Pre-consent tracking: historical benchmark notes

Pre-consent request activity and third-party cookie storage are related but distinct observations. A broad fingerprinting-related signal is not interchangeable with probable fingerprinting. Session recording presence does not prove that sensitive input was captured.

These are historical classifications. Their counts do not establish legal violations or imply that current scanner rules would produce identical results.

A defined sampling frame and retained scan manifest; exact collection dates; region and browser conditions; scanner and rule versions; successful, failed, and excluded counts; a deduplication method; and bounded evidence for the measured findings.

Any future study must report its own denominator and collection method. We will not silently carry these historical counts into a new study or treat repeated scans as unique sites.

For a website you maintain, review the actual target, date, consent state, requests, storage, and coverage. A historical frequency is not a severity score and cannot decide whether that website’s behavior is appropriate.