URLs :)
Flows:
This question is closely related to the Question Accessing Domain Cookies within an iFrame on Internet Explorer.
For Internet Explorer I need to take P3P Policies into account and set an additional P3P HTTP-Header to allow images to set cookies across domain borders. Then I can use simon's suggestion.
You can follow the same concept used in Google Analytics. Injecting javascript in the pages you want to track.
You do not give any context to your situation -just the basic problem. So it is difficult to give an answer that clearly fits. However, here are some techniques/mechanisms for passing information from one page to another, regardless of what domain is involved.
include hyperlink to a 1x1 pixel transparent gif image (sometimes called a "beacon")
rely on referrer information in HTTP request headers to identify page hyperlink is on
include extra parameters in hyperlinks to other site - assuming you run both sites
buy services of a company like Akamai to do user tracking for you
possibly use cross domain cookie mechanism in the future if standard is ever approved
Which techniques really come down to whether you can place software on all of the sites (servers) that the user will visit where you have interest - or you cannot place your software on all of them.