Prevalence of Online Tracking in Local Government

Abstract

Measurement of prevalence tracking online highlights the darkness web that raises privacy issues with users’ data. This study provides an overview of the prevalence tracking in local government websites. So far, very little attention has been paid to the role of prevalence online tracking in local government. Online advertisements rapidly grow everywhere on the internet in both private and public sectors. Local government provides services for the public rather than businesses. In this research, we investigate whether the local government might threaten user’s privacy. For instance, using embedded third party in the websites. We collect the data using an automated crawling tool OpenWPM to automatically visit local government websites in the three countries we consider for this work, the UK (England-Wales), Ireland, and Canada. In visiting each website, we collect the embedded third parties as well as their tracking features, such as canvas fingerprinting and cookies. The results of this dissertation show that local governments are involved in online tracking. In comparing the three countries, we found that Canada has the highest average number of imbedded third parties on their local government websites, and the highest frequency of websites that use canvas fingerprinting. Also, England-Wales have the highest number of third-parties’ cookies on their websites. Further research is needed to investigate other public sectors that will expand this work in covering regions to build up an overview of the prevalence online tracking, which may encourage the government to take further action about the prevalence of online tracking in public sectors.