What is the nsid cookie?
Cookie for fraud detection. When making a payment via PayPal these cookies are issued – PayPal session/security.
Our October 2026 scan found it on 4 sites (0% of the 2,450 we scanned), set before any consent.
- Purpose
- Functional
- Belongs to
- PayPal
- Set as
- First-party on 25% of sites, third-party on 75%
- Typical lifetime
- Session (vendor says: session)
Sites that set nsid before consent
The highest-ranked 4 of 4 sites.
- paypal.com1 tracking company
- venmo.com0 tracking companies
- poshmark.com9 tracking companies
- joinhoney.com1 tracking company
Related cookies
Other cookies from PayPal.
- ts26 sites
- ts_c5 sites
- enforce_policy4 sites
- l7_az4 sites
- tsrce4 sites
How to stop it
Declining non-essential cookies in a site's consent banner should stop nsid 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.