Using historical versions of government websites from the Internet Archive's Wayback machine, we can look back from 1996 to the present day, and we can see that different regions have adopted trackers at different rates.

Overall, the trend is towards increasing tracking, but not all regions are the same, and neither are all countries within a region. For example, the countries we studied in North America (US, Canada, Mexico, Costa Rica) have adopted trackers on their government websites in pretty similar patterns. So have Australia and New Zealand. In South America, though, the governments of some countries that we studied (Bolivia and Paraguay) have been less aggressive at tracking users than others (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay). Similar clusterings between low-tracking countries (Algeria, Nigeria) and high-tracking countries (Egypt, Morocco, South Africa) appear in Africa too. Asia and Europe have more diverse ranges of tracking behaviors.