The UWV, the government agency that deals with benefits, illegally collected data from benefit recipients. Investigations by NOS and Nieuwsuur revealed that the usage behavior of benefit recipients on the UWV website was constantly analyzed and tracked by the agency to investigate whether they were illegally staying abroad while receiving unemployment benefits. The Dutch benefits agency also secretly placed cookies on its website to track users. This enabled users that were logged in to be identified and automatically linked to their IP address, NOS found out.