Could Hackers Expose Your Online Porn Viewing? Yes...

CYBERSPACE—Some might say that software engineer Brett Thomas is a bit paranoid. He recently posted an article on his blog suggesting that with all the information being collected online from internet users by multinational corporations and the U.S. government—and, in some cases, actual hackers—that it wouldn't be too much trouble for some malicious malcontents to collect a user's "browser footprint" (created every time the user visits a Web page), cross-reference such footprints across several sites, including those devoted to porn, and figure out who's looking at what sexy content—which information the hackers could then make public. Thomas' article apparently inspired Vice magazine to investigate the possibility of such a program actually being undertaken. Their conclusion appears to be that while that scenario is eminently feasible, it doesn't seem as if anyone's gearing up to do it on a widespread basis. "The far more likely scenario is just that a porn company gets hacked and credit-card data is stolen. If this were the case, I think that an attacker would be more likely to sell the credit-card information than release it online 'for the lulz,'" said Cooper Quintin, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's staff technologist. "I think a bigger concern is data brokers using your IP address to correlate data about what porn sites you visit with tracking profiles that they already have, even when browsing in 'incognito mode.'" But the Vice article made it clear that Thomas was correct when stating 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," and that therefore, "a complete catalog of your personal porn habits is perennially on the verge of being leaked to the public." That said, at least one porn site—by most measures, the most popular—called the tracking/revealing scenario "not only completely false, but also dangerously misleading." "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," VICE's Brian Merchant reported. But the news wasn't all good. "To get a better idea of what, exactly, is watching porn-site visitors, I used the privacy app Ghostery, which identifies and blocks tracking elements installed on web pages, to investigate the top five most visited porn sites—XVideos, XHamster, Pornhub, XXNX, and Redtube," Merchant reported. "Ghostery revealed that each site has tracking elements installed, and thus is transmitting data to a number of third-party corporations, including Google, â€‹Tumblr, and industry-specific ad services like Pornvertising and DoublePimp. Furthermore, most of the top porn sites made explicit the exact nature of the film being viewed right in the URL." Merchant also noted that "88 percent of the top 500 porn sites have tracking elements installed." So what's the bottom line here? Well, since merely clicking on a link or typing a URL into your browser will probably activate some internet tracking program or other, and though several porn sites disclaim keeping any user-specific data on their servers, the user's "footprint" is still out in cyberspace somewhere, perhaps the solution is for more people simply to admit that yes, they look at porn on the internet, and assert their rights as a U.S. citizen to do so. But sadly, there are still plenty of countries where internet porn viewing is a crime—so those folks had better do their best to figure out ways to satisfy their urges while remaining anonymous to their country's "guardians of morality." Failure to do so could land them in prison for years.