Cookie data, shown
with its working out
Most cookie banners ask for a decision without giving you anything to decide on. DataMetrics publishes the underlying counts instead — what each site stores, what it is for, and how long it stays.
What this project is
DataMetrics is a public dataset and dashboard covering the cookie and tracking behaviour of a set of well-known websites. Each record describes one domain: how many cookies it sets, what those cookies are for, how many survive the end of a session, and an overall tracking level.
It is deliberately a narrow, readable dataset rather than a crawl of the whole web. A small set that has been checked is more useful for comparison than a large one that has not, and it keeps every figure on the site traceable back to a specific analysis of a specific domain on a specific date.
What is measured
Every domain is broken into the same fields, which is what makes cross-category comparison meaningful:
- Strictly necessary — cookies without which the site cannot function: sessions, security tokens, load balancing.
- Performance — analytics and measurement, used to understand how the site is used in aggregate.
- Functionality — remembered preferences such as language, region, layout or a dismissed notice.
- Targeting — advertising and cross-site profiling cookies. This is the category that moves a tracking level most.
- Unknown — set, but not confidently classifiable. Reported rather than absorbed into another bucket.
Alongside these, each domain carries a session versus persistent split. Two sites can set the same number of cookies while one forgets you at the end of the visit and the other does not, and that difference matters more than the total.
How tracking levels are assigned
The level reflects the composition of a site's cookies and how long they persist — not how many there are. A site can set a lot of cookies and still be Low.
High
Targeting cookies make up a large share of the total, and most persist well beyond the visit. Typically sites funded by advertising or operating their own ad network.
Medium
Some targeting present, but balanced by necessary and functional cookies, or with shorter retention. Common for large commercial sites that advertise but do not resell audience data.
Low
Little or no targeting activity. The cookie load is dominated by what the site needs to work and what it needs to remember your preferences.
A note on the score
It is a comparative signal, not a compliance verdict. A High level does not mean a site is breaking any rule — only that it tracks more heavily than its peers here.
Accuracy, and where it stops
The dashboard reports an average accuracy figure, which reflects how confidently cookies could be classified across the set. It is not 100%, and the honest reason is that cookie naming is not standardised: a name that means analytics on one site can mean something else on another. Rather than guess, unclassifiable cookies are counted as unknown and left visible in the breakdown.
Two further limits worth stating plainly. Each record is a snapshot, carrying the date it was last analysed — sites change their cookie behaviour, sometimes within weeks. And what a site sets can vary by region and consent state; a visitor under one privacy regime may see a different set than another.
How we handle your data on this site
The same standard applies here. This site sets the strictly necessary cookies it needs to run, and asks before anything optional. Your choice is stored locally and can be changed at any time from the Privacy & Cookies link in the footer.
How it is built
The front end is plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript with no framework and no third-party
origins — fonts, icons and charting are all served from this domain, which is why the
site runs under a strict default-src 'self' content security policy. The data
comes from a Laravel API, proxied same-origin at /api/v1.
Look at the data yourself
Every claim on this page is checkable against the published breakdown.
Open the dashboard