We visited 200 websites from Virginia and from Frankfurt. The US visit got 3x the high-risk tracking.
If you build or run a website, you probably test it from where you sit. For cookie banners and trackers, that means you see one version of your site, and visitors in other countries may see a very different one. We wanted to know how different, so we measured it. (General information, not legal advice.) What we did On 14 October 2026 we loaded the same websites, on the same day, with the same…
Researchers tested 200 popular websites, scanning them from servers in both Virginia (US) and Frankfurt (Germany). The US visit saw 3 times more high-risk tracking requests and 4 times the number of third-party cookies compared to the Frankfurt test, before any consent was given. Most EU visitors encounter cookie banners due to stricter consent rules, while US visitors typically experience a more permissive approach.
California requires sites to respect the Global Privacy Control signal, which could affect US testing results. To properly evaluate a site's privacy behavior from another country, one could use a VPN to change the virtual location, or utilize tools like PrivacyFixed for an automated scan from specified regions.
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