Governance & Operations
What is Cookie Policy?
A cookie policy is the disclosure document that lists the cookies and tracking technologies a website uses — each with its provider, purpose, and duration — and explains how visitors can manage or withdraw their consent.
Where the privacy policy covers all personal data handling, the cookie policy is the tracker-specific disclosure that EU consent rules effectively require: consent must be informed, and a visitor cannot be informed about 'cookies' in the abstract. The accepted implementation is a policy page — linked from the consent banner and the footer — containing a table of the actual cookies and similar technologies (pixels, localStorage, SDKs), each classified by category (strictly necessary, functional, analytics, marketing), with its provider, purpose in plain language, and lifespan.
The document has a truth problem baked in: websites change constantly, and every tag-manager publish or new embedded widget can add trackers the policy has never heard of. A cookie table written by hand at launch is typically wrong within a quarter. The sustainable pattern couples the policy to a scanner — the site is crawled on a schedule, the inventory diffs against the table, and the policy regenerates — so the disclosure tracks reality rather than memory.
The policy also carries the instructions consent law requires: how to change choices (reopening the preference center), how to withdraw consent as easily as it was given, and what third-party tools like browser settings can do. For US visitors it commonly hosts the state-law disclosures about which trackers constitute 'selling' or 'sharing' and links the opt-out.
Accuracy is enforceable in both directions: regulators and plaintiffs scan sites and compare findings against the published table, and a policy that omits the trackers actually present documents that the operator either did not know or did not say.
Why it matters for eCommerce
An eCommerce cookie policy has to keep pace with the app ecosystem — each Shopify or WordPress plugin can introduce cookies you never explicitly installed. Automate the table from scans of your actual storefront, and make sure banner categories, policy table, and blocking behavior all agree: three artifacts describing the same trackers, drifting independently, is how audits go badly.
Frequently asked questions
- Do I need a separate cookie policy or can it live inside the privacy policy?
- Either structure works legally — what matters is that the specific disclosures exist (each tracker's provider, purpose, duration, category) and are reachable from the consent banner. A dedicated page is the cleaner pattern and easier to keep synchronized with scans.
- How detailed does the cookie table need to be?
- Enough for informed consent: named cookies and technologies, who sets them, what they are for in plain language, how long they persist, and their consent category. 'We and our partners use cookies for various purposes' does not support valid consent.
Related terms
Wondering how this applies to your own site? Get a free compliance scan — see every tracker that fires before consent, graded against CIPA, GDPR, CCPA/CPRA, and MHMD.
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