Preventing AddThis from setting cookies (or documenting the purpose of these)?

Question

AddThis provides a configurable toolbox that allow visitors to share content on your site through social media.

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:

I don't subscribe to AddThis analytics. My only use of the toolbox is to make it simple for my users to share my site's content on social media.

There exists recipes like this on StackOverflow that tells you that you can embed some JavaScript to set options such as data_use_cookies false in addthis_config. As far as I am able to tell, these methods for preventing cookies being set by AddThis no longer works.

In order to comply with the EU cookie directive 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 purpose).

Hence my questions:

1. I really want to prevent AddThis from using cookies on my site. Is there a way to do this in 2016?
2. 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 purpose of these are?

The only thing I've found so far is the AddThis privacy policy. This page is not very helpful as it contains misleading statements like this:

“We don't install any tracking software on your computer.”

Since cookies are “tracking software” for all intents and purposes, this statement is obviously false.

As for purpose, there is a partial answer at AddThis support sub-site, but it leaves out vc and the two first-party cookies it sets.

Cookiepedia explains __atuvc, but not __atuvs.

Haya

Why do you think AddThis is providing this free service? Because they are nice people and philanthropists or because they want to sell the tracked user data? – Legal

While I had hoped that the function to disable cookies was still there (they used to let you do this), there is a fallback question (if the answer to my first question is "no".): What is the purpose of these cookies? That is still answerable and will be accepted if given. – Haya

Another implication of these cookies is that they may prevent page from http caching because of their random nature. – Kahlil

Answer 1

AddThis widget uses a global configuration variable called addthis_config here the Doc.

but there are more configurations than those mentioned!

After calling the widget (be sure to remove the async attribute) put this code

var addthis_config = {
   data_use_cookies_ondomain: !1,
   data_use_cookies: !1
}

This prevent the creation of __atuvc and __atuvs. But there still be another created cookies.

Thunderous

This suggestion is explicitly mentioned in the question, with "As far as I am able to tell, these methods for preventing cookies being set by AddThis no longer works." – Estus