ShareThis

Overview

ShareThis provides social sharing buttons and audience engagement tools for publishers. The script injects share widgets and tracks content sharing activity across social networks while also collecting behavioral data for audience segmentation.

What This Script Does

The ShareThis script renders social sharing buttons on content pages and tracks which articles are shared, to which networks, and how often. It sets persistent cookies to identify visitors across sessions and across sites in the ShareThis publisher network. Behavioral data including page URLs, content categories, and sharing activity is collected to build audience segments. This data is made available to advertising partners for targeted ad delivery. The script fires pixel requests to sync visitor identifiers with third-party data partners.

Consent & Compliance

Consent category: Functional / Marketing (depends on configuration)

The sharing button functionality serves visitors directly, but ShareThis also operates a data business that profiles users and sells audience segments to advertisers. Under GDPR, the cross-site tracking and data sharing with advertising partners requires explicit opt-in consent. Under CCPA, the audience data sharing qualifies as selling personal information. The ePrivacy Directive requires consent for persistent cookies used for profiling. ShareThis participates in IAB TCF.

Should You Block This Without Consent?

Conditional. If ShareThis is configured with data collection disabled (sharing-only mode), it may operate as functional. In its default configuration with behavioral tracking and data sharing enabled, it should be blocked until marketing consent is granted.