AI Cookie Classification: Compliance Just Got a Whole Lot Easier

Like washing the dishes or doing the laundry, you’re never quite done managing the cookies on your website.  

In the past, you had to wash your dishes and dirty laundry by hand—now, your appliances do the hard work for you. Finally, there’s a solution that does the hard work of managing cookies on your website too. 

Osano’s new AI cookie classification feature is the easy way to do the housework to keep your website’s cookies and scripts compliantly categorized. Researching every cookie on your site could take days, and it needs to be done consistently as your organization’s disparate teams add new cookies and scripts over time.  

Osano’s AI cookie classification reduces that work to minutes, enabling you to turn your attention back to high priority work without sweating over your cookie compliance.

An example list of cookies within the Osano platform and associated AI-generated classification recommendations. 

What Is Cookie Classification? 

If only cookie compliance was as easy as throwing up a banner on your website, collecting consent, and saying that’s that. Unfortunately, data privacy regulations require a little more effort. 

Data privacy laws like the GDPR, US state privacy laws, and others require you to inform consumers about the cookies and scripts running on your website. This includes their expiry period, originating vendor, and purpose. You have to give consumers granular control over which cookies and scripts they do or do not consent to. 

To accomplish all of that, you need to classify your cookies. You can learn more about cookie classification in our blog, 5 Ways to Identify Cookies and Scripts. 

Cookie Classification in Osano: Before and After 

Osano users benefited from partial recommendations for cookie classifications in the past—but there were still plenty of unclassified cookies to research and categorize. Osano’s AI cookie classification feature saves time spent classifying cookies by orders of magnitude. 

How Does Osano’s New AI Cookie Classification Work? 

When Osano first scans your website for cookies or scripts, AI reviews information like the cookies’ vendor, function, typical actions, and online references. This is pulled from a combination of publicly accessible data sources as well as aggregate, anonymous insights from the Osano user base.  

Osano’s AI generates classification details for three categories, including the cookie’s: 

• Expiry period 

• Associated vendor 

• Purpose 

Additionally, the AI generates a quick summary of its findings.  

This is what the Osano AI generated for a cookie titled “^bm_mi$”: 

An example cookie with a high-level confidence score. Due to its confidence score, this cookie can be safely categorized with the identified information. 

What Do the Confidence Scores Mean? 

As in all AI use cases, it’s best to think of Osano’s AI cookie classification as a helpful assistant—not a replacement for human oversight. All cookie recommendations should still be reviewed by a human being. 

With this understanding, our AI generates confidence scores that can help you prioritize which cookies to review first. 

• High Confidence: The AI has found significant agreement in both public sources and the Osano community, making this a generally reliable classification.  

• Medium Confidence: While there's helpful evidence that gets you part of the way there, it’s a good idea to conduct a quick manual check of the suggested information. Most of the time, this will involve conducting a quick search to confirm the expiry period, vendor, and purpose of the cookie. If they need to be adjusted, now you have a place to start your research. 

• Low Confidence: The AI has encountered limited or contradictory information, so a thorough manual review is strongly recommended. 

Is the Osano AI Cookie Classification Secure and Private? 

At Osano, we’re always looking for ways to make privacy operations easier without introducing additional risk. With this update, we’re not just employing AI technology for AI’s sake. Careful analysis led us to conclude that AI cookie classification would bring considerable value to our users without incurring additional risk. 

We think it's important that all of our design decisions—AI included—are made with ethics, privacy, and security in mind. 

Osano does source anonymized trend data from user classifications to improve suggestions for all users. None of this information is personally identifiable or site-specific. The AI doesn’t share user-specific data in its output. And all classification data is processed and stored securely in our AWS infrastructure. 

Does This Mean I Never Have to Worry About Cookie Classification Again? 

Not exactly—but it does mean the time and effort required to manage your cookies’ classifications is significantly reduced. 

Again, AI is a helpful assistant, not a replacement for human expertise. All Osano AI’s classification recommendations are exactly that—recommendations. You’ll need to jump in occasionally to confirm or adjust recommendations, starting with those cookies that scored low on the confidence scale. 

Sometimes, the AI just isn’t able to find relevant information on a cookie or script and can’t provide a suggestion. There will be some cookies where you’ll need to roll up your sleeves and tackle them the old-fashioned way.  

Eager to Get Classifying? 

Osano customers can benefit from our AI cookie classification feature right away. Just log into your account and enjoy all that AI-generated classification info. If you want to learn more about this new functionality, check out the associated page on docs.osano.com. 

If you’re not an Osano customer yet, we’re happy to talk about this and other features of the platform and how they can help support your organization’s compliance.