title: Preventing AddThis from setting cookies (or documenting the purpose of these)?
body: <p><a href="http://www.addthis.com" rel="nofollow noreferrer">AddThis</a> provides a configurable toolbox that allow visitors to share content on your site through social media.</p>
  
  <p>When this toolbox is active on my site, 6 third party cookies and 2 first party cookies is set as shown in the screen-shot below:</p>
  
  <p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/wN5Pl.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/wN5Pl.png" alt="Cookies set byAdd this "></a></p>
  
  <p>I don't subscribe to AddThis analytics.  My <em>only</em> use of the toolbox is to make it simple for my users to share my site's content on social media.</p>
  
  <p>There exists recipes like <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20218458/how-do-i-prevent-addthis-from-using-cookies-on-my-site">this on StackOverflow</a> that tells you that you can embed some JavaScript to set options such as <code>data_use_cookies</code> false in <code>addthis_config</code>. As far as I am able to tell, these methods for preventing cookies being set by AddThis no longer works.</p>
  
  <p>In order to comply with the <a href="http://ec.europa.eu/ipg/basics/legal/cookies/index_en.htm" rel="nofollow noreferrer">EU cookie directive</a> I either need to remove these cookies, or to get informed consent from visitors (which means I need to document and inform visitors about their <em>purpose</em>).</p>
  
  <p>Hence my questions:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>I really want to prevent AddThis from using cookies on my site. Is there a way to do this in 2016?</li>
  <li>If it is no longer possible to prevent AddThis from using cookies (without disabling the AddThis toolbox), is there documentation (by AddThis or others) that explains what the <em>purpose</em> of these are?</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>The only thing I've found so far is the <a href="http://www.addthis.com/privacy" rel="nofollow noreferrer">AddThis privacy policy</a>.  This page is not very helpful as it contains misleading statements like this:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>“We don't install any tracking software on your computer.”</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>Since cookies <em>are</em> “tracking software” for all intents and purposes, this statement is obviously false.</p>
  
  <p>As for <em>purpose</em>, there is a partial answer at <a href="http://support.addthis.com/customer/portal/questions/327365-cookie-audit" rel="nofollow noreferrer">AddThis support sub-site</a>, but it leaves out <code>vc</code> and the two first-party cookies it sets.</p>
  
  <p><em>Cookiepedia</em> explains <code>__atuvc</code>, but not <a href="https://cookiepedia.co.uk/cookies/__atuvs" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><code>__atuvs</code></a>.</p>