What does harvard.edu track?
Before any consent, harvard.edu loaded 4 tracking companies and set 5 advertising or analytics cookies.
That's more tracking companies than 70% of the 2,450 sites we scanned.
Scanned October 2, 2026 from Germany, loading www.harvard.edu once and clicking nothing. How we scan
- Tracking companies
- 4
- Tracking cookies
- 5
- Third-party hosts
- 14
- Cookies in total
- 8
Consent banner
No known consent management platform was detected on the page.
Companies contacted before consent
2 of the 6 companies it contacted before consent were analytics companies.
- Google Ads2 requestsAdvertising
stats.g.doubleclick.net, www.google.de
- Meta3 requestsSocial media
connect.facebook.net, www.facebook.com
- Google Analytics6 requestsAnalytics
www.google-analytics.com, www.googletagmanager.com, region1.analytics.google.com
- Parse.ly2 requestsAnalytics
cdn.parsely.com, p1.parsely.com
Other third parties (content delivery, consent, functional, unclassified)
- Google6 requestsFunctional
www.google.com, cse.google.com, clients1.google.com
- WordPress.com2 requestsFunctional
stats.wp.com, pixel.wp.com
Cookies set before consent
The longest-lived tracking cookie it set was _ga, from Google Analytics, lasting about 13 months.
| Cookie | Purpose | Set by | Lasts |
|---|---|---|---|
| _fbp | Advertising | harvard.edu | 3 months |
| _ga | Analytics | harvard.edu | 13 months |
| _ga_KBLBYHG5EP | Analytics | harvard.edu | 13 months |
| _gat_UA-2923555-1 | Analytics | harvard.edu | Under a day |
| _gid | Analytics | harvard.edu | 1 day |
| Unclassified | www.harvard.edu | Session | |
| _parsely_session | Functional | harvard.edu | Under a day |
| _parsely_visitor | Functional | harvard.edu | 13 months |
The page also wrote 2 keys to local storage, which works like a cookie but isn't sent with requests.
Understanding this page
- How to see which cookies and trackers a website loads
A hands-on walkthrough for checking what a site sets before you've clicked anything, using Chrome and Firefox's built-in tools, plus how CookieTosser automates the same check every month.
- What counts as valid cookie consent in the EU
The rules that actually govern cookie banners — the ePrivacy Directive, the GDPR consent standard, the Planet49 ruling, the strictly-necessary exemption, and what "reject" has to offer compared with "accept.
- Consent management platforms explained
What a CMP banner is actually doing behind the scenes, how the IAB's TCF standard and Google's Consent Mode v2 fit in, and why a banner being present is no guarantee that nothing loads before you answer it.