Cookie Stumbler mislead me 🤷â€â™‚ï¸
Since my results were out of line with what others were reporting, I installed Cookie to double check my results. The results are significantly different between the two.
- Cookie Stumbler was not finding any Prosoft cookies and Cookie found several
- When I looked at the cookies by browser some of the Prosoft entries were reported as containing tracking cookies and others were not.
- __cfduid was reported as the tracking cookie and was found in Safari Technology Preview, but not in Safari.
- a subsequent visit to prosofteng.com in Safari netted three tracking cookies, the previously mentioned _cfduid plus Google Analytics' _ga and _gat
- __cfduid turned up in many entries other than Prosoft
As to __cfduid itself and whether or not it is truly a tracking cookie, according to
Cookiepedia Cookie assoiated with sites using CloudFlare, used to speed up page load times. According to CloudFlare it is used to override any security restrictions based on the IP address the visitor is coming from. It does not contain any user identification information.
The main purpose of this cookie is: Strictly Necessary {emphasis added}
Key numbers for __cfduid:
Cookies with this name have been found on 13,740 websites, set by 9,304 host domains.
It has been found as a First Party cookie on 5,300 websites and a Third Party cookie on 17,374 websites.
It has been found as a Persistent cookie on 22,658 websites, with an average life span of 2,352 days. {emphasis added}
It has been found as a Session cookie on 16 websites.
In light of the Cookiepedia entry (and I have no reason to question it) together with the fact it appears Cookie declares any cookie beginning with "__c" or "_c" a tracking cookie, more like a blunderbuss than a shotgun approach, calling __cfduid a tracking cookie seems questionable.
I wish Cookie Stumbler were as good at ferreting out cookies as Cookie or Cookie were as discrete in identifying and reporting cookies as Cookie!
