Measuring Web Cookies in Governmental Websites

Abstract

In recent years, governments worldwide have moved their services online to better serve their citizens. Benefits aside, this choice increases the danger of tracking via such sites. This is of great concern as governmental websites increasingly become the only interaction point with the government. In this paper, we investigate popular governmental websites across different countries and assess to what extent the visits to these sites are tracked by third-parties. Our results show that, unfortunately, tracking is a serious concern, as in some countries up to 90% of these websites create cookies of third-party trackers without any consent from users. Non-session cookies, that are created by trackers and can last for days or months, are widely present even in countries with strict user privacy laws. We also show that the above is a problem for official websites of international organizations and popular websites that inform the public about the COVID-19 pandemic. CCS CONCEPTS• Information systems → World Wide Web; • Security and privacy → Human and societal aspects of security and privacy.

Assessing e-Government DNS Resilience

“…The Swiss e-gov domains were provided to us by SWITCH, the .ch registry.For the United States' e-gov domains, we analyzed the complete list of .gov names, provided in a public dataset. 1 E-mail E-gov domains may also be used for e-mail (e.g., info@nsf.gov), which involves MX record resolution (see §II), and may involve an external e-mail provider. We evaluate external dependencies for e-gov domains.…”

“…Governments increasingly use digital avenues for communication with citizens and residents, further solidifying the Internet as core communications fabric of modern societies. Electronic Governance (e-gov) refers to the set of services governments offer online to their citizens and residents [1]. Egov has the potential to save costs and provide faster service, easing access to people with disabilities or mobility challenges.…”

“…Egov has the potential to save costs and provide faster service, easing access to people with disabilities or mobility challenges. The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the payoffs of investments in e-gov, by allowing parts of e-gov services to operate normally despite all restriction measures [1]- [3], such as lockdowns and social distancing.…”

“…The process is complete when the domain is resolved to its IP addresses: the user can finally visit the requested webpage. Examples of ADNS include the Root DNS servers [15], which are authoritative for the Root zone, and examples of resolvers include Quad [1,8,9] [16]- [18]. In this paper, we analyze the deployment and structuring of ADNS in e-gov.…”

Quantifying Dark Web Shops’ Illicit Revenue

“…The original design of the Web did not have anonymity as a requirement. Any user browsing the Web leaves digital footprints that can be traced and unveil the user's identity [28], [55]. The public Web is also easy to crawl and index, hence collecting data to profile users.…”