EU gov't and public health sites are lousy with adtech, study finds

The highest number of tracking companies were present on the websites of the French , Latvian , Belgian and Greek governments.

The researchers also ran a sub-set of 15 health-related queries across six EU countries to identify relevant landing pages hosted on the websites of the corresponding national health service — going on to count and identify tracking domains operating on the landing pages.

Broken down by market, the Irish health service ranked worst — with 73 per cent of landing pages containing trackers.

While the UK, Spain, France and Italy had trackers on 60 per cent, 53 per cent, 47 per cent and 47 per cent of landing pages, respectively.

Searches on publicly funded health service sites being compromised by the presence of adtech suggests highly sensitive inferences could be being made about web users by the commercial companies behind the trackers.

“Vulnerable citizens who seek official health advice are shown to be suffering sensitive personal data leakage,” it writes in the report.

“These citizens have no clear way to prevent this leakage, understand where their data is sent, or to correct or delete the data,” it warns.

Transparency is a fundamental requirement of data protection legislation, including privacy of electronic communications.