Cookies, Tracking, and pixels: Where does your Web data come from?

“chocolate cookies on blue textile” by Yullina D on Unsplash

Cookies, tracking scripts, and pixels are different tools used to get a better understanding of the users on your website. They are used to help identify, collect, and transfer data from a given site to software catering to analytics and advertising services.

Cookies

Cookies are some form of storage within your browser that is generally used to store some kind of IDs such as userids and session ids, some session parameters, for instance, if you already agreed to a cookie gate or some personalization parameters.

They are generally split into two categories:

• First party cookies: These are cookies set on your domain, this means that you can easily create, retrieve, and edit their content as you see fit when a user visit your website. Within first-party cookies, you further have a class of cookies called “Samesite” which provides a layer of protection against cross-site request forgery. Using Samesite, only the request for data originating from the first party domain would result in the cookies being provided.
• Third-party cookies: These are cookies set on external domains, the browser usually set a restriction on accessing cookies on external domains. You are, however able to usually check the information that you are creating…