Cookiebot publishes „Ad Tech Surveillance on the Public Sector Web“

The website Cookiebot recently published a report of its “Ad Tech Surveillance on the Public Sector Web”. They used their scanning technology to analyse tracking across official government websites and public health service websites in all 28 European Union member states. More than 100 advertising technology companies track EU citizens who visit those public sector websites by gaining access through free third-party services such as video plug-ins and social sharing buttons.

Said ad trackers were found on 25 out of the 28 official government websites in the EU. Only the Dutch, German and the Spanish websites had no commercial trackers. Most of them were found on the French website (52 trackers) followed by the Latvian website (27 trackers).

Cookiebot also investigated the tracking on Public Health Service Sites and found out that 52% of landing pages with health information contained ad trackers. The worst ranked one was the Irish health service with 73% of landing pages containing trackers. The lowest ranked country – Germany – still hat one third of its landing pages held trackers.

Those trackers got in via free third-party website plugins. For example, Ireland’s public health service (Health Service Executive (HSE)) installed the sharing tool ShareThis, which is like a Trojan horse that releases more than 20 ad tech companies into every Website it’s installed on.

Most of the tracking tools are controlled by Google. It controls the top three domains found and therefore tracks the visits to 82% of the main government websites of the EU. A complete list of all the trackers can be find in the published report.