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

A study of tracking cookies running on government and public sector health websites in the European Union has found commercial adtech to be operating pervasively even in what should be core not-for-profit corners of the Internet. The researchers used searches including queries related to HIV, mental health, pregnancy, alcoholism and cancer to examine how frequently European Internet users are tracked when accessing national health service webpages to look for publicly funded information about sensitive concerns. The study also found that most EU government websites have commercial trackers embedded on them, with 89 per cent of official government websites found to contain third party ad tracking technology.