Datafying citizens: Third-party trackers and data-as-payment in government infrastructure

Scandinavians are among the most datafied citizens in the world. With its digitalised welfare states, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish e-governance infrastructures collect massive amounts of data about citizens as they search for jobs, apply for building permits, and check school calendars. In this article, we analyse the use of third-party trackers (n = 2,761) on Scandinavian municipal websites (n = 745) between 2007–2023. Mobilising the theoretical framework of universalism, our aim is to understand what kind of cost data tracking constitutes for users of digital government services. Results show that Scandinavian municipal websites are dominated by commercial trackers harvesting citizen data for advertising purposes, particularly those provided by Alphabet and Meta. We conclude that commercial user-tracking on Scandinavian municipal websites does not conform to the principle of universality, proposing 1) that governments ensure transparency of the cost incurred by these websites’ data tracking, and 2) that they ban commercial tracking on municipal websites.