Clarity Cookie Consent Changes for 2025

What is this, and why should I care?

In 2025, Microsoft updated its Clarity product to enhance user privacy, requiring explicit consent before setting cookies. As a result, VisualSP will disable cookies in your Clarity project by default to simplify management for you.

After the change, customer admin teams with Clarity access will still see aggregated click data, session recordings, and heatmaps – but will face a few limitations. Tracking user behavior across multiple pages or identifying returning users will be restricted without cookie data, making it harder to understand broad user journeys.

For those needing more detail

Your VisualSP subscription can make Clarity API calls on your behalf wherever you use the VisualSP panel to support a web application, which greatly simplifies the process to collect usage information about use of your organization’s web platforms.

When Clarity integration is enabled, it collects information from various sources to help you understand what is happening in your platforms:

• Common information that’s always available from every browser session (like browser version, city / state, referrer page…),
• Custom tags from the VisualSP system (like if a feature was used), and
• Potentially, cookies placed on the user’s system for more consistent tracking, such as an anonymous user id. (This is where Microsoft’s change comes into play.)

Summary of Microsoft’s Changes

In 2025, Microsoft implemented changes regarding cookie consent for Microsoft Clarity aimed at enhancing user privacy and complying with evolving legislative requirements, particularly in Europe and California. These changes mean that anyone leveraging the Clarity API is required to obtain user consent before cookies are set.

Here’s a summary of their changes, the reasons behind them, and the updated requirements moving forward:

1. Enhanced Transparency: Microsoft Clarity has increased transparency around the types of data collected through cookies and the purposes for this collection. Users are better informed about what data is collected, how it is used, and who the data is shared with.
2. User Consent Mechanism: A more robust cookie consent mechanism was introduced, where users must opt-in to allow cookies to be placed on their devices, reflecting principles from GDPR and CCPA regulations about user consent for the use of cookies.
3. Periodic Review of Consent: Companies using Microsoft Clarity are encouraged to periodically review and refresh user consent, ensuring ongoing compliance with privacy regulations.
4. Right to Withdraw Consent: In scenarios where cookies are used, users are explicitly informed that they have the right to withdraw consent at any time and that it is a straightforward process.

What do you have to do?

Good news – we’re making a simple change to implement best practices for you.

VisualSP customers are likely to be using Clarity for a broad selection of sites. If consent had to be obtained for each of those, it would likely create a poor user experience and significant complexity for you to manage.

For this reason, we are resetting each Clarity project where we have shared access to not use cookies at all going forward. This greatly simplifies the requirements for you as the customer. As admins of your Clarity projects, you can make any setting that is appropriate. However, it should be considered best practice for all Clarity projects that are integrated with a VisualSP subscription to have their cookies disabled.

How does that affect the data available to you in your Clarity dashboard?

The primary use case for Clarity integration with VisualSP is to analyze interactions with specific features, tools, and pages rather than to track broader user journeys throughout their entire session. When configured to not use cookies, your Clarity project will still collect the data that is most likely to be useful for this use case. You will still see aggregated click data, heatmaps, and session recordings.

However, disabling cookies introduces the following changes in the data you will see going forward:

1. Sessions will be shorter and more specific: Without cookies, each page visit will be tracked as a single browsing session instead of combining a string of multiple page visits into a broader session.

Before disabling cookies:



After disabling cookies:



This imposes limitations for some advanced filtering scenarios, like sessions where someone visited both the home page and the profile page. (Referrer page is still tracked, since it is part of the common contextual information always provided by the browser.)

In many ways, this makes heatmaps more helpful – because it becomes easier to filter sessions for a specific page and then overlay clicks more consistently for that one page.

2. Limitations to identify returning users: Cookies help determine whether a user is new or returning by assigning a consistent and anonymous user id to sessions. Without this capability, you lose insight into user-specific history.

After disabling cookies, new User IDs are assigned to each page visit, even if it is the same user:



NOTE: VisualSP has a separate configuration option to allow you to push the activated username from your subscription as a custom tag when calling the Clarity API. This does not require cookies and is therefore not relevant to the changes being described here. You must determine whether your organization’s regulatory and compliance requirements allow for this setting to be used.