All about the CIVIC Cookie Scanner
The new CIVIC Cookie Scanner consists of an intelligent scan engine which can be used to scan your website and generate a detailed report with the cookies found and the proposed categorization for your website's CMP configuration.
There are 4 new plans to choose from according to your needs:
- Cookie Scanner 700 - for up to 700 pages per scan
- Cookie Scanner 4K - for up to 4000 pages per scan
- Cookie Scanner 8K - for up to 8000 pages per scan
- Cookie Scanner Enterprise
Each of the pre-set plans above can be selected with a volume of 5, 10 or 20 scans per month*. If none of these options matches your needs please contact us to discuss the Enterprise plan, where you can set your own limits on the number of pages processed per scan and the number of scans available per month, higher than 20. These limits are set by us after our communication.
What is the functionality of the CIVIC Cookie Scanner ?
After you have purchased a scanner plan and you are logged in to your account, you will notice the menu section on the left hand-side.
1. Create New Scan
2. Scan Schedule
3. Scan History
Create New Scan
The page will allow you to scan your website instantly, schedule a one-time scan, or schedule a regular scan. You will be prompted to match each scan with an active Cookie Scanner licence.
- Scanning your website immediately will create a scan request to be processed as soon as possible. Depending on the size of your website, this may take up to 24 hours to complete during busy periods.
- Scheduling a one-time scan will queue a scan request to be processed on the date you will select. This type of scheduled scan usually completes in the morning.
- Scheduling a regular scan will queue a scan request to be processed on the date you will select and reoccur every set number of days. This type of scheduled scan usually completes in the morning.
There are three types of scans available:
- Page Scan: Can be used unlimited number of times and is available for free to all users with an active Cookie Control PRO subscription. This scan type will crawl the single URL that you enter and produce a report with the scan results.
- Site Scan – Crawl: You can gain access to this full site scan functionality if you purchase any one of the Cookie Scanner plans. The scanner will scan your full website starting from the URL that you will insert and then automatically discover the rest of the pages. It will generate a scan report on screen and in a PDF for you to download.
- Site Scan – Sitemap: You can gain access to this full site scan functionality if you purchase any one of the Cookie Scanner plans. The scanner will scan the set of URLs contained within the sitemap you will enter and generate a scan report on screen and in a PDF for you to download.
The Cookie Page and Site Scanner requires an active Cookie Control subscription as it validates requests with the domains assigned in the Cookie Control user area, under 'Domains'.
Scan Schedule
On this page you will find the scan schedules you have set. You can set unlimited schedules for your websites, up to your monthly allowance. For each scheduled scan you can see the start date, the scan frequency, the scan mode (sitemap, crawl) and the starter URL, as well as when the scheduling was created and updated. You can delete the schedule any time before the scan starts without any impact to your monthly scan allowance.
Scan History
On this page you will find the status and reports for all your scans. The scans are ordered by creation date and you can see the type of the scan, the pages processed and the status (Completed/Aborted/Failed). After the scan has finished, you can view the scan report and download it in PDF format. You will also receive the report via email. Scan reports are kept a year back from the scan.
How does the CIVIC Cookie Scanner work?
As part of your initial request to create a new Cookie Scan, you provide either a single URL or a set of URLs to process (sitemap mode). These URLs are queued and processed individually by a headless browser.
What is a headless browser?
A headless browser is a web browser without a graphical user interface. This allows us to automate the control of web pages in an environment similar to what real users experience with popular web browsers.
Do URLs behave any differently?
The automation occurs on machines in Belgium, so we expect URLs to behave as though they would for any user accessing the URL from this location and conform to GDPR requirements, which means setting only strictly necessary, or functional cookies prior to user consent.
Do consent banners impact the results?
When processing each URL, the scan will wait for all network requests to become idle before reporting on the cookies found. This means that if consent banners such as Cookie Control are implemented, only the cookies set prior to any user action will be reported. This also means that cookies set after explicit user action, such as adding products to a shopping cart will not be included in the report either.
What might cause failures to occur?
The scan may fail to process URLs entirely if they either take too long to load, are for files such as PDFs or advanced anti-bot techniques such as TLS fingerprinting are implemented to block automated access.
CIVIC Cookie Scanner reports
For each scan completed, a report will be generated. The report is available on-screen and in PDF format for you to download and save locally or share with your stakeholders. The CIVIC Cookie Scanner reports are kept for a year back from the scan date.
You will also find the GDPR compliance related information on the report page. At the moment, the scanner will only scan the public pages of your website, not the ones with authorized access. If Cookie Control is active on your website at the time of the scan, the report will contain the cookies which are unprotected and need your attention. The ones protected from the CMP will not appear in the report as these are not dropped without user consent.
The report consists of three parts:
- Cookies
A list of the cookies set in the browser’s application storage layer during the scan. Clicking on a cookie name will show you the description currently held in our database for the cookie. - Products
A list of the products associated with the cookies detected during the scan. The cookies displayed in this section are illustrative of what each product may set. - Categories
Under this tab you can find the suggested configuration categories, based on the cookies detected during the scan.
The scanner report is intended to help users to manually populate the optional categories within their CMP configuration.
The scan results can be previewed within the Configuration Preview tool of the user area, though you will still need to manually copy and paste the updated code from the Configuration Preview tool to your website.
It is also worth noting that in CIVIC we make every effort to identify all cookies and ensure the accuracy of the information held in our cookie database, though no software can guarantee 100% the discovery of all cookies. Therefore, it is recommended to periodically support automated scans by using your browsers console and double-checking manually.
How can I get the CIVIC Cookie Scanner?
Simply visit your Cookie Control user area and add a Cookie Scanner licence under 'Licences'.
The product is under active development, so if you have any questions, suggested feature requests or simply want further information, contact us at info@civicuk.com
For product terms, please review our Licence Agreement.