TY - GEN
T1 - Measuring Web Cookies in Governmental Websites
AU - Gotze, Matthias
AU - Matic, Srdjan
AU - Iordanou, Costas
AU - Smaragdakis, Georgios
AU - Laoutaris, Nikolaos
PY - 2022
Y1 - 2022
N2 - In recent years, governments worldwide have moved their services online to better serve their citizens. Benefits aside, this choice increases the danger of tracking via such sites. This is of great concern as governmental websites increasingly become the only interaction point with the government. In this paper, we investigate popular governmental websites across different countries and assess to what extent the visits to these sites are tracked by third-parties. Our results show that, unfortunately, tracking is a serious concern, as in some countries up to 90% of these websites create cookies of third-party trackers without any consent from users. Non-session cookies, that are created by trackers and can last for days or months, are widely present even in countries with strict user privacy laws. We also show that the above is a problem for official websites of international organizations and popular websites that inform the public about the COVID-19 pandemic.
AB - In recent years, governments worldwide have moved their services online to better serve their citizens. Benefits aside, this choice increases the danger of tracking via such sites. This is of great concern as governmental websites increasingly become the only interaction point with the government. In this paper, we investigate popular governmental websites across different countries and assess to what extent the visits to these sites are tracked by third-parties. Our results show that, unfortunately, tracking is a serious concern, as in some countries up to 90% of these websites create cookies of third-party trackers without any consent from users. Non-session cookies, that are created by trackers and can last for days or months, are widely present even in countries with strict user privacy laws. We also show that the above is a problem for official websites of international organizations and popular websites that inform the public about the COVID-19 pandemic.
KW - COVID-19
KW - GDPR.
KW - Official Web Services
KW - User Tracking
KW - Web Cookies
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85133710798&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3501247.3531545
DO - 10.1145/3501247.3531545
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85133710798
T3 - ACM International Conference Proceeding Series
SP - 44
EP - 54
BT - WebSci 2022 - Proceedings of the 14th ACM Web Science Conference
PB - Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
T2 - 14th ACM Web Science Conference, WebSci 2022
Y2 - 26 June 2022 through 29 June 2022
ER -