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Up to 90% of governmental websites include cookies of third-party trackers

Researchers Matthias Götze (TU Berlin), Srdjan Matic (IMDEA Software), Costas Iordanou (Cyprus University of Technology), Georgios Smaragdakis (TU Delft)…

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Researchers Matthias Götze (TU Berlin), Srdjan Matic (IMDEA Software), Costas Iordanou (Cyprus University of Technology), Georgios Smaragdakis (TU Delft) and Nikolaos Laoutaris (IMDEA Networks) have presented at the ‘Web Science Conference’ the paper: “Measuring Web Cookies in Governmental Websites”, in which they investigate governmental websites of G20 countries and evaluate to what extent visits to these sites are tracked by third parties.

Credit: Matthias Götze (TU Berlin), Srdjan Matic (IMDEA Software), Costas Iordanou (Universidad de Chipre de Tecnología), Georgios Smaragdakis (TU Delft), and Nikolaos Laoutaris (IMDEA Networks)

Researchers Matthias Götze (TU Berlin), Srdjan Matic (IMDEA Software), Costas Iordanou (Cyprus University of Technology), Georgios Smaragdakis (TU Delft) and Nikolaos Laoutaris (IMDEA Networks) have presented at the ‘Web Science Conference’ the paper: “Measuring Web Cookies in Governmental Websites”, in which they investigate governmental websites of G20 countries and evaluate to what extent visits to these sites are tracked by third parties.

The results reveal that in some countries up to 90% of these websites add third-party tracker cookies without users’ consent. This occurs even in countries with strict user privacy laws.

The study

Previous studies have shown the widespread use of cookies to track users on websites on an unprecedented scale but this had not been studied so far on government sites.

The researchers considered studying the behavior of government websites and their compliance or non-compliance with data protection laws during the COVID-19 pandemic, a time when citizen information was provided through official websites of international organizations and governments. “Our results indicate that official governmental, international organizations’ websites and other sites that serve public health information related to COVID-19 are not held to higher standards regarding respecting user privacy than the rest of the web, which is an oxymoron given the push of many of those governments for enforcing GDPR,” comments Nikolaos Laoutaris, Research Professor at IMDEA Networks.

A total of 5,500 websites of international organizations, official COVID-19 information and governments of G20 countries were analyzed: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, UK and USA.

Methodology: types of cookies

There are several types of cookies. “There are first-party cookies, which are those created by the visited website itself, while third-party cookies are those commonly created by external agents through content embedded in the website. In addition, there is the cookie ghostwriting, in which an external entity creates the cookie on behalf of another party and therefore its origin is unknown”, highlights Srdjan Matic, Research Assistant Professor at IMDEA Software.

This paper also distinguishes between cookies by their duration: session cookies active only during the visit to the page or persistent cookies of short, medium or long duration.

Results: G20 government websites

Most of the websites of the G20 countries analyzed install at least one cookie without the user’s consent. Japan is the country with the lowest percentage of websites with cookies, with 77.2%, and South Korea, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia lead the ranking with almost 100%.

Figure 1. Percentage of government websites (number in parenthesis) that contain ≥ 1 cookie per G20 country. 

Of the cookies located the article analyzes the number of third-party cookies (TP) and third-party tracking cookies (TPT). Together, they add up from about 30% in the case of Germany to 95% in the case of Russia. Germany is the only country where this percentage decreases significantly, with only 9% of official websites including a TPT cookie.

Figure 3. Percentage of government websites with third-party (TP) and third-party tracker (TPT) cookies per G20 country. 

In 16 of the 19 countries analyzed, more than 50% of TP and TPT cookies take more than one day to expire.

Figure 5. Percentage of TP and third-party trackers (TPT) cookies with expire times ≥ a day for G20 countries. 

In the table below, the cookie expiration times divided by first party, TP and TPT by country are shown. France leads the ranking of countries for TP and TPT of more than one-year duration. 

Figure 7. Expiration times for first-party (FP), third-party (TP), and third-party trackers’ (TPT) cookies at G20 countries.

Results: International Organizations websites

The study shows that around 95% of the websites of international organizations set cookies and around 60% of these websites use at least one third-party (TP) cookie. Matic explains that “there are no special measures to neutralize third-party cookies on these websites since 52% of the websites of international organizations set at least one cookie associated with a tracker (TPT)”. 

Results: COVID-19 Websites

More than 99% of the websites analyzed in the COVID-19 information study add at least one cookie without the user’s consent. In contrast, there is a lower presence of third-party (TP) cookies, at around 62%.

As Laoutaris points out, with this publication the research team aims to “put more pressure on governments to clean up their own house first and, by doing so, set an example and be more convincing about the importance of implementing the GDPR in practice”. 

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New York Refuses To Give More Money For Offshore Wind Projects As Cheap “Green” Myth Implodes

New York Refuses To Give More Money For Offshore Wind Projects As Cheap "Green" Myth Implodes

By Irina Slav of OilPrice.com,

The New York…

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October 14, 2023

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New York Refuses To Give More Money For Offshore Wind Projects As Cheap "Green" Myth Implodes

By Irina Slav of OilPrice.com,

The New York state authorities have rejected a request by Orsted, BP, and Equinor for raising the price of electricity in future power purchase contracts featuring offshore wind energy.

Offshore wind developers have been pressured by rising raw material and component costs, and higher borrowing costs, which has cast doubt over the viability of many projects. Indeed, Reuters reported that some projects planned for the waters off the coast of New York may need to be reconsidered in light of the authorities’ decision.

"Sunrise Wind's viability and therefore ability to be constructed are extremely challenged without this adjustment," Orsted told Reuters.

Sunrise Wind is an offshore project with a planned capacity of 924 MW that could supply electricity to 600,000 households. According to Orsted, it would also involve several hundred million dollars in investments in the state and 800 jobs.

"These projects must be financially sustainable to proceed," the president of Equinor Renewables Americas told Reuters, referring to the offshore wind projects the Norwegian energy major is leading in the U.S.

Per Reuters, Equinor is involved in three projects with BP—the 816 MW Empire Wind 1 and the 1.26 GW Empire Wind 2, as well as the Beacon Wind farm, with a projected capacity of 1.23 GW.

Indeed, rising costs have compromised the financial sustainability of many wind power projects and earlier this year led to the cancellation of a large-scale one off the coast of the UK.

Swedish Vattenfall, which led the Norfolk Boreas project, said it would quit it after it saw costs rise by 40%, which made the project unviable.

To tackle the rising cost problem, wind developers have turned to governments, asking for additional tax incentives and higher electricity prices, busting the myth of cheap wind power.

The New York Public Service Commission said that if they had agreed to do what the wind developers wanted, that would have added 6.7% to New Yorkers’ electricity bills, which are already among the highest in the State.

Tyler Durden Sat, 10/14/2023 - 10:30

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Russia Denies Talks Of A Gas Cartel

Russia Denies Talks Of A Gas Cartel

By Michael Kern of OilPrice.com

There are no plans for the creation of a natural gas cartel similar to…

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October 14, 2023

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Russia Denies Talks Of A Gas Cartel

By Michael Kern of OilPrice.com

There are no plans for the creation of a natural gas cartel similar to the OPEC cartel in crude oil, Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak said on Friday. 

“There are no discussions to set up a (gas) cartel,” Novak told RT Arabic TV as quoted by Reuters. 

The Gas Exporting Countries Forum (GECF) is an organization of gas producers and exporters but it is not coordinating supply to the market the way OPEC does. Russia is a member of the GECF and its top energy official Novak said in the televised interview that the gas organization was “mostly about exchanging views.”  

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the halt of most of Russian pipeline gas supplies to Europe, the EU has turned to LNG imports and increased deliveries via offshore pipelines from Norway and North Africa to replace the Russian supply, which accounted for around one-third of all European gas imports before the war in Ukraine. 

The EU aims to ditch Russian gas by 2027. 

Having lost the European market, Russia has raised pipeline exports to China and its global LNG exports, which are neither sanctioned nor too shunned in gas-starved Europe. 

This year, the exports of Russian gas giant Gazprom to Europe have slumped and dragged its profits down. Gazprom has reported a massive drop in its first-half net profit as deliveries to Europe plunged compared to the same period in 2022 when Russia was still supplying pipeline gas to its European customers.  

The major drop in Gazprom’s gas deliveries to key customers was due to the halt of Russian pipeline gas exports to nearly all European countries.

Gazprom started to reduce supply via the Nord Stream pipeline to Germany in June 2022, claiming an inability to service gas turbine maintenance outside Russia due to the Western sanctions against Moscow for the invasion of Ukraine. This was weeks before the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines at the end of September 2022, which definitively closed all pipeline gas routes of Russia’s gas to Germany. 

Tyler Durden Sat, 10/14/2023 - 09:20

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Carnival Cruise Line enforces a key main dining room rule

Cruisers love to debate every aspect of eating in the main dining room, but Carnival has drawn a line in the sand on one key issue.

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October 14, 2023

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For most people on a Carnival, Royal Caribbean, MSC, or Norwegian  (NCLH) - Get Free Report cruise the main dining room serves as a gathering and reset point. 

During the day families and friends may go off in different directions, but on most nights they gather in the main dining room for a multicourse dinner experience that generally takes about 90 minutes.

Cruise lines have more small tables, so in many cases you're not sitting with strangers as often as you would have been in the past, but dinners in the main dining room remain an important part of cruising. 

Dinner brings everyone on a trip together and creates shared memories even when days are spent in different places.

Related: Carnival Cruise Line CEO openly talks about adding unpopular fee

The main dining room , of course, is not the only option. You can opt for specialty dining or the buffet, or you can just grab a pizza. Still, with the capacity to serve the entire ship across multiple seatings, the main dining room dinners remain a crucial part of the cruise experience on Carnival, Royal Caribbean (RCL) - Get Free Report, MSC, and Norwegian sailings.

Cruisers, of course, love to debate any changes and rules that are enforced or not enforced in the main dining room. Thousands of social-media posts argue how and whether each cruise line enforces its dress code, with some people wanting to wear shorts, hats or flip-flops while others lament that passengers no longer wear tuxedos on formal nights.

Carnival Cruise Line (CCL) - Get Free Report Brand Ambassador John Heald recently touched off a debate, however, when he outlined on his Facebook page one rule that Carnival does enforce.

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Dinner in a cruise ship main dining room is an elaborate affair.

Image source: Nora Tam/South China Morning Post via Getty

Don't be late for your Carnival main dining room time

Heald spends most days answering questions from Carnival's customers. Sometimes he shares notes that have been sent to him and solicits public response.

BOOK YOUR CRUISE NOW: Plan a dream cruise vacation at the best possible price.

In this case, he shared what happened to one family when it arrived 40 minutes late to its designated meal time. 

On our recent Pride cruise from Rome, we had a table of 10. After long days in port, we did not always make it on time for early seating and came into the main dining room at intervals. This really threw our servers off and therefore, OUR service suffered. One evening, we were all 40 minutes late That is all.. The restaurant manager told us we had to eat at the buffet or come back to see if there was a table available at the late seating.

Carnival, like most cruise lines, offers early and late seatings as well as "anytime" dining options. People who have a specific seating will eat at the same table every night, while people with flexible time seating will eat in a different dining room.

The family that arrived late shared more info with Heald.

That is not acceptable with teenagers. If Carnival puts a cruise together with long stays in ports then expect many to be late. We were punished for being 30 mins late. Unacceptable !!! You are monsters!

Carnival's brand ambassador tried to be understanding but also backed the main dining room management's decision.

I also understand as a parent myself that getting a family ready for dinner on time is not easy, especially after a long day in port. However, the waiter has not just this table to serve but others and moving back to serving appetisers while everyone else is about to be served their main course really can cause a massive dollop of stress for the waiter. If perhaps they had Your Time Dinning or late seating it might have been manageable but early seating, nope, I support what the Maitre D did by asking them to use the Lido or come back later for a table

Heald also posted a poll asking his followers to vote on whether directing guests who were 40 minutes late to their seating to the buffet was a correct choice. 

His followers overwhelmingly agreed with the cruise line: 97% agreed with the decision and 3% said the cruise line should have tried to accommodate the family. 

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A comment from Pam Miller Downey seemed to illustrate how most people felt about the issue.

"They were late...that means not on time..that means they eat somewhere else. Most people who are 40 minutes late wouldn't even dream of going to the MDR. They would automatially go to Lido or one of the other eateries," she wrote.

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