What is the YSC cookie?
Registers a unique ID to keep statistics of what videos from YouTube the user has seen.
Our October 2026 scan found it on 114 sites (5% of the 2,450 we scanned), set before any consent.
- Purpose
- Functional
- Belongs to
- Youtube
- Set as
- First-party on 1% of sites, third-party on 99%
- Typical lifetime
- Session (vendor says: Session)
Sites that set YSC before consent
The highest-ranked 30 of 114 sites.
- youtube.com0 tracking companies
- slack.com6 tracking companies
- tp-link.com2 tracking companies
- stanford.edu4 tracking companies
- trendmicro.com8 tracking companies
- berkeley.edu4 tracking companies
- usda.gov4 tracking companies
- frontiersin.org4 tracking companies
- worldbank.org9 tracking companies
- xerox.com4 tracking companies
Show 20 more sites
- elmundo.es20 tracking companies
- ox.ac.uk4 tracking companies
- marca.com9 tracking companies
- nypost.com8 tracking companies
- clarin.com13 tracking companies
- elconfidencial.com6 tracking companies
- mundodeportivo.com13 tracking companies
- ilfattoquotidiano.it4 tracking companies
- grow.google2 tracking companies
- gst.gov.in2 tracking companies
- ucla.edu5 tracking companies
- nikkansports.com7 tracking companies
- bookmyshow.com5 tracking companies
- ilmeteo.it9 tracking companies
- cronista.com9 tracking companies
- protothema.gr6 tracking companies
- sozcu.com.tr11 tracking companies
- gcash.com5 tracking companies
- umn.edu2 tracking companies
- eenadu.net12 tracking companies
Related cookies
Other cookies from Youtube.
- VISITOR_PRIVACY_METADATA114 sites
- __Secure-ROLLOUT_TOKEN113 sites
- VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE113 sites
How to stop it
Declining non-essential cookies in a site's consent banner should stop YSC 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.