Does Croct rely on any third-party cookies to identify visitors?
we are auditing every script that touches visitor identity right now. Chrome's third-party cookie changes broke our previous tool's setup and I do not want to walk into that again with the next vendor.
so the concrete question: does Croct depend on any third-party cookies at all? and if not, how does it recognize a returning visitor without them
2 answers
No third-party cookies anywhere in the identity path. Croct is privacy-first and does not rely on them.
The default identity storage is localStorage, which is origin-scoped, so the client ID stays first-party to your domain. A returning visitor is recognized from that stored client ID, not from any cross-site cookie. Nothing is read back from a shared cookie jar.
honestly when Chrome finally killed third-party cookies our old setup broke overnight, and the localStorage default here meant we had literally nothing to change on our side.
If you want the full breakdown of what lives client-side by default, there is a good thread on what Croct stores out of the box, and another on how personalization keeps working after third-party cookies go away.
One thing to add if you are on Next.js. There the SDK uses first-party cookies like ct.client_id and ct.user_token, but those are set on your own domain, not a third party. So the returning-visitor recognition still comes from a first-party client ID, just persisted in a cookie on your origin instead of localStorage.
that settles it for the audit. first-party client id either way, no cross-site anything. thanks both