A cookie is a small text file that is stored in your browser and contains information about who provides it, how long it's valid for, and a value to tie it to your particular browsing session.

This value is then used for remembering how certain things were before you left so that they are the same when you come back (if the cookie is persistent - if it's a session cookie, then it gets removed as soon as you leave the site).

For instance, if something is in your basket (so that when you visit again without having checked out, the items will still be there ready for you to pay), whether you are logged in or out, your language preferences, and so on.

A first-party cookie is a cookie that is set on your domain or provided by you (the website that the visitor entered in their address bar in order to get to your site).

These cookies are normally useful - for purposes such as making sure that the items or products you add to your basket are remembered, remembering which region or language you selected, and sometimes collecting analytics data that can be used to improve your experience on the site.

Yes. (Only first-party)

A third-party cookie is a cookie that is set by another service on your domain (because you have integrated that service in order to make use of the functions that it provides). In most cases, these are cookies that are used for tracking, marketing (as well as re-marketing), and advertising.

No. At the moment, third-party cookies are not blocked by default as part of this feature.

Cookies set by your CMS system will be classified as first-party in most cases, so these will be taken care of by cookie autoblocking. If they aren't, then you can always classify these cookies as necessary so that there's no need to worry about them.

In most cases, third-party cookies will be services that are currently living in your Google Tag Manager container or scripts that are directly placed within the source code of your website (depending on how you have decided to implement them).

If some third-party cookies are still not being blocked before consent is given by your visitors, you can implement third-party cookie blocking.

To make sure that Cookie Autoblocking has worked, please see our Cookie Autoblocking Check article which takes you through the process.

If the consent solution was created before we rolled out the autoblocking feature on the 5th of May 2021, then it is not turned on by default - so nothing has changed for you.

If your consent solution has been created after the 5th of May 2021, then you can turn off the cookie autoblocking feature by going to the consent solution, clicking on the "Settings" Tab, and then clicking on the toggle next to "First-Party cookie blocking".

Currently, there aren't any customizations that can be made - the only options are to enable or disable the feature.

However, to customize the cookies themselves (so that they are included and caught by the cookie autoblocking feature by being a first-party or necessary cookie), you can re-classify them following our article Managing Cookies,

Occasionally it's possible that a cookie will be set as first-party on one domain, and third-party on another.

On the part of Cookie Information, this usually occurs when the shared consent feature is enabled. In scenarios where shared consent is not enabled, it is usually due to how the cookie has been configured by the provider themselves.

As the cookie autoblocking feature blocks the cookie rather than the script, this means that in some cases certain services may still continue to work (so long as they are not dependent on the cookie set for their functionality). For this reason, it does not mean that the feature is not working.

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