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 the USA…”