Opinion: Facebook and Google aren’t the only ones tracking your clicks

Criticism of big tech companies that track us across the internet without our informed consent misses a bigger picture: There are hundreds of ad-tracking companies that do the same, and regulators have been powerless to rein them in.

A report by the Danish privacy consulting firm Cookiebot says that 112 ad-tracking companies collect information about visitors to government and public sector websites in European Union countries, even though the websites are not ad-supported. Of these, 52 were found on French government sites; German taxpayer-funded sites were found to be the best protected, yet one-third of their pages still contained advertising trackers.

If you don’t recall authorizing that activity, that’s because you didn’t. Even if you clicked on an “I accept cookies” pop-up, which probably didn’t explain properly what cookies you were accepting, it didn’t cover all of the trackers. Some were smuggled in.