Thanks to movements in sex-positivity, porn is no longer the dirty little secret that everyone pretends not to have.

That doesn’t mean you want all and sundry to know what you’re watching and when.

I’m sorry to tell you, then, that there are officially no safe places left on the internet. Even ‘incognito mode’ can’t protect you any longer.

A new study has shown that Facebook, Google, and Oracle are tracking the porn you watch. They track everything else, so why not?

Over to Business Insider:

Researchers from Microsoft, Carnegie Mellon, and the University of Pennsylvania analyzed 22,484 pornography sites using a tool called webXray to identify tracking tools feeding data back to third parties.

“Our results indicate tracking is endemic on pornography websites: 93% of pages leak user data to a third-party,” the study concludes.

Of the sites scanned in March 2018, the study found Google or its subsidiaries had trackers on 74%, Oracle on 24%, and Facebook on 10%. That translates to roughly 16,638 sites with Google trackers, 5,396 with Oracle, and 2,248 for Facebook.

The researchers warn that the highly sensitive nature of data leaking out of people’s internet use is cause for concern.

“The fact that the mechanism for adult site tracking is so similar to, say, online retail should be a huge red flag,” one of the study’s researchers, Elena Maris, told The New York Times. The study also found that only 17% of the porn sites were encrypted, leaving users vulnerable to hackers.

There are a number of reasons that websites might use trackers. Google Analytics, for example, feeds traffic data back to websites so they can monitor their traffic.

Alternatively, Facebook offers sites the ability to embed its “like” feature, enabling sharing back to Facebook. In return, they receive data about the websites’ visitors. Exactly what happens to the data, or which data specifically is being collected, is hard to scrutinize. Facebook and Google said they did not use information collected from porn-site visits to build marketing profiles. A Google spokesman told Business Insider:

“We don’t allow Google Ads on websites with adult content and we prohibit personalised advertising and advertising profiles based on a user’s sexual interests or related activities online. Additionally, tags for our ad services are never allowed to transmit personally identifiable information to Google.”

I might be willing to listen to Google, but Facebook has proven time and time again that it can’t be trusted.

They’ve made a documentary about it – you should check it out.

While I’m sure that this information won’t stop people from watching porn, it might change the type of porn that they watch.

Big Brother is watching.

[source:businessinsider]