Why am I now seeing this when I come to the forum?
Never saw it before…
Good question! Investigating now. Thanks for the heads-up.
Never seen it before. I’m running an adblocker, too.
We started a new digital advertising campaign yesterday, and that prompted the message. Apologies to you all, for catching you off guard. Like pretty much every company nowadays, we do run digital advertising campaigns, and those always include the installation of a pixel / web beacon that creates a cookie.
Safari users were actually the only visitors to see the message. Back in June, Safari started prompting a privacy notice about third party cookies (used by the advertising companies) that most other browsers just silently accept (by default; you can go edit the browser’s settings).
The ad campaign that started yesterday is through a company named AdRoll (adroll.com) if you want to check them out, and here’s Apple’s explanation of the Safari setting (https://webkit.org/blog/7675/intelligent-tracking-prevention/).
The advertising is intended for new website visitors who’re checking out our products. As such, the adroll pixel really shouldn’t have been on the forum, so we’re removing it so it’s just on the website.
There’s one thing I don’t understand. I have third party cookies blocked, but the Wicked Edge cookies that existed until yesterday enabled, and have set Chrome (my browser) so that it displays an unobtrusive warning in case a site tries to set a third-party cookie. So any such warning on the WE site should be an indication of a third-party cookie.
In contrast to Curtis, I get these warnings on the main site, but not on the forum. Don’t I have third-party cookies on the forum?
(And I thought third-party cookies were cookies from other sites. A third-party cookie is a cookie associated with a file requested from a different domain. Why would you host these? I can imagine that WE places cookies on other sites for advertising/marketing purposes, in which they are WE third-party cookies on those sites, but you’re not advertising for other companies, are you? Here’s a good explanation: http://www.ravelrumba.com/blog/third-party-cookies/.)
We don’t run advertisements on the site (website/forum). So, all of our first party cookies are non-advertising, i.e. ease of use. For example, the forum uses a cookie to track with articles you’ve already viewed (the green circle with a number), and the custom view New Posts Since your Last Visit.
The purpose of third party cookies, in this case, is that advertising technologies (like adroll) need a cookie that will allow them to show you advertisements on other websites that do run advertisements, based on what you did on the original website.
For example, if you shop for products on amazon and then go read the news on the nytimes.com, you'll notice advertisements on nytimes.com that show the product you were just looking at on amazon. In this case, it's a third party cookie (amazon's) that's used on nytimes.com to show you ads based on what you looked at somewhere else. And to be specific, this kind of advertisement is called a Dynamic Product Ad because it's showing you a) a product you were shopping for, with b) content pulled from the ecommerce product catalog "feed" which ensures the ad will show the current price, and any current promotions. This is a relatively recent innovation in digital ads, compared to the old static banner ads that were just images.
There's actually a marketplace and exchange where advertising "real estate" on various websites is bought and sold, pretty much in real time. So companies like adroll are intermediaries who buy/sell ad space on behalf of their customers, and then their customers pay a markup. They offer additional features like easy-to-use advertisement builders, and ad scheduling.
Regarding why you're seeing an indication of third party cookies on the website, but not the forum (or knowledge base, if you check there) is that we're not placing the advertising pixel (aka web beacon) on the forum or knowledge base. It was inadvertent that the adroll pixel made it on there, and I removed it yesterday.
Also, the advertising third party cookies don't contain any personally identifiable info. Website visitors are just identified by a long random string a characters that records products viewed, products added to the shopping cart, and other aspects of their website visit (just depends on the website; could be PDF downloads, newsletter signups, etc). So, if you delete your cookies (or open a chrome incognito browser, which temporarily accepts but doesn't store cookies) you'll notice that you see different ads on other websites, because your history was associated with that random ID, and not with you personally. At least, that's the way we operate, although there may be other companies that are more intrusive regarding cookies.
Resources
- To see a website that's chock full of display advertising and retargeting ads, go to speedtest.net. You'll likely see ads you recognize from websites you've been to.
- To see what pixels (aka third party cookies) are in place on a website you visit, if you use chrome, try ghostery (chrome extension that displays the list of pixels/beacons).'
- Alternatively, you can view the source code of the page, and look for <script> tags; not all are pixels but some will be.
- At Wicked Edge, we use a tool from google named Google Tag Manager to install and manage analytics and marketing scripts (and some website customizations). Because we have the same google tag manager script installed on all 3 properties (website, forum, knowledge base) unless we take an extra step to restrict a <script> to just the website it will install everywhere; so that's how I adjusted it to remove the adroll pixel from the forum.
Thanks again, Chris. Now I understand. I didn’t know those cookies were called third-party cookies as well.
Be a bit careful in using them though. For example, if I visit the site of Knives and Tools (who also happens to be your Dutch reseller) and visit other site thereafter, I get ads from Knives and Tools (usually with the knives I decided not to buy) on 50% or so of these sites. That is quite annoying. Also, the idea that people/sites are following you is not appealing to me.
Mark, all browsers have mode that erase all cookies automatically after you close browser window. In Chrome it is called “New incognito window”. In IE it is called “Start InPrivate Browsing”. When you open browser in this mode, the websites see you as a brand new user without any prior history. When you close browser in this mode, all your browsing history and cookies are automatically erased.
This mode is convenient when you don’t like to see ads that has been customized using your browsing history.
The mode is not convenient when you need to be logged in, because you will need to login every time.
Thanks, Dulledge. In fact, I have this switched on in Chrome 
.
I don’t think you can switch it ON and OFF. You can only open it in a new window. Maybe you meant the same thing, I just want to be sure.
Chrome has more options.
Start (three vertical dots) -> Advanced -> (under Privacy and Security) Content Settings -> Cookies -> Block third-party cookies. I’ve switched this off.
Under Cookies there is even an option “Allow sites to save and read cookie data (recommended)”. Here you can switch off all cookies.
You can refine all this under “Block”, “Clear on exit”, and “Allow”, where you can override these settings for individual cookies.
Good to know. Thank you Mark!