Overall, this is what the history of web tracking on government websites looks like over the past 29 years. A few countries have backed off somewhat on tracking visitors to their websites, but overall, the trend is towards increased tracking.
If you want to learn more, we have a preprint of our paper up at https://www.flux.utah.edu/paper/singh-pets26 . And, @sachindhke is on the academic job market right now, so you could interview him and ask!
@ricci @sachindhke Fascinating, thanks for sharing! 🙌
This is quite interesting. I help run a govt focused CMS platform (focused on the US, AU, and NZ) and this definitely matches the trends I’ve seen. Especially in AU and NZ.
@ricci @sachindhke thank you for sharing— very interesting
@ricci wow france going down a lot
Good job France!
@shadowwwind Yeah we don't have enough visibility into exactly why - we couldn't track all of these kinds of things down for all 61 countries we studied, but it does seem that the government there has made a decision at the policy or technical level that has made a big impact
Dec 19, 2025, 10:00 AM@ricci DE: you can't track somebody with a fax machine 🌈