Yesterday Brave release a report detailing how bad the Surveillance is on UK Council websites.

If you want to read the whole report here it is: https://brave.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Surveillance-on-UK-council-websites_compressed_version.pdf 

I will summarize it for you with the key take aways. But first lets start with what is a UK Council website. If you need to do anything legal that ever day citizens do you would need to visit your Council website. Things like, the birth of your baby, death of family member, you got married, you moved houses, disability parking permits, Senior Home Care, and so on. So pretty important things and also things that can really define you in a dataset.

On the Council websites where you data is being collected none of the companies behind the data collection has received consent to do so. By that I mean when you visit the site they do not tell you they are collecting your data in any way. 

198 websites are using "real-time bidding" advertising which is also the same advertisement used in the biggest data breach in UK history.

Over 1/4 of the UK's population is served by council websites that also embed social media sites so their data on those sites is leaked as well.

Let's take a step back and figure out what these companies are tracking on you. Each person that visits the council website has a unique ID code assigned to them. It collects your physical location, IP Address, Device details (and some cases other apps on your phone), URL's of each page you visit. 

The ramifications of this are insane if you take a moment to think about it. Some 3rd party company knows if you are an alcoholic by you going to your Councils website to search for help. Tie that with you twitter account data and maybe your Facebook too. They know too much information about you. And guess what this 3rd party company is going to do with this information. They are not going to help you by sending you AA e-mails.

This whole report was put together by Brave. You know the Browser that pays you to view ads. But what most people forget is that it inherently blocks a ton of this tracking spam on the web to keep your information your own.

I highly suggest you read the 21 page report if you live in the UK. And for everyone else just remember that the internet is awesome and helps us do a ton of cool and helpful things but it's a black hole as well. Just be smart when online and use your common sense.

side note: Brave is an amazing Browser but also an amazing company. This report was done to literally help people browse the internet safer. They released all the graphics from their report for people like to me to post in the hope more people see it and browse safer. Ignorance is not bliss.