Abstract
The accelerated digitalization and the increased use of online services for everyday tasks, online privacy issues are more important than ever before. This also goes for universities which are increasingly moving information and services online. Our study provides a technical overview of prevalence of third-party analytics on university websites. Websites of 40 universities from eight different countries around the world are analyzed to reveal third-party analytics services they use. The study shows that most universities, especially in many technologically advanced western countries, have alarmingly high number of analytics services on their websites. The results emphasize the need for web developers and data protection officers to better assess what kind of data their websites deliver to third parties. This is especially important for universities, as kind of example institutions tasked with advancing the common good.
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Notes
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The top five universities for each country were chosen according to the listing at https://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-university-rankings/2022.
- 2.
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Acknowledgements
This research has been funded by Academy of Finland project 327397, IDA – Intimacy in Data-Driven Culture.
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Heino, T., Rauti, S., Carlsson, R., Leppänen, V. (2023). Study of Third-Party Analytics Services on University Websites. In: Abraham, A., Hong, TP., Kotecha, K., Ma, K., Manghirmalani Mishra, P., Gandhi, N. (eds) Hybrid Intelligent Systems. HIS 2022. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol 647. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27409-1_117
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