With these steps, your name and identity will be accessed when you view pornographic sites
How afraid are you of being known to watch porn online? The best remedy is not to look at it.
Most porn websites are traded without encryption, there are as many third-party cookies as there are regular pages, and there are not even privacy policies on more than 80% of porn pages.
This crawl also occurs largely in regular content, but is (somewhat) more moderated. Adult content is more delicate and has to be intense. According to two new science articles, the opposite happens: It is a darker, less controlled world. It's 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.
This details five researchers at Imdea Networks analyzed the behavior of nearly 7,000 adult websites, the results of which were revealed after analyzing more than 22,000 pornographic pages.
Pornography is a sensitive issue for two reasons: People prefer not to acknowledge its use. Additionally, if users are detected, it can be a tool of coercion, especially in countries where it is punished. 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, lead researcher and author of the Imdea study. ”The drama is that it is still impossible today to pinpoint which companies have this data for sure and how to collect it about you.
These are some of the reasons that explain the Internet pornographic privacy mess and who can find out:
1. Famous cookies.
A cookie is a piece of code that remains on our computer when we visit a website. There are cookies that the domain we visit and third-party cookies. Those from third parties are from other companies, and they have their own lives and they are the ones devoted to monitoring our browsing. On the regular web there is a lot more, on porn pages too.
Both investigations found third-party cookies on more than 70% of the pages, although only 4% of them had the required legal consent button for their computer cookies.
2. Unknown companies without a privacy policy.
One of the most amazing data is that 97% of websites do not have information about the owner company. "It's dangerous and it shows there is a long way to go, really implementing RGPD," says Alvaro Viel, a researcher at Imdea Networks. Without an institutional management that handles obligations, how can legislation demand responsibility? Only 16% of porn sites have something similar to a privacy policy and the rest 84% expose you to a major scandal.
3. The minimum encrypted traffic.
Traveler connects to a Wi-Fi network at your hotel, airport, or company operator. If the traffic is not encrypted, the administrator of that network will see the addresses and content it visited, including the cookies that are circulating. It is also registered in some cases for commercial purposes.
"Only 17% of the 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 Maris, Microsoft researcher and lead author of the New Media & article Society.
4. The complexity of tracking tools.
Third-party cookies are just the most popular way to find out which websites a user is viewing. But there are more reliable and accurate ways to link identity and navigation. The IMEDIA study found two types of pornography: Cookie-Sync and Canvas fingerprints.
For security reasons, browsers restrict access to cookies only for those who have installed them. However, synchronizing cookies allows two trackers to share the information they have about the same user.
Out of the top 100 Alexa porn sites ranked, 58% use this technology.