Tracking Purposes
In Transcend, a data flow / cookie can be labeled with one or more associated tracking purposes (AKA consent purpose). The tracking purposes allow you to define and track what the data in each data flow / cookie is being used for. Once a data flow / cookie is assigned a consent purpose(s), your consent manager (via the airgap.js script on your site) will regulate that data flow /cookie given a user’s consent choices. In this way, Transcend Consent Management can block data flows / cookies labeled with a particular tracking purpose when a user has not given consent for that purpose.
Let’s revisit the Google Ads example where your site makes requests to googleadservices.com with user data for the purpose of advertising. The tracking purpose for this data flow can be set to “Advertising” and Transcend Consent Management will regulate this data flow according to whether the user has given consent for Advertising trackers. Transcend Consent Management would block the request to this Google Ads data flow googleadservices.com if the user hasn’t consented to Advertising tracking purpose, or allow the data flow request if the user has given consent.
Not every data flow / cookie will have an associated tracking purpose as defined under different privacy regimes. Some data flows and cookies are necessary for the site to load and work correctly, and some data flows don’t view, collect or transmit user data. For these cases, you can label the data flow with ‘Essential’ in place of a tracking purpose. ‘Essential’ means that the Transcend Consent Management will always allow all requests to this domain, resource path, or which match this regex.
| Purpose | Description |
|---|---|
| Essential | This tag is for data flows for which no consent is required. It can be used for essential functionality and flows that don’t transmit user data. |
| Functional | This tag is used to denote data flows that are not essential, but help your site work. Examples could include support live chat widgets or error logging that doesn't transmit user data, but won't break your site if they are blocked |
| Advertising | This tag represents data flows that collect or share data for marketing or advertising purposes |
| Analytics | This tag is used for data flows that collect or share information for analytics purposes |
| Sale/Sharing of Personal Information | This tag is used for data flows that are used to sell or share data to third parties for “commercial purposes” as opposed to “business purposes”. This most commonly refers to data that will be used for cross-context behavioral advertising. Different state privacy regulations approach and define this in slightly different ways, but the general concept is an advertising vendor that targets based on a profile of the user that is aggregated from a user’s experience across the current site as well as other information about their activities over time or on other third-party websites or apps. |
Remember: Data flows often may have multiple tracking purposes, which is why you can add multiple purpose tags. For example, many data flows that are Sale or Sharing of Personal Information are also Advertising.