A team of researchers from Microsoft, Carnegie Mellon, and the University of Pennsylvania analyzed 22,484 porn sites using a tool called webXray to identify tracking tools that send data to third parties.
“Our results indicate that tracking is endemic on pornography websites: 93% of pages leak user data to a third party,” concludes the study published in Arxiv.
It turns out that Google and Facebook are keeping track of porn consumption habits, and even incognito mode can’t save us from their omnipotent gaze; is what is deduced from the study.
“All websites and applications include code from other parts of which users are generally not aware,” say the authors. “Such ‘third party’ code may allow companies to monitor user actions without their knowledge or consent and build detailed profiles of their habits and interests.”
Using software to analyze third-party tracking scripts , experts found that Google’s advertising affiliate DoubleClick had been implemented on 74% of all porn sites. They also discovered tracking software developed by Oracle and Facebook (which conspicuously prohibits explicit content on their platform) on 24% and 10% of the websites scanned, respectively.
The New York Times newspaper asked the companies involved about the use of such data, and both Google and Facebook said they did not use the data collected from pornographic sites to create “marketing profiles intended to serve people with advertising.”
Many involved
In total, the study identified 230 companies that were crawling explicit content on the web. Most of the monitoring, however, was done by a small group of companies.
Worst? Only 17% of the more than 22,000 websites analyzed in the research sample were encrypted, which leaves said data open to piracy and all kinds of infractions. Not only that, 49.97% of the links from pornographic-themed websites energetically expose or suggest the identities, sexual orientation and intimate interests of visitors.
“These porn domains contain words or phrases that would likely be generally understood as an indicator of a particular sexual preference or interest inherent in the content on the site. It may also be assumed that this is linked to the user accessing that content.” , the authors explain.
Privacy?
Another notable problem is that most porn sites lack privacy policies that address third-party data collection. The study found that only 3,856 websites (about 17% of all scanned posts) had such policies in place.
“The policies were written in such a way that one might need a two-year college education to understand them,” the authors note, highlighting the dense legal features found in the privacy terms.
In addition, this information presents a “unique and high risk” , as 45% of the links from pornographic sites surveyed point to the nature of the pornographic content.
These links could reveal an individual’s sexual preferences in a way that could be used against them, endangering LGBTQ + people in places where same-sex relationships are illegal.
As written by the study authors: “A person is at risk when this data can be accessed without the consent of users and therefore can be exploited against them. These risks increase for vulnerable populations whose use of porn could be classified as non-normative or contrary to its public life. “
Referencia: Tracking sex: The implications of widespread sexual dataleakage and tracking on porn websites (Preprint, July 2019) Elena MarisMicroso, Timothy LibertCarnegie Mellon University, Jennifer HenrichsenUniversity of Pennsylvania. Preprint Arxiv.org
