Jouw favoriete pornosite kijkt met je mee…

Gisteren publiceerde Vice’s Motherboard nogal een verontrustend en haast surrealistisch artikel over hoe porno-sites allerlei gegevens van haar gebruikers weten te traceren. Je laat als het ware digitale broodkruimeltjes achter over je persoonlijke porno-voorkeur. “88 percent of the top 500 porn sites have tracking elements installed,”

“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, whatever) has a ​very 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 you visit. 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 Pornhub and XVideos.

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 (certainly 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, 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.

Fair enough, wie houdt dit gegeven nou tegen om porno te kijken? Niemand. Maar wat als deze persoonlijke informatie in de handen valt van de verkeerde personen. Die jouw porno-voorkeuren doorspelen naar derden of erger nog…tegen je gaan gebruiken. Denk aan afpersing, vernedering, relaties en reputaties ermee kapot maken…

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.

This, of course, has any number of damaging implications, even beyond the potential humiliation for an outed porn watcher—if you think erasing your internet history wipes out the record of those food-fetish vids or CGI beast porn, think again. Worse, there are still plenty of places around the world where individuals are persecuted for their sexual orientation. A revelation that someone in an oppressive country watched a series of gay porn videos could put that person at serious risk.

Best wel confronterende implicaties als je niet leeft in een vrij land. Iedereen kijkt porno, van de burgemeester (niet die van Maastricht, die heeft z’n eigen toyboy) tot aan je eigen vader…Pornhub was de enige website die een goed weerwoord presteerde aan  Motherboard:

Pornhub was the only porn site that returned a request for comment. They issued me a statement calling Thomas’s conclusions “not only completely false, but also dangerously misleading.” In their lengthy, compelling rebuttal, Pornhub pointed out the vast amount of server space they would need to store users’ viewing histories—they get 300 million requests a day, and they estimate that storing all of that would require 3,600 terabytes of space. Not to mention that sifting through all of it would be nearly impossible and maddeningly time-consuming. “Pornhub’s raw server logs contain only the IP and the user agent for a very limited time, never a browser footprint,” a Pornhub spokesperson wrote me in an email.

Maar waarvoor dan incognito modus in Chrome? (Het doet je goed voelen, maar het is vrijwel nutteloos.)

Another important point, he said, is that incognito mode does “virtually zero to stop this tracking, and at best your address bar won’t auto-complete to something embarrassing, but advertisers and data brokers still get the information. I have no idea what, if anything, they do with it—but it’s all sitting in a database somewhere.”

Klik: Het volledige interessante artikel ‘Porn is watching you.’