The privacy risk guide

The purpose of the privacy audit is to check your website to determine if it is already fully privacy compliant or if there’s room for improvement with your data privacy strategy. There are three different results levels, depending on your website’s current level of risk or data compliance: low, medium or high. Risk level is dependent on the following three factors: 1) first-party cookies, 2) third-party cookies 3) third-party requests. This guide provides more information about definitions of these and other terms.

Levels

High Risk – Strong, demonstrable proof of the lack of data compliance. This audit has found that your website sets a large number of first-party cookies, third-party cookies, and/or third-party requests. Due to the high risk of fines and the loss of visitors’ trust, our legal team recommends taking action to achieve data compliance as soon as possible.

Medium Risk – Demonstrable proof of the lack of data compliance. This audit has found that your website sets an above average number of first-party cookies, third-party cookies, and/or third-party requests. Due to the high risk of fines and the loss of visitors’ trust, our legal team recommends taking action to achieve compliance as soon as possible.

Low Risk – This audit has found that your website might set first-party cookies. No third-party cookies and/or third-party requests were found.

Explanations

Once you have identified which Cookies and Requests are being used by your website, you can begin to ask your website visitors for consent. A CMP (consent management platform), is a simple solution in managing, gathering and storing consent in a legally compliant manner.

Cookies

Cookies identify online users and have become the main ingredient in providing a personalized online marketing campaign. Yet, many website providers lack the know-how as to which Cookies are used on their website. This causes difficulty in asking consent for the right service and makes data compliance a tedious process. That’s where we come in. Our Usercentrics CMP not only lets you know which First and Third party cookies are being set, but also which Third Party Requests are loaded. Collect consents in a transparent, granular and compliant manner with our category winning CMP.

First Party Cookies

First party Cookies are set by the website you are currently surfing. These Cookies allow website providers to collect customer analytics data, remember language settings, and carry out other useful functions that help provide a personalised user experience.

Third Party Cookies

The worst kind of Cookies, these are usually set for tracking and retargeting marketing campaigns. They are set by third-party servers (such as an embedded youtube video) on publishers’ websites.

Third Party Requests

Third party requests are files that are loaded from a website other than the website the user is currently visiting. They usually are from vendors whose technology is implemented on the website or who use the website for advertising and tracking purposes.