What does howstuffworks.com track?
Before any consent, howstuffworks.com loaded 1 tracking company and set 0 advertising or analytics cookies.
That's fewer tracking companies than most sites we scanned: 75% of the 2,450 sites we checked loaded more.
Scanned October 2, 2026 from Germany, loading www.howstuffworks.com once and clicking nothing. How we scan
- Tracking companies
- 1
- Tracking cookies
- 0
- Third-party hosts
- 8
- Cookies in total
- 1
Consent banner
The page loaded OneTrust, a consent management platform. Everything below was recorded before anyone answered it. 1 tracking company still loaded while it was unanswered.
Companies contacted before consent
2 of the 5 companies it contacted before consent were unclassified.
- New Relic1 requestAnalytics
js-agent.newrelic.com
Other third parties (content delivery, consent, functional, unclassified)
- hswstatic.com14 requestsUnclassified
media.hswstatic.com, cdn.hswstatic.com, cdn-assets.hswstatic.com
- greencolumnblog.com2 requestsUnclassified
ob.greencolumnblog.com, obs.greencolumnblog.com
- OneTrust2 requestsConsent banner
cdn.cookielaw.org
- AWS WAF3 requestsFunctional
5474cb65a01c.18c71156.eu-central-1.token.awswaf.com
Cookies set before consent
| Cookie | Purpose | Set by | Lasts |
|---|---|---|---|
| aws-waf-token | Necessary | howstuffworks.com | 4 days |
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.