We are committed to privacy and current industry initiatives to protect individual rights on the internet. All cookies used by the Drift widget are "first-party" cookies assigned to the domain of your website. Drift cookies on your domain cannot be read by Drift widgets on other websites.

Why does Drift use Cookies?

Drift places and uses cookies on your website for a variety of reasons. The primary reason is so that Drift has the ability to tie previous conversations and interactions to a specific person on your website. With this information, your chat agents can easily see the previous conversation and use that context in their current conversation. Without cookies, if someone chats in with Drift and asks about for an update to their conversation last week, Drift will have no connection to the previous conversation. Drift classifies these cookies of type Identification.

Drift also uses cookies to improve the performance of the Drift platform. An example of this is the "DFTT_END_USER_PREV_BOOTSTRAPPED" cookie. It tells Drift that we've already created a record for this site visitor, so that work doesn't have to be done and saves us some loading time. Drift classifies these cookies of type Functionality.

The last type of cookie that Drift uses are of type "tracking", and those are used to track website behavior that allows Drift to display different messaging. A common example of this is presenting a message such as "Welcome back! ... " if the site visitor is coming for a return visit. These types of cookies are of type Tracking.

When cookies aren't really cookies

Drift also stores data in the browser using a technology known as HTML5 LocalStorage.  Although cookies are more commonly known, LocalStorage is also a mechanism by which websites can store information locally onto a browser. When considering the cookies that Drift will place onto your website be sure to include the LocalStorage data that Drift will include as well.

Cookie List

If you want to see the full list of cookies that Drift uses, you can view this document that covers all cookies and data that Drift stores onto the browser.  

FAQ's

How do I classify these cookies against my website's cookie policy?

Cookie classifications are a broad area that is open for interpretation. If you have a marketing cookie category, it's safe to assume that all Drift cookies will fall under that category. If you have more granular categories, it's best to go through the list of cookies that Drift provides and classify them individually!

How long do the cookies last?

As of now, our identifier cookies will last for 2 years. Others will remain in our system indefinitely. Specific details are available in the spreadsheet attached.

Can I target my chat and/or playbooks based on cookies?

Absolutely! We've created a separate doc that dives into this. Check it out!

Can I use cookies to A/B test my playbooks?

You sure can! This process also has its own document. Here it is!

Will Google's new policy about Third Party Cookies hinder my Drift experience in any way? 

Nope!  Rest assured, Drift does NOT utilize Third Party Cookies, so Google's new policy to make Third Party cookies obsolete will not affect your experience with Drift.