Porno is watching you
30 million Americans regularly watch porn online, according to the Wall Street Journal. This is much more than people admit to this, even in anonymous surveys. But thanks to the ubiquitous online tracking and fingerprinting of the browser, much secret becomes known to someone else.
Thomas, who lives in San Francisco, ended up at a bar chatting with a member of the adult online entertainment industry. They talked about the economy, of course. While a professional porn insisted to collect and sell personal data of users who visited erotic sites. Thomas was convinced that this is not part of the business model in this industry.
"If you watch porn online in 2015, even in incognito mode, you should expect that at some point the history of your porn watching will be public and stick to your name," Thomas declared in his blog called "Internet porn can Become the next big privacy scandal. "
The Thomas case explained: your browser (Chrome, Opera, Safari, any other) has a unique configuration, and transfers all kinds of information that can be used to identify you as soon as you enter the network. You basically leave "traces", as Thomas calls them (others prefer "fingerprints"), in all the web pages that you visit. Thus, an expert can identify the same prints on Facebook and NYTimes.com, on PornHub and XVideos.
Thomas argued that "almost every traditional website that you visit stores enough data to link your account in your fingerprint browser, either directly or through third parties." He's definitely right that most of the web pages you visit (of course, not just porn sites) have installed tracking elements that send data to third-party corporations without your knowledge. Many of them, for example Google Analytics, are used to monitor traffic to the site. Other have social media buttons "share" and third-party advertising networks.
So, for example, when you click on "Leather Fetish #3" on XNXX, you do not just send a request to the site-request the first batch of porn. You send requests to third-party services, web tracking companies, and companies called Pornvertising, even if you are viewing in private mode. You also send other data that can be used to identify the computer, such as your IP address.
We will add insiders, people who have access to all information on an ongoing basis. One day they were fired and they need to somehow live. They do not fire suddenly, it's hanging in the air for a while. So workers try to take something from work that can have value. Then it will be possible to earn money on blackmail.
Unfortunately, today anonymity with the Internet is fundamentally incompatible. "
