UK Council websites are letting citizens be profiled for ads, study shows – TechCrunch

Summary (IA Generated)

While many large councils (serving 300,000 people) were found exposing site visitors to what Brave describes as “extensive tracking and data collection by private companies” — with the worst offenders, London’s Enfield and Sheffield City Councils, exposing visitors to 25 data collectors apiece. Brave argues the findings represent a conservative illustration of how much commercial tracking and profiling of visitors is going on on public sector websites — a floor, rather than a ceiling — given it was only studying landing pages of Council sites without any user interaction, and could only pick up known trackers (nor could the study look at how data is passed between tracking and data brokering companies). Nor is the first such study to warn that public sector websites are infested with for-profit adtech. A report last year by Cookiebot found users of public sector and government websites in the EU being tracked when they performed health-related searches — including queries related to HIV, mental health, pregnancy, alcoholism and cancer. […] The analysis also found 198 of the Council websites use the real-time bidding (RTB) form of programmatic online advertising. […] TechCrunch Natasha Lomas feedproxy.google.com UK Council websites are letting citizens be profiled for ads, study shows – TechCrunch http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/2GWqTUigwE8/