It's quite likely a contracted web developer is using a "free" library that had these trackers built into it. It's also possible this is corruption, as it's a

It's quite likely a contracted web developer is using a "free" library that had these trackers built into it. It's also possible this is corruption, as it's a question of where the revenue from that data was going. If it's going to some web developer's account that's a problem. The RTB aspect of this story makes it clearly disingenuous, but getting interaction data to improve services is something you would expect a progressive public service to do. Crying wolf on this could do a lot more harm than good to the risk averse cultures of public services. I hope they've got the story right.