Taxonomy of Digital Cookies and Online Trackers

This deliverable presents a classification of cookies and trackers and is aimed at the general public, including parents and teachers who can guide school pupils and children to safeguard their personal data. In this CSI-COP report, a taxonomy of the types and purposes of digital cookies and tracking techniques is detailed with examples from the project’s citizen scientists’ investigations of websites and apps. These include duration cookies (session; persistent) and cookies that help to measure the performance of a website or an app, as well as tracking tools for marketing and advertising purposes to observe our behaviour as we navigate across the internet. Readers are invited to review CSI-COP citizen scientists’ investigations available as open-access databases from the project’s website. Future work involves pulling together CSI-COP’s citizen scientists and project team members’ investigations into a searchable repository. This is currently under development and expected for launch in May 2023. The outcome of the taxonomy and the project is to instil an effort to avoid the temptation of ‘accepting cookies’ without knowing what these are.