Tracking Sex: Implications of widespread data leakage and tracking on porn sites
Some friends noted that this had been up on HN for three hours with no comments. So I decided to read the paper and note some highlights.<p>&gt; What Jack does not know is that incognito mode only ensures his browsing history is not stored on his computer. e sites he visits, as well as any third-party trackers, may observe and record his online actions.<p>&gt;  ‘30% of all the data transferred across the internet is porn,’ with site YouPorn using six times more bandwidth than Hulu (Kleinman, 2017)<p>&gt; Herein, we take such a ‘sex positive’ view of porn and access to online pornography. While acknowledging the many racist, misogynistic, heteronormative and other problematic histories and themes in pornography and its production, distribution and consumption, our work recognizes the ubiquity and permanence of porn and its many uses and social functions, and the danger of societal, state, and institutional narratives that might work to discipline gender and sex.<p>&gt; To identify third-parties found on a given website we used the webXray software platform. webXray &#x27;is a tool for analyzing thirdparty content on web pages and identifying the companies which collect user data’ (webXray, 2018)<p>&gt; We used four coders from diverse backgrounds: one primary
researcher and three volunteers. Three coders were women (one
identifed her sexuality as fluid; the others as queer), and one was a heterosexual man.<p>&gt; Coders were instructed to code Presence for: ‘Any word or phrase that indicates or suggests the porn content will feature a specifc gender or sexual identity, orientation, or preference,’ and&#x2F;or ‘Any word or phrase that indicates or suggests the porn content will feature a specifc sexual focus, body part or type, identity or character (like race, nationality, ethnicity, religion, profession), act, fetish, interest, porn genre, porn trope, etc.<p>&gt;Our March 2018 analysis successfully examined 22,484 sites drawn from the Alexa list of one million most popular websites where the URL, page title, or page description includes ‘porn.’ We found third-party tracking is widespread, privacy policies are difficult to understand and do not disclose such tracking, and third-parties may often be able to infer specifc sexual interests based solely on a site URL.<p>&gt; We identified 230 different companies and services tracking users in our sample. Such tracking is highly concentrated by a handful of major companies, some of which are pornography-specifc. Of non-pornography-specifc services, Google tracks 74% of sites, Oracle 24%, Facebook 10%, Cloudflare and Yadro 7%, and New Relic and Lotame 6%. Porn-specific trackers in the top ten are exoClick (40%), JuicyAds (11%), and EroAdvertising (9%).<p>&gt; Based on a random sample, 44.97%of porn site URLs expose or strongly suggest the site content includes or targets one or more specific gender or sexual: identities or orientations, and&#x2F;or topic(s) of interest&#x2F;focus.<p>&gt; We contend that the tracking of online porn consumption represents an even riskier violation of privacy, in line with Citron’s (2019:1870,1881) argument that: &quot;Sexual privacy sits at the apex of privacy values because of its importance to sexual agency, intimacy, and equality. We are free only insofar as we can manage the boundaries around our bodies and intimate activities… It therefore deserves recognition and protection, in the same way that health privacy, financial privacy, communications privacy, children’s privacy, educational privacy, and intellectual privacy do.&quot;<p>&gt; For example, same-sex relations between consenting adults are criminalized in 70 United Nations member states, with punishments ranging from imprisonment to death (Fox et al., 2019). Thee consequences of sexual privacy violations in such contexts would clearly be severe. Even in societies with less regulation around sex, breaches of sexual privacy often have bodily stakes<p>&gt;  Porn website privacy policies are long, dense, difficult to understand, and only 11% of the third-parties observed tracking users on a given page are listed in the policy, leaving users ignorant of which organizations may be assembling catalogues of their perceived sexual interests<p>Edit: I have been adding to this comment as I read the study. I do have other things to do today.