Consent Manager cookie being created on excluded domains

[Krasner]

We are seeing some undesirable behavior with our Consent Manager prompt, and I am asking if anyone else using consent manager is seeing this same behavior.

We have set a display rule for the prompt to only display on our EU sites. So, it will not display on our non-EU sites, which are on the same root domain (different subdomains). This is working properly.

However, when a visitor first visits one of our non-EU sites, even though the prompt is not shown, the CONSENTMGR cookie gets created anyway, under the root domain. And so when the visitor subsequently visits the EU property, since that cookie exists, the consent prompt is not displayed.

So, the prompt works properly if the EU site is opened first. But does not work properly if a non-EU site is opened first, and then the EU site is opened.

If there are any users out there who have Consent Manager configured to load on some sites and not others, based on load rule, can someone out there verify if they see the same behavior? And has anyone yet found a workaround to this?

[Krasner]

A quick update, for anyone else who may be having this same issue. Tealium support confirmed that indeed, Tealium adds a cookie with a consent value of TRUE whenever the load rules for the consent manager are not met.

So, in our case, we are using load rules to only use the consent manager in the EU. But the cookie is being stored with consent of TRUE in the US, when the load rule of region=EU is not met.

We are still working with Tealium support to identify resolution, and I will post here once resolved. In the interim, I would appreciate any create workarounds from the community.

[jason_paddock]

Hi @Krasner,

The cookie defaults to the value of utag.cfg.domain.  utag.cfg.domain by default is the top level domain.  A quick workaround would be to overwrite the domain value to include the subdomain and this will no longer set the consent cookie at the top level domain, but instead at the subdomain level.

This article describes how to set up the override: https://community.tealiumiq.com/t5/JavaScript-utag-js/Config-Overrides-for-utag-js/ta-p/14048#toc-hI...

I hope this can work for you in the interim while a more permanent fix is put into place.

Thanks!

[Krasner]

Update. Tealium Support was able to provide an interim solution using a javascript extension, very specific to our unique implementation, until this is addressed in a future product update. The javascript extension creates a new cookie, to keep track of whether users have visited our EU sites or not in the past, and then conditionally removes the CONSENTMGR cookie under certain circumstances. This ensures that visitors who access our non-EU sites don't get automatically opted-in when they go back to visiting one of our EU sites. This interim solution was very specific to our implementation, but hads addressed the problem for us now.

[kathleen_jo]

Thank you for the update @Krasner. Keep them coming!