Measuring Web Cookies in Governmental Websites

Gotze, Matthias; Matic, Srdjan; Iordanou, Costas; Smaragdakis, G.; Laoutaris, Nikolaos

doi:10.1145/3501247.3531545

Measuring Web Cookies in Governmental Websites

Title

Measuring Web Cookies in Governmental Websites

Author

Gotze, Matthias (Technical University of Berlin)
Matic, Srdjan (IMDEA Software Institute)
Iordanou, Costas (Cyprus University of Technology)
Smaragdakis, G. (TU Delft Cyber Security)
Laoutaris, Nikolaos (IMDEA Software Institute)

Date

2022

Abstract

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.

Subject

COVID-19
GDPR.
Official Web Services
User Tracking
Web Cookies

To reference this document use:

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:83f42930-5696-40c3-ae63-35a8e5c18967

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1145/3501247.3531545

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)

ISBN

9781450391917

Source

WebSci 2022 - Proceedings of the 14th ACM Web Science Conference