Overview
This check reviews the configured expiration on every observed cookie and flags any cookie whose lifespan exceeds your documented corporate retention baseline (commonly 13 months, the widely referenced European guidance benchmark for non-essential cookies) or the specific retention period declared for that cookie's category in your public privacy notice.
Note: This guide is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Consult qualified legal counsel regarding your organization's specific GDPR compliance obligations.
Why it is important
GDPR's storage limitation principle requires that personal data, including cookie-based identifiers, be retained no longer than necessary for the purpose it was collected for, and a cookie configured with an excessive or indefinite lifespan (a simple analytics cookie persisting for ten years, for example) directly contradicts both the storage limitation principle and whatever retention period your privacy notice actually discloses to visitors.
Implementation
Create an audit representing a user who has opted in from at least one European country to capture the current cookie inventory and expiration settings.
Check the pre-built ObservePoint report for Cookie Durations Exceeding 13-Month Retention Limit.
Note: Adjust the threshold in the report above if your documented retention baseline differs from 13 months for a given cookie category.
Remediation
For remediations, follow the next steps:
For each over-retention cookie, determine whether the excessive lifespan is a vendor default that was never explicitly configured (common with third-party analytics and advertising scripts, which often ship with multi-year defaults) or a deliberate first-party setting that no longer reflects current policy.
Reconfigure the cookie's expiration directly where you control it (first-party cookies), or contact the vendor to request a shorter default where you don't (third-party cookies). If first-party, the cookie expiry attribute can be easily modified in the code responsible for setting the cookie.
Where the actual, intended retention period genuinely differs from what's currently documented, update the privacy notice and cookie register to reflect the corrected reality rather than silently shortening the cookie without updating the disclosure.
Re-run the Cookies report after the change and confirm the observed expiration now falls within the documented threshold.
Conclusion
An inflated cookie lifetime extends your own compliance exposure window unnecessarily by treating retention-period accuracy as a routine, recurring reconciliation rather than a one-time fix that keeps actual practice aligned with what your privacy notice promises.