Mada Cookies and PDPL Consent
Saudi Arabia's national payment scheme sets cookies at checkout. They are necessary — and that is a claim worth being able to defend.
Cookies we detect
Category: Necessary- mada_session
- mada_token
- mada_gw
- mada_pay
- mada_tx
- mada_3ds
Detection patterns are taken from our own cookie classifier and are limited to those confirmed in real scans. Patterns we have inferred from vendor documentation but not yet observed are deliberately not listed.
What Mada sets
Mada cookies appear during the payment step and carry the gateway session, the payment token, the transaction reference and the 3-D Secure step-up. They exist for the duration of a payment the shopper has already chosen to make.
Why it is classified as necessary
This is the cleanest case of a strictly necessary cookie there is. The shopper has selected a payment method and is trying to complete a purchase; without the session and 3-D Secure state, the payment cannot be authenticated. Necessary cookies do not require prior consent under any of the regional regimes, and blocking them would break checkout rather than protect anyone.
What PDPL requires
No consent gate — but you still have to disclose them. A cookie declaration that omits payment cookies is incomplete, and 'they were necessary' is a defence you can only run if the record shows you classified them deliberately rather than never noticed them. The distinction also has to survive scrutiny: calling an advertising cookie necessary because it is set at checkout is the most common way merchants lose this argument.
How Arqam360 handles it
Mada patterns are classified necessary, so they are never blocked and never gated, and they appear in the declaration with a plain-language explanation in both languages. The scanner distinguishes them from marketing cookies set on the same checkout page, which is the part a generic international scanner gets wrong — most do not carry Mada at all and file it as unknown.
See which of these are on your store right now, and which are firing before anyone consents.
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