You can access your name and identity when viewing pornographic websites by following these steps
How scared are you of being known for watching porn online? The best cure is not to look at it.
Most porn websites are traded without encryption, there are as many third-party cookies as there are on regular pages, and there are not even privacy policies on more than 80% of porn pages.
This creeping also happens to a large extent on regular content, but it is (somewhat) more supervised. Adult content is more sensitive and should be extreme. According to two new scientific articles, the opposite is happening: it is a darker, less controlled world. It is easy to imagine porn users watching their entertainment in the quiet of a room. On the other side of the screen, there are many eyes watching them.
This is detailed by five researchers at Imdea Networks who analyzed the behavior of nearly 7,000 adult websites, and their results were revealed after more than 22,000 porn pages were analyzed.
Pornography is a sensitive issue for two reasons: People prefer not to admit to using it. In addition, if users are caught, it can be a tool of coercion, especially in countries where it is punishable. The second reason is that there is a regulation that defines it.
“If they wanted to know something about you, they would know it,” says Pelayo Vallina, researcher and lead author of the Imdea study. The drama is that today it is still impossible to determine with certainty which companies have this data and how they collect it about you.
Here are some of the reasons that explain the privacy mess of online porn and who can know:
1. The famous cookies.
A cookie is a piece of code that remains on our computer when we visit a website. There are cookies owned by the domain we visit and third-party cookies. Those from third parties are from other companies; they have their own lives, and they are the ones dedicated to monitoring our browsing. On the regular web there are many, on porn pages too.
Both investigations found third-party cookies on more than 70% of pages, although only 4% of them have the legally required consent button for their computer cookies.
2. Unknown companies with no privacy policy.
One of the most striking data points is that 97% of websites have no information about the company that owns them. “It’s serious and shows that there’s a long way to go to really implement the RGPD,” says Alvaro Viel, researcher at Imdea Networks. Without corporate governance that takes on the responsibilities, how can legislation demand accountability? Only 16% of porn sites have something like a privacy policy and the remaining 84% expose you to major scandal.3. Minimum encrypted traffic.
A traveler connects to the Wi-Fi network of your hotel, airport, or company. If the traffic is unencrypted, the administrator of that network will see the addresses and content you visited, including the cookies that are being circulated. In some cases, it is also logged for commercial purposes.
“Only 17% of pages are encrypted, which means that most of them are more vulnerable to attack. If a bad person gets information from your personal porn browsing, they can use it for various malicious purposes, such as blackmail,” says Elena Mares, Microsoft researcher and lead author of the New Media & Society article.
4. The complexity of tracking tools.
Third-party cookies are just the most common way to know which websites a user is viewing. But there are subtler, more consistent ways to link identity and browsing. The Emedia study found two types of porn pages: cookie syncing and canvas fingerprints.For security reasons, browsers restrict access to cookies to only those who have them installed. However, cookie syncing allows two trackers to share the information they have about the same user.
Of the top 100 porn sites ranked by traffic-counting sites, 58% use this technology.