Cafcass - Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service

"Adoption: I’m getting a new family"

Adoption seems like quite a private matter, at least to start with as a child learns about what is happening, the family adopting them learns too and both have to navigate the various challenges and risks of failure.

The government's Cafcass service has decided to share this situation with advertising companies by including identifiable tracking of the children involved as they seek support material on pages like the above.

Not just adoption

Cafcass support children in other situations too and support advice that children read is also tracked by companies here too:

What does a tracking request look like?

Google Ads

GET /ddm/fls/z/src=10124671;type=alway202;cat=apbtn202;ord=1;num=5848663026567;gtm=45He36l0;auiddc=*;~oref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cafcass.gov.uk%2Fyoung-people%2Fmy-parents-are-separating%2F HTTP/1.1
Host: adservice.google.com
Referer: https://10124671.fls.doubleclick.net/
Cookie: [Google user account cookies here]

If you scroll right on the first line, you'll see "my-parents-are-separating"

The Host: entry is the web site that will receive this request

The cookie has not been included, as it has my login cookie in, but that's the problem, it ties exactly to my Google account.

The Referer: is meta data sent to Google to make it clear that the authority of this data is Google's Double Click embed, which Google is also getting a referer on separately that Cafcass is loading this.

Facebook

The Facebook integration Cafcass installs sends a more complicated request, called a POST request that allows them to submit a whole file of data about the user activity.

So the request is broken into first some basic metadata data to send Facebook about the request, including a cookie that will identify a logged in Facebook Account or their advertiser tracking id (both are identifiable references):

POST /tr/ HTTP/1.1
Host: www.facebook.com
Referer: https://www.cafcass.gov.uk/
Cookie: [advertising tracking cookie and likely account cookie]

The Referer: here is Cafcass - Facebook know exactly where this data is coming from and the authority a gov.uk site offers.

Then the file. Is is in odd format, but it doesn't take much to spot that this is a lot of information about what the child is reading.

-----------------------------11764896883442642573939292605
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="dl"

https://www.cafcass.gov.uk/young-people/my-parents-are-separating/
-----------------------------11764896883442642573939292605
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="rl"

https://www.cafcass.gov.uk/young-people/
-----------------------------11764896883442642573939292605
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="cd[Meta]"

{"title":"My parents are separating - Cafcass - Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service","meta:description":"Sometimes after parents separate they find it hard to agree on important things and ask the court for help. Whatever happens remember this is not your fault"}
-----------------------------11764896883442642573939292605
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="cd[OpenGraph]"

{"og:locale":"en_GB","og:type":"article","og:title":"My parents are separating - Cafcass - Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service","og:description":"Sometimes after parents separate they find it hard to agree on important things and ask the court for help. Whatever happens remember this is not your fault","og:url":"https://www.cafcass.gov.uk/young-people/my-parents-are-separating/","og:site_name":"Cafcass - Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service","article:modified_time":"2018-06-04T13:52:46+00:00"}
-----------------------------11764896883442642573939292605
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="cd[JSON-LD]"

[{"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://www.cafcass.gov.uk/young-people/my-parents-are-separating/","url":"https://www.cafcass.gov.uk/young-people/my-parents-are-separating/","name":"My parents are separating - Cafcass - Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service","isPartOf":{"@id":"https://www.cafcass.gov.uk/#website"},"datePublished":"2017-11-29T15:21:24+00:00","dateModified":"2018-06-04T13:52:46+00:00","description":"Sometimes after parents separate they find it hard to agree on important things and ask the court for help. Whatever happens remember this is not your fault","breadcrumb":{"@id":"https://www.cafcass.gov.uk/young-people/my-parents-are-separating/#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-GB","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https://www.cafcass.gov.uk/young-people/my-parents-are-separating/"]}]},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https://www.cafcass.gov.uk/young-people/my-parents-are-separating/#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https://www.cafcass.gov.uk/"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Young people","item":"https://www.cafcass.gov.uk/young-people/"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"name":"My parents are separating"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://www.cafcass.gov.uk/#website","url":"https://www.cafcass.gov.uk/","name":"Cafcass - Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service","description":"Putting children and young people first in the family courts","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://www.cafcass.gov.uk/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}],"inLanguage":"en-GB"}]}]
-----------------------------11764896883442642573939292605

The file is actually longer, but I trimmed out some bits that did not seem so interesting.

Is it fixed

Raising the complaint

17th January 2023: A complaint was sent with details regarding tracking by Facebook and YouTube

The organisation did not respond.