What is the s_fid cookie?
Alternative cookie with unique user ID / timestamp when the s_vi cookie can not be set for technical reasons.
Our October 2026 scan found it on 14 sites (1% of the 2,450 we scanned), set before any consent.
- Purpose
- Analytics
- Belongs to
- Adobe Analytics
- Set as
- First-party (under the site's own domain)
- Typical lifetime
- 13 months (vendor says: 5 years) — shorter than the vendor documents
Sites that set s_fid before consent
The highest-ranked 14 of 14 sites.
- apple.com0 tracking companies
- corriere.it12 tracking companies
- tabelog.com6 tracking companies
- gazzetta.it7 tracking companies
- suumo.jp11 tracking companies
- politico.com31 tracking companies
- imf.org4 tracking companies
- cancer.gov4 tracking companies
- poste.it1 tracking company
- politico.eu5 tracking companies
Show 4 more sites
- au.com9 tracking companies
- bostonglobe.com10 tracking companies
- kakaku.com22 tracking companies
- trulia.com4 tracking companies
Related cookies
Other cookies from Adobe Analytics.
How to stop it
Declining non-essential cookies in a site's consent banner should stop s_fid 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.