Privacy at Risk: An Investigation of Data Collection Practices and Tracking Scripts on Government Websites in Java

The widespread use of the Internet has led users to frequently and unknowingly share personal information. This research conducted an analysis of the data typically collected and its impact on user privacy, as well as the current privacy policies and their contents. Numerous methods for analyzing privacy can be employed to complete this research. For instance, OpenWPM is one such method that involves gathering data on Internet user behavior by configuring the target URL. OpenWPM provides various options including cookie data collection and HTTP headers. It is also possible to manually analyze privacy. In this research, we conducted a privacy analysis of 1 2 5 government websites in Java (six provinces). Of these, 1,576 out of 3,492 (45%) websites had third-party tracking scripts and 955 out of 1,576 (65%) had cookies available in the third-party tracking scripts. All government websites in Java, except for Jakarta, were flagged as malicious by VirusTotal. Furthermore, none of the main domains of government websites had privacy policies and cookie availability was accepted.