Women's shelters usually operate with a commitment to confidentiality to protect the privacy and safety of the help-seeking individuals. In today's digital age, this principle also extends to their websites, highlighting the importance of online visitors' privacy. This study discusses the potential negative outcomes of using third-party analytics services on websites of the women's shelters, conducted by analyzing the contents of web requests made to third parties and how they jeopardize the user privacy. The results show that 95.5% of the studied websites leak visitors' personal data, such as IP addresses, and device identifiers. Along with these identifying details, the current website URL is also leaked, potentially revealing the user's intent to seek help. Consequently, detailed profiles of violence victims could be created by third parties. The study also offers recommendations to protect the confidential personal data of vulnerable individuals seeking support.

Several web-based healthcare services such as medi-cal center websites, online pharmacies and mental health websites process sensitive medical data that should not end up in the wrong hands. Today's trend of incorporating several third-party services on websites poses a threat to online privacy, and this is also a considerable risk when it comes to medical websites. In this study, we conduct a network traffic analysis on 20 Finnish healthcare websites to investigate the types of personal data that these websites inadvertently share with third parties and to identify these third-party entities. Our results indicate that even without consent, 12 of these websites leak sensitive data to third parties. We also discuss the implications of health data leaks and offer recommendations for web developers to prevent such privacy issues in the future.

Online services are increasingly being used to complete everyday tasks, and ordinary users with very little technical knowledge have learned to use web services and applications. At the same time, many user applications are gradually moving from the traditional desktop environment to the web. Because of these developments, it is not surprising that user privacy has become a very important consideration when developing web services. In the current study, we assess the privacy of 34 web services provided and maintained by Finnish public sector bodies. We perform a network traffic analysis in order to find out what kind of personal data the studied services deliver to third party analytics services. We then take a look at the privacy policy documents of these web services and gauge their transparency and clarity by comparing their contents to the actual network data sent out by the web services. Our findings reveal numerous inconsistencies between what is said about handling personal data in the analyzed privacy policies and the actual traffic of the studied web services. Another prominent finding is the sheer amount of analytics services employed by the studied websites. We conclude that there is still an obvious need for web developers and public sector bodies to improve their awareness of existing privacy regulations and personal information their online services deliver to third parties. A lot of work also remains to be done in clearly and transparently communicating privacy-related matters to users.