What is the FPAU cookie?
Assigns a specific ID to the visitor. This allows the website to determine the number of specific user-visits for analysis and statistics.
Our October 2026 scan found it on 9 sites (0% of the 2,450 we scanned), set before any consent.
- Purpose
- Advertising
- Belongs to
- Google Analytics
- Set as
- First-party (under the site's own domain)
- Typical lifetime
- 3 months (vendor says: session)
Sites that set FPAU before consent
The highest-ranked 9 of 9 sites.
- sagepub.com4 tracking companies
- dmm.co.jp5 tracking companies
- beget.com5 tracking companies
- nsw.gov.au7 tracking companies
- libsyn.com8 tracking companies
- livechat.com6 tracking companies
- dmm.com6 tracking companies
- cloud86.nl3 tracking companies
- casasbahia.com.br8 tracking companies
Related cookies
Other cookies from Google Analytics.
- _ga700 sites
- _ga_*685 sites
- _gid185 sites
- _gat*108 sites
- _gat_gtag_*55 sites
How to stop it
Declining non-essential cookies in a site's consent banner should stop FPAU being set on later visits. Blocking third-party cookies in your browser settings stops the third-party kind everywhere, and clearing cookies for a site removes any it already set.
Description from the Open Cookie Database (Apache 2.0).
Understanding this page
- How cookie lifetimes work, and why a 13-month _ga matters
What a cookie's "expires" field actually controls, why Google Analytics ships a 2-year default that many sites cut down to 13 months, and how Safari's 7-day cap on script-set cookies changes the picture.
- First-party vs third-party cookies (and why "first-party" still tracks you)
What the distinction actually means technically, why browsers only block one of the two, and how CNAME cloaking, server-side tagging and cookies like _ga let sites keep tracking under their own domain.
- How to block or limit trackers
Browser privacy settings, content blockers, Global Privacy Control and clearing cookies compared honestly — what each one actually stops, what it doesn't, and what it costs you in return.