description of cookies (needed to be GDRP compliant)

[Felix Vogler]

Hello!

We are currently in the process of sorting and marking all the cookies needed by our website (and therefore the "embedded" Confluence behind it) to be GDPR compliant.

We discovered lots of cookies and assigned them accordingly to "needed" and "analysis", but we also found a couple of cookies we can't explain. As far as we found out they are all provided by Confluence - do you know what these cookies are for?

Thank you very much in advance!

Alex.

NAME		PURPOSE	EXPIRY	TYPE
atlassian-analytics.confluence		Pending	Persistent	HTML Local Storage
atlassian-analytics.confluence.lock		Pending	Persistent	HTML Local Storage
browser-metrics-journey		Pending	Session	HTML Local Storage
Confluence.insert-wiki-markup-dialog.cache		Pending	Persistent	HTML Local Storage
Confluence.insert-wiki-markup-dialog.cacheStack		Pending	Persistent	HTML Local Storage

[Shannon S]

Hi Felix,

Thank you for bringing this up to us.

I'm trying to find out for you what these cookies are for specifically; I'll let you know when I find more information on that.

Thank you.

Shannon

[Felix Vogler]

Hi Shannon,

Did you have any success in finding the specifics?

Thank you very much for your efforts!

Felix.

[Shannon S]

Hello Felix,

I'm so sorry about that. I found specifics about one of those cookies, but not all of them yet:

• atlassian-analytics.confluence - Used for statistics only, in order to store statistics about Confluence usage (for the Analytics feature). I believe the .lock file is probably a version of that cookie.

The others aren't listed anywhere yet, but I've been trying to chase down the information for you still. I will follow-up with the teams again today to see if I can find anymore information.

Regards,

Shannon

[Felix Vogler]

Thank you so much Shannon!

[Shannon S]

Hi Felix,

Thank you for your patience.

For the remaining cookies, it could be that a few of them are outdated. Can you let me know exactly which version of Confluence you're working with?

Regards,

Shannon

[Felix Vogler]

Unfortunately quite old - 6.9.0
We're unable to update due to a custom plugin - at the moment at least, we are working on it.

Could we just put them all in the analysis category? Our guess would be that they are not necessary for Confluence to function properly.

Thank you again!

Felix.

[Shannon S]

Hi Felix,

Thank you for confirming. I'm getting in touch with the Confluence server GDPR team, let me see what I can find out for you!

Shannon

[Shannon S]

Hello @Felix Vogler,

Thank you so much for your patience while I tracked this information down.

• The cookie browser-metrics-journey is related to the browser-metrics frontend library. This cookie measures transition time between various pages. The information can then be used for profiling and measuring performance. We weren't able to find any usage of this in Confluence, so it may be a leftover from an older version. 
• Any cookies starting with Confluence.insert-wiki-markup-dialog were used for the Insert Markup functionality. They stored the last choice of conversion format (Wiki or Markdown). Later on, they were converted to Local Storage, so these aren't necessary anymore.

I hope that helps, but do let me know if you have any further questions.

Regards,

Shannon

[Nicolas Casel]

Hello @Shannon S  ,

Thanks for this information, but I am not allowed to access to the (bitbucket) browser-metrics frontend library.

Is this cookie native to Confluence, or is it related to a 3rd party plugin? What do you mean by: "so it may be a leftover from an older version"?

We are running Confluence 6.15.4 and this cookie is present. How should we consider it?