Thirty million Americans watch porn online, according to the Wall Street Journal. But there are a lot more who confess to it, even in anonymous surveys: In 2013, just 12 per cent of people asked admitted to watching Internet porn. Thanks to pervasive online tracking and browser fingerprinting, the brazen liars of America may not have a say in whether their porn habits stay secret. Porn watchers everywhere are being tracked, and if software engineer Brett Thomas is right, it would be easy to out them, along with an extensive list of every clip they’ve viewed, reports motherboard.com.
Can’t cover your footprints
“If you are watching porn online in 2015, even in incognito mode, you should expect that at some point your porn viewing history will be publicly released and attached to your name,” Thomas proclaimed in a blog post titled Online Porn Could Be the Next Big Privacy Scandal, shortly after.
Thomas’s case went something like this: Your browser (Chrome, Safari, etc) has a unique configuration and it broadcasts all sorts of information that can be used to identify you as you click around the web. You’re basically leaving “footprints” as Thomas calls them (others prefer “fingerprints”), all over the webpages.
Thus, it’s a matter of linking one footprint to another— an expert could spot the same prints on Facebook and NYTimes.com as on porn sites.
Meet the trackers
Thomas argued that “almost every traditional website that you visit saves enough data to link your user account to your browser fingerprint, either directly or via third parties”.
He’s definitely right that most web pages you visit, and not just porn sites, have installed tracking elements that send your data to third-party corporations, probably without your knowledge. Many, for instance, run Google Analytics, which companies use to monitor traffic to the website. Others have social media “share” buttons and third-party ad networks built in.
So, for example, when you click on “Leather Fetish #3” on XNXX.com, you’re not just sending a request to the porn site — a so-called first-party request. You’re sending third-party requests to Google, to the web-tracking company AddThis, and to a company called Pornvertising, too, even if you’re browsing in private mode. You’re also sending other data that can be used to identify your computer, like your IP address.
All that, paired with the continued rise of casual hacking, Thomas says, means that a complete catalog of your personal porn habits is perennially on the verge of being leaked to the public.
Thomas believes that it’s not only possible but likely that a hacker will whip up a database that can share your porn-viewing history with the entire Internet. And if you think erasing your Internet history wipes out the records, think again.
To get a better idea of what, exactly, is watching porn-site visitors, Mothe-rboard.com contributor Brian Merchant used the privacy app Ghostery, which identifies and blocks tracking elements installed on web pages, to investigate the top five most visited porn sites.
It’s worth noting here just how big these porn sites are: According to Alexa, the analytic service, XVideos is the 43rd most visited website in the world. By way of comparison, Gmail is 66th. Netflix is 53rd.
Ghostery revealed that each site has tracking elements installed, and thus is transmitting data to a number of third-party corporations, including Google, Tumblr, and industry-specific ad services like Pornvertising and DoublePimp.
