Data Flows and Cookies
In order to allow users on your site to provide consent preferences to share their data, you first need to understand where data is sent from your site, why it’s collected and what it’s used for. Transcend’s consent manager makes it easy to do this with Data Flows. Data Flows are used to identify where data is going and tag that “flow” of data with a consent tracking purpose. Data flows with an assigned tracking purpose can then be regulated by the consent manager on your site, allowing you to respect users’ consent choices.
The rest of this guide further explains data flows and consent tracking purposes as well as how to manage data flows and cookies on your site.
A Data Flow in Transcend represents a rule that matches a network request sent from your website, with information about where the data is flowing and why. By regulating data requests at the network-level, Consent is able to not only regulate cookies, but ensure other tracking technologies like XHR, Fetch, Pixels, Web Beacons, iframe elements are regulated by users’ consent preferences.
For example, if your site makes requests to googleadservices.com with user data for the purpose of advertising, the consent manager will log a Data Flow with the value of googleadservices.com.
Consent’s data flow regulation setup implicitly regulates first-party and third-party cookies. Cookies are regulated through the same network-level regulation engine discussed in the previous Data Flow section. In this way network requests that include cookies can be labeled and tagged with a tracking purpose. To put it simply, Transcend treats cookies as a type of data flow. However, cookies are shown separately in the Transcend Dashboard to allow for more granularly classifying and regulating trackers on your site. Consent’s Cookies tab allows for the identification and categorization of individual cookies to give additional flexibility when configuring regulation.
Data Flows and cookies are populated in the Transcend Admin Dashboard in two ways: through telemetry from the Transcend script on your website and via manual entry. You can add a data flow or cookie manually to the Transcend Admin Dashboard to be regulated by your consent manager. This option is helpful if you want to add new cookies/data flows when a new script is added to your website, to add internal cookies and to collapse repeating data flows.
Refer to our guide on Adding and Managing Data Flows / Cookies for more information on the process of manually creating new data flows.