mim.gov.it

Context

www.mim.gov.it is the official website of Italy’s Ministry of Education and Merit. The data controller is the ministry itself. The site is informational: news, regulations, policy directions in the field of education. Capture: 109 requests to only 2 domains, the home page, taken on a clean Edge browser with no VPN and no blocker. Of the two domains, one is its own, the second is analytics on the ministry’s domain. No third-party commercial trackers, no Google, advertising or social plugins.

Who receives the data

There are no third-party commercial recipients. The analytics is deployed on the ministry’s own domain (istruzione.it) — that is, it stays within the government infrastructure, nothing goes to advertising third parties. It is the Matomo engine, and in the capture it conducts only ordinary web statistics: recording the page view and tracking clicks on outbound links. There is no Google Analytics, no Meta, no advertising networks and no social-network pixels in the capture. Not a single cookie was set.

Was there a consent banner

There is no consent-collection platform on the site, and here this is not a complaint. The only analytics is first-party, on the ministry’s domain, de-identified: the policy explicitly states that navigation data is used only for anonymous statistics and deleted immediately after processing. For such collection consent is not required by the rules, and there are no third-party trackers on the site that would require it.

What fires before consent

Before any user decision, only the following fires:

• Matomo analytics on the ministry’s domain — page view and outbound-link tracking. It is fundamental that what distinguishes behavioural tracking from simple statistics is absent here: there is no session recording, no heatmaps, no form analytics. The analytics assigns a visit identifier, but works without cookies and within its own infrastructure, and the data, according to the policy, is de-identified and not stored. This is precisely the profile of first-party statistics exempt from consent.

Conclusion

Mim.gov.it is an example of how a government site should handle analytics. There are no third-party commercial trackers at all, the data does not go to Google or Meta, cookies are not set, and the only analytics is first-party, on the ministry’s domain, and conducts only ordinary web statistics without behaviour recording. The policy honestly describes this data as de-identified and deleted after processing. It is useful to compare this case with other government sites in the series: where there are formally also «only two domains», the decisive factor turns out to be what exactly the own analytics does — ordinary statistics or session recording with identification. Here — ordinary statistics, and so no violations are recorded. The main takeaway for the reader: a clean configuration on a government site is achievable and is implemented here.