Why On Earth Do Local Council Websites Need Adverts Or Trackers?

I finally got around to looking at the report that Brave created showing the results of their investigation into third-party tracking on UK local council and county websites earlier this month. The interactive map included is particularly eye-opening.

There is no good reason for most of those trackers to be there. I can only presume that either the councils need the marginal revenue generated from their use—unlikely, since it probably won’t be much—or they didn’t consider privacy when outsourcing the creation and maintenance of said websites.

Sadly, it appears that the regulator, the ICO, is reluctant to force the parties involved in tracking and real-time bidding (RTB) to clean up their act. This doesn’t bode well for a future where the UK Government may choose to ‘diverge’ from the EU data protection regulations that we currently have.