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MENA Tracker Guides

SMSA Express Cookies and PDPL Consent

Shipment tracking cookies from SMSA Express — necessary when the shopper is tracking a parcel, and worth declaring either way.

Cookies we detect

Category: Necessary
  • smsa_track
  • smsa_awb
  • smsa_session
  • smsa_shipment

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 SMSA Express sets

SMSA's tracking integration sets cookies carrying the shipment reference, the air waybill number and a session for the tracking lookup. They appear when a customer checks where an order is, or on a store's own order-tracking page.

Why it is classified as necessary

A shopper who typed a tracking number has explicitly asked for that lookup, and the cookies carry it out. That is the necessary exemption working as intended. The classification is narrower than it looks though: it covers the tracking function, not any analytics a logistics widget might bundle alongside it, and those would need separating.

What PDPL requires

Disclosure without a consent gate, on the same basis as payment cookies. The reason to get this right is that shipment references are linkable to an identified customer and an order, so treating them casually is a data-minimisation problem even where it is not a consent one.

How Arqam360 handles it

Recognised by pattern and classified necessary, with a bilingual description in the declaration. Most international classifiers have no entry for SMSA and report these as unknown cookies, which pushes the merchant into either guessing a category or leaving a gap.

See which of these are on your store right now, and which are firing before anyone consents.

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