Cloudflare announced the release of Zaraz, an easy-to-use tool to help clients manage third-party cookies and customer consent.

Websites often integrate a variety of third-party services and tools, many of which rely on cookies to work properly. This can pose a challenge for web admins to keep track of and manage. Cloudflare’s Zaraz tool is designed to make it easier while respecting user privacy.

The company announced the new tool in a blog post:

For website owners it’s really hard to keep track of which third party tools are used and whether they’ve asked end users about all of them. There are tools that help you load third-party scripts on your website, and there are tools that help you manage and gather consent. Making the former respect the choices made in the latter is often cumbersome, to say the least.

This changes with Cloudflare Zaraz, a solution that makes third-party tools secure and fast, and that now can also help you with gathering and managing consent. Using the Zaraz Consent Manager, you can easily collect users’ consent preferences on your website, using a consent modal, and apply your consent policy on third-party tools you load via Cloudflare Zaraz. The consent modal treats all the tools it handles as opt-in and lets users accept or reject all of those tools with one click.

The tool is designed to help websites stay compliant with growing privacy legislation, both in the EU and in some US states:

The privacy landscape around analytics cookies, retargeting cookies, and similar tracking technologies is changing rapidly. Last year in Europe, for example, the French data regulator fined Google and Facebook millions of euros for making it too difficult for users to reject all cookies. Meanwhile, in California, there have been enforcement actions on retargeting cookies, and new laws on retargeting come into effect in 2023 in California and a handful of other states. As a result, more and more companies are growing wary of potential liability related to data processing activities performed by third party scripts that use additional cookies on their websites.

While the legal requirements vary by jurisdiction, creating a compliance headache for companies trying to promote their goods and services, one thing is clear about the increasing spate of regulation around trackers and cookies – end users need to be given notice and have the opportunity to consent to these trackers.

The company says the new tool offloads much of what the third-party scripts do to Cloudflare Workers. This has the two-fold benefit of increasing performance and decreasing the time it takes to get up and running.

Customers can try Zaraz Consent here.