You are missing the fact that Enfield council has RTB House , Criteo retargeting , Tru Optik demand side platform , OpenX , Districtm, msecnd , doubleclick , omnitag integrated as 3rd party. This doesnt make sense if the intent was purely to show internal ads. The implementation here seems to be no different to any other news site. As a visitor to the council website , I would expect that the same privacy levels and UX as that of gov.uk sites.