A 20-year-long permanent cookie: America.gov and tracking
The Trump administration's new America.gov portal is being integrated with Login.gov, raising privacy concerns regarding long-lived browser identifiers. While the portal claims to avoid tracking, researchers have identified code that could potentially facilitate persistent user identification.
Why it matters
It highlights the tension between government digital centralization and individual privacy rights in the era of AI-powered public services.
The Trump administration has launched America.gov as a single AI-powered gateway to federal information and services with an unusually explicit privacy promise. But the authentication system the new portal is ordered to use already contains recently added Login.gov code supporting a National Design Studio experiment (NDS) that creates a long-lived browser identifier and incorporates it into Login.gov analytics.
Architecturally, America.gov is becoming the presentation and service-access layer for federal government services, while Login.gov is being positioned as the reusable identity and authentication layer underneath it.
Users may encounter government through a single America.gov interface, but Login.gov is intended to provide common sign-in and identity verification infrastructure that participating agencies and services can reuse.
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