What is the dpm cookie?
Synchronizes visitor identifiers between Adobe Audience Manager and third-party data partners to enable cross-site tracking and audience profiling.
Table of Contents
About dpm
| Vendor | Adobe |
|---|---|
| Cookie Domain | dpm.demdex.net |
| Category Category The functional category of the technology, such as Web Analytics or Social Media. Learn more | Advertising & Paid Media |
| Consent Category Consent Category The consent category this cookie most commonly falls under across sites we scan, normalized into four standard categories. Learn more | Targeting & Advertising |
| Prevalence | Very Common |
| Popularity Popularity Popularity is calculated from our dataset of 4.5B+ cookies analyzed across hundreds of millions of web pages. Learn more | Found on 25% of scanned pages |
| Expiration Type | Timestamp |
| Expiration Duration | 27 days |
| Party Type Party Type Whether the cookie is first-party or third-party. Learn more | 3rd-Party |
| Risk Level Risk Level Rates how sensitive the data stored by this cookie is (High, Medium, or Low) based on data classification and distribution. Learn more | Medium |
| Vendor Privacy Policy | https://www.adobe.com/privacy/policy.html |
| Vendor Website | https://www.adobe.com |
What is the purpose of dpm?
The dpm cookie is set by Adobe Audience Manager (AAM) and the Adobe Experience Cloud ID Service when making network requests to the third-party domain dpm.demdex.net. "DPM" stands for Data Provider Match. This cookie is utilized to record and synchronize unique user identifiers between Adobe's internal profile systems and external third-party data vendors, Demand-Side Platforms (DSPs), and advertising networks.
During an ID synchronization event, Adobe and its partners exchange pseudonymous IDs so that a user known as ID "123" in Adobe can be mapped to ID "456" in the partner's platform. This reconciliation process maintains a consistent user profile across different domains, devices, and ad networks, which is critical for behavioral targeting, audience segmentation, and managing frequency caps across the digital advertising ecosystem.
What are the Privacy Risks of dpm?
Risk Level: Medium
This cookie acts as a third-party behavioral advertising identifier designed specifically for cross-site tracking and audience profile synchronization. While it primarily relies on pseudonymous identifiers (UUIDs) rather than direct Personally Identifiable Information (PII), its core function is to share tracking data with external advertising networks. This enables extensive user profiling, placing it in a medium risk category that generally requires explicit user consent under privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA.
How to Remove dpm from a Website
To remove this cookie, a website administrator must modify their tag management system or website source code to remove the Adobe Audience Manager / Adobe Experience Cloud Identity Service implementation that triggers the calls to dpm.demdex.net. If the site operator wants to keep the core Adobe ID/analytics functionality but stop this specific third-party demdex.net cookie from being set, they can configure the Experience Cloud Identity Service with the disableThirdPartyCookies: true initialization parameter; per Adobe's documentation, when this flag is set the ID service does not return the third-party demdex.net cookie (instead it creates a random MID in the first-party cookie). Note that the related disableThirdPartyCalls flag is a different setting intended to stop the ID service from making calls from authenticated/secure pages and does not by itself prevent this cookie. If the operator cannot disable the third-party cookie via configuration, the cookie cannot be removed without removing the Adobe Audience Manager / Experience Cloud ID Service technology entirely.