Abstract
With digitalization, the use of essential social and healthcare services online has become increasingly prevalent. In this paper, we conduct a survey on the websites of Finnish social and healthcare districts and determine to what extent, if any, they leak their users’ personal data to third parties through the use of the collection and tracking of user data and actions with the web analytics tools. Our findings show that 82.6% of the studied websites leaked personal data to outside actors, but the extent and contents of these data leaks varied. Our study also demonstrates that in many cases, privacy policies of the studied websites do not always report personal data items transferred to third parties and fail to adequately inform users. The cookie banners of the studied websites were also found to contain several dark patterns.
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Notes
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The HTTP Archive format is a file format for recording a web browser’s interactions with a website.
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This research has been funded by Academy of Finland project 327397, IDA—Intimacy in Data-Driven Culture.
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Puhtila, P., Vuorinen, E., Rauti, S. (2024). Third-Party Data Leaks in the Websites of Finnish Social and Healthcare Districts. In: Rocha, Á., Adeli, H., Dzemyda, G., Moreira, F., Poniszewska-Marańda, A. (eds) Good Practices and New Perspectives in Information Systems and Technologies. WorldCIST 2024. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol 985. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-60215-3_14
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