Google, Facebook and even Oracle cloud are secretly tracking the porn you watch, according to a joint study from Microsoft, Carnegie Mellon University and University of Pennsylvania. Even watching porn on ‘incognito’ mode on your laptop, phone or desktop won't help as the data is tracked.
The study investigated 22,484 sex websites using a tool called ‘webXray’ and came to the conclusion that 93 per cent of the pages are tracked and the data leaked to third-party organisations.
The researchers who have undertaken the study, which is to be published in the New Media & Society, say that tracking on these sites is “highly concentrated by a handful of major companies”. In the sample used for their investigation, researchers found that at least 230 different companies and services were tracking users.
Researchers said that they successfully extracted privacy policies for 3,856 sites, 17 per cent of the total.
Porn-specific trackers in the top 10 are exoClick (40 per cent), JuicyAds (11 per cent), and EroAdvertising (9 per cent).
Of non-pornography-specific services, Google tracks 74 per cent of sites, Oracle 24 per cent and Facebook 10 per cent.
The study also says that a majority of the pornography-specific companies in the top 10 are based in Europe while the majority of the non-pornography companies are based in the US.
The researchers added that the policies were written in a manner that one might need a two-year college education to understand it.
For the study, researchers created a profile named ‘Jack’. In order to watch porn on his laptop, Jack turns the ‘incognito’ mode on and visits a site. Assuming that his actions are private, Jack scrolls down the site and past a small link to a privacy policy. He presumes a site with privacy policy will protect his personal information, Jack clicks on a video. However, Jack does not realise that incognito mode only ensures his browsing history is not stored in his computer. The sites he visits and any third-party trackers can observe and record his online actions.
Jack does not realise that these third-party data transfers happen as he browses videos or that they may even sell his data. Jack's assumption the website will protect his data coupled with the assurance of the incognito mode, gave him a misleading sense of privacy as he watches porn.
Researchers said these third-parties may even infer Jack's sexual interests from the URLs of the sites he accesses. They might also use what they have decided about these interests for marketing or building a consumer profile.
Pornhub, one of the largest porn websites, received 28.5 billion visits in 2017 | Shutterstock
They further added that this hypothetical scenario is frequent and indicates the widespread date leakage and tracking that occur on porn sites.
A 2017 report says that porn sites get more visitors every month than Netflix, Amazon, and Twitter combined and that “30 per cent of all the data transferred across the internet is porn”.
Pornhub, one of the largest porn websites, received 28.5 billion visits in 2017, with users performing 50,000 searches per second on the site.
The researchers said that while the findings of this study are far from encouraging, regulatory intervention may have positive outcomes.
