Tracking Sex: Implications of widespread data leakage and tracking on porn sites

https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.06520

by interweb • 7 years ago

348 222 7 years ago

octosphere2• 7 years ago

This paper explores tracking and privacy risks on pornography websites. Our analysis of 22,484 pornography websites indicated that 93% leak user data to a third party. Tracking on these sites is highly concentrated by a handful of major companies, which we identify. We successfully extracted privacy policies for 3,856 sites, 17% of the total. The policies were written such that one might need a two-year college education to understand them. Our content analysis of the sample's domains indicated 44.97% of them expose or suggest a specific gender/sexual identity or interest likely to be linked to the user. We identify three core implications of the quantitative results: 1) the unique/elevated risks of porn data leakage versus other types of data, 2) the particular risks/impact for vulnerable populations, and 3) the complications of providing consent for porn site users and the need for affirmative consent in these online sexual interactions.

thanatropism• 7 years ago

Possibly relevant:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profumo_affair

_-___________-_2• 7 years ago

how is that in any way related to the article?

bitxbitxbitcoin• 7 years ago

Looks like everyone - vulnerable population or not - should be using VPN when viewing pornographic content.[1]

[1] https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2019/07/why-you-n...

andrepd• 7 years ago

s/pornographic content/any content/g

craftyguy• 7 years ago

While I don't disagree with using a VPN as you suggest, I would be wary of using an advertisement by a VPN company as a supporting source for that claim.

liability• 7 years ago

I think if you use a VPN that doesn't have any of your personal information of file for billing or infrastructure purposes (like your residential ISP does) then at the very least the shady logging VPN will have a dossier on you that doesn't include your name, street address, bank or credit card numbers, etc. Even if the VPN is otherwise a bunch of Mafia scum datamining you as hard as they can, you're still better off than if you were raw-dogging on Comcast.

However I think those VPN companies that throw around suspicious abouts of cash advertising all ask for credit cards or similar. I would never do business with one of them, it's pointless.

I also hate NordVPN's YouTube advertising campaign in particular, in which they pay YouTube creators to mislead their audience. Suggesting among other things that connections to your bank's website are unencrypted if you aren't using a VPN.

CiPHPerCoder• 7 years ago

VPNs don't help here.

https://panopticlick.eff.org

https://gist.github.com/joepie91/5a9909939e6ce7d09e29

fragsworth• 7 years ago

According to panopticlick, Chrome is 100% secure in incognito mode.

semi-extrinsic• 7 years ago

So this is really interesting:

On Panopticlick with Firefox Mobile, with Ghostery plugin active in a normal tab I get 18 bits of info, in a private tab I get 17 bits, but the best is a private tab with Ghostery paused - then I get 16 bits, and equal results on the other parts.

Are privacy plugins really redundant in this day and age? Or is the test too incomplete to reflect their value?

jammygit• 7 years ago

Panopticlick won’t work at all on brave on mobile. Maybe a good sign?

FabHK4• 7 years ago

That's very incomplete advice (on the blog of a VPN provider). A VPN alone won't give you any protection from being tracked either, you need both that and incognito mode (or a separate browser), and should probably throw ad/tracking blockers in the mix as well.

simion3142• 7 years ago

I don't think a VPN is enough, it will mask your location but there are so many ways your browser can be fingerprinted so you would need to have fingerprint resistant browser profile, maybe with JS off is possible.

gruez2• 7 years ago

so you would need to have fingerprint resistant browser profile

easy. use firefox, open about:config, and set privacy.resistFingerprinting => true.

Amezarak• 7 years ago

With NoScript on Firefox, I have 8.7 (???) bits of identifying information according to Panopticlick. I did not enable the about:config setting a sibling poster mentioned. According to the site, I am passing adblocking and fingerprinting, but not invisible trackers or DNT.

Within our dataset of several hundred thousand visitors tested in the past 45 days, only one in 417.05 browsers have the same fingerprint as yours.
Currently, we estimate that your browser has a fingerprint that conveys 8.7 bits of identifying information.

So yeah, pretty much all web privacy is broken by Javascript.

larrymcp• 7 years ago

I read the link you provided, but there wasn't any "OMG yes" light-bulb moment in that article.

Do I care if Google & Facebook track my viewing habits? I'm not sure I understand what the potential harm to me might be.

tiborsaas2• 7 years ago

It might be problematic in countries where certain kind of sexual orientation is punishable even with death. If you don't live in those countries, then I don't see much problem with GA in these sites as well.

toyg5• 7 years ago

It is relevant if your porn habits can be used against you (blackmail, public shaming, strict indecency laws, etc).

JudgeWapner• 7 years ago

I was recently googling friends' names and looking at the results from find-people sites. It's already creepy enough that they have "related to:" and then a list of family members of that person. But the most recent concern was one site already has a "reputation score" like china has already implemented. I checked a few friends who had criminal convictions and, voila, their "score" ranked lower (and of course you can pay the site to remove your entry or whatever, aka a racket). Porn viewing could easily be ranked into the "score" in a negatively-impactful way and lead to job/social discrimination.

tiborsaas2• 7 years ago

But most importantly, close the incognito mode once you finished consuming the content, don't just close the lid of your machine. The next day at work might be a bit more awkward than what Google does with your aggregated data :)

Also ask your girlfriend / boyfriend to tag imgur links with NSFW :)

toyg5• 7 years ago

VPN protection from site-level tracking is basically nonexistent. Browser fingerprinting is widespread and bypasses anything a VPN might offer. VPN is effective against network-level issues, not against browser-based tracking - it's a different level in the stack.

everdrive• 7 years ago

VPN in a VM, then, or on a different PC altogether.

ryacko2• 7 years ago

Virtual machines have the same virtualized graphics drivers, if everyone used virtual machines for browsing and deleted cookies and cache, web tracking would be restrict to IP-based.

Spooky23• 7 years ago

How does that factor in with locked-down platforms like iOS? Can you effectively fingerprint one of those devices?

mbostleman• 7 years ago

Does Brave impact that?

igravious• 7 years ago

Shouldn't browsers enable anti-fingerprinting (fingerprint spoofing) when you go incognito?

cronix• 7 years ago

Sounds like that's fairly easily solved by just using a different browser only for your porn habits. If you use FF for your normal web browsing, only use Chrome just for porn, etc.

octosphere2• 7 years ago

A VPN might be handy for bypassing the near-future UK porn block / age verification system[0] (by spoofing your geo-location). I imagine tech savvy teens/children are already investigating VPNs in light of the recent articles which outline the system.

[0] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/porn-block-uk-wired-explains

[0] https://www.ageverificationfacts.org.uk

Here's the important bit from the article where children will need to bypass:

From the launch date in July, porn websites will have to show anyone visiting from a UK IP address a landing page that doesn't show any explicit content.

meruru8• 7 years ago

Each age-checking company has a variety of different ways people can prove they're old enough to view porn. These include using SMS, credit card data, passport information, or driving licence details. There are other options that include face scanning and the blockchain.

This is so going to result on a ton of teens with credit cards. Just look at what is already happening with mobile games. Sounds like a boom for the porn industry. Sure enough, MindGeek is already on it:

The most well-known of these is AgeID, designed by MindGeek

bfirsh• 7 years ago

Here's an HTML version if you're on a phone: https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/1907.06520/

meruru8• 7 years ago

The hentai sites I tend to use are pretty good in this regard I think. Most of them even work with no JS. E.g. https://danbooru.donmai.us https://e-hentai.org

Edit: I tried visiting them without adblock and I'm actually surprised they didn't even have ads.

posix_compliant• 7 years ago

In case it wasn't already abundantly clear, all of these links are not safe for work.

meruru8• 7 years ago

Ah, yes. Hentai means cartoon pornography.

hnaccy2• 7 years ago

e-hentai is EOL if you weren't aware.

meruru8• 7 years ago

I know, but I'll stick to it until a proper successor appears. nhentai.net and hitomi.la recompresses images and I want to be able to archive the originals easily.

the84723• 7 years ago

Note that both sites also host non-pornographic content and on danbooru it's the dominant kind.

mirimir8• 7 years ago

Those are good sites. But cartoon porn with underage characters is illegal in some countries. And marginally so in the US, depending on attitude of the prosecutor. Also, I've come across some cartoon porn sites that are too disturbing to even risk describing here. Violence per se isn't so illegal, but underage sex + violence may well be.

meruru8• 7 years ago

I've come across some cartoon porn sites that are too disturbing to even risk describing here

Those are the best ones :)

Well, you can be disturbed by the work if you want, but please don't discriminate against the people who are into it.

We're just human beings like everyone else: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SD9-4pUPH0&t=130

scanny2• 7 years ago

God forbid someone mis-clicks while browsing this thread at work

wruza• 7 years ago

At least it serves its main goal. Youtube is far behind with their stupid suggestions than any major porn aggregator.

scanny2• 7 years ago

To be fair, Youtubes content is significantly more diverse and harder to classify than what these aggregators deal with.

kingkawn2• 7 years ago

I've assumed (without evidence, only deduction) since the 90s that every pornographic thing anyone has ever looked at has been recorded for future blackmail use against social rebellions.

Raphmedia8• 7 years ago

It might be my age demographic but everyone I know is very open with their choices of pornography and I have the link to several of my friend's favorite lists and playlists.

There are also shared accounts of paid websites going around and we can see the "recently watched" lists. There shouldn't be any shame to pornography unless you are consuming illegal content.

Unless you are a content creator and wish to keep your personal and online life separated, there's not much of a blacklist potential.

pessimizer6• 7 years ago

I agree, but millennials have no power, there's the potential that what they've done (while being tracked and recorded every moment of their lives) could be used to blacklist the entire generation by zombie boomers and their xer children. They've already come of age during a ruined economy, this could just be another strike. Xers will live long enough that they could skip most of the millennials in favor of their kids, who may take their parents' experiences as a cautionary tale and be more careful and contrived about their public faces (I think there's ample evidence of this wariness.)

codesushi423• 7 years ago

I find this hard to believe. Are you saying you have friends that sign up on porn sites with their real names? At which age are we talking about?

I would wager you wouldn't talk casually about it to any prospective girlfriends, assuming you guys have any...

friedegg• 7 years ago

You reach a point where if nearly everyone is blackmail-able for the same thing, that it stops becoming effective. If everyone is cheating on their spouse, then who is anyone to judge?

kingkawn2• 7 years ago

Yes, the diminishing returns of weaponized social pressure

gurkendoktor• 7 years ago

If the top 1% are rich enough to avoid being tracked by pleb porn sites, they can still use this against the most inconvenient actors of the 99%.

SkyBelow• 7 years ago

Does it? Maybe if it was used to blackmail everybody, but as long as people are given a chance to feel superior, no matter how hypocritical the opportunity, they will take it. Thus as long as the blackmail is only selectively applied to a few targets it will remain extremely effective.

Also, there is the possibility of creating false data that is worse than the average blackmail material. For example, say you are a political dissident starting a new party that appears to be an actual threat to the incumbents. Oops, we leaked the data showing you had an uncanny knack for finding and repeatedly viewing the most illegal of material before our moderators manage to take it down.

No matter how well you can defend against such a claim, your political future is now over.

edgarvaldes2• 7 years ago

That's why you don't spend your ammunition on everyone, but only on people of high profile or interest.

adventured• 7 years ago

You reach a point where if nearly everyone is blackmail-able for the same thing, that it stops becoming effective.

That's not true, because it requires a further massive step (that is unlikely to occur): all people must be similarly revealed to be doing the thing in question.

You'd have to know that everyone is cheating on their spouse; everyone would have to have max knowledge / transparency. Until then, the ones that get revealed will get judged by those not yet revealed. In my observation, people tend to be very comfortable with being a hypocrite, right up to the point where they're burned by it.

And further, if there's even a small detail that is different, the crowd will use that detail as the point of differentiation to say that they're not as bad as some other person.

If you have 100 people all surfing the same porn, and only one of them gets publicly revealed for the behavior, most of the remaining 99 people - assuming individual separation - will pretend they're not doing the same thing. They'll ostracize or harshly judge the person that got revealed publicly, pretend they're not doing the same thing, and go on doing the same thing in private. This behavior seems to repeat essentially non-stop among people socially; you see it in the news, with politicians or celebrities, with scandals, in various group behavior, among friends & family, et al.

meristem• 7 years ago

You'd need to stop the act from being shameful. The number of people doing it does not _necessarily_ map to "less socially shameful"

philwelch3• 7 years ago

There's still an information asymmetry that's powerful. If everyone knows that everyone is cheating on their spouse, it's ineffective. If the Stasi knows that everyone is cheating on their spouse, and isn't stupid enough to share quite all of that information with everyone, it's another story.

And with porn it's so multifaceted. Everybody breaches some taboo or other, but they're all different taboos. Not to mention that every social taboo immediately gets sexualized.

If the conspiracy theory was true though, they would have never let Tumblr go down. Tumblr was the mecca of weird, fringe, taboo porn. And they could even take down the people who made it.

shostack• 7 years ago

I wouldn't be shocked if we have a mass kompromat attack trying to coerce people into doing something based on some porn site analytics data. Paired with god knows what Cambridge Analytica had at their disposal, it probably wouldn't be too difficult.

johnedwards• 7 years ago

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.

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.
‘30% of all the data transferred across the internet is porn,’ with site YouPorn using six times more bandwidth than Hulu (Kleinman, 2017)
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.
To identify third-parties found on a given website we used the webXray software platform. webXray 'is a tool for analyzing thirdparty content on web pages and identifying the companies which collect user data’ (webXray, 2018)
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.
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/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.
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.
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%).
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/or topic(s) of interest/focus.
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: "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."
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
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

Edit: I have been adding to this comment as I read the study. I do have other things to do today.

anaphor• 7 years ago

The paper is wrong when it says incognito mode only ensures your browser history is not stored. It also ensures that any session cookies are not shared between private mode / regular mode.

Obviously that doesn't rule out other browser fingerprinting methods of course (see panopticlick, evercookies, etc)

Edit: It seems like they are saying you can be tracked within incognito mode sessions? That seems pretty obvious. I don't understand why this is surprising.

Isn't the whole risk here that you could have your porn browsing habits tied to your "real" identity? (i.e. your facebook/google/twitter identities). It doesn't really bother me that Google is aggregating porn browsing habits if they can't tie that to my real identity.

FabHK4• 7 years ago

between private mode / regular mode

Or within private mode. (I use private mode by default, and anytime I open a new tab, I need to log into HN again).

dao-• 7 years ago

Also, private browsing in Firefox blocks known trackers by default.

SmirkingRevenge• 7 years ago

I agree its not quite as concerning if your habits are only coalesced in an anonymous profile, but...

The matching engines will keep matching on. You can't ever slip up, even once.

If you leak any sort of signal, its all for naught - and the matching engines may be able to use that signal to link that anonymous collection of habits back to a real resolved identity.

pessimizer6• 7 years ago

Mindgeek runs all of the biggest porn sites, and also runs its own ad network. Since the biggest of those sites are their "tube" sites, they run into the same issues as youtube when it comes to tracking individual tastes. Since the product is porn, which is very easily classifiable with a list of the physical features of actors (with maybe a few behavioral distinctions), the actors in the video, how they are matched ("how" doing a lot of heavy lifting here) and possibly director, producer, and age of content, it would be easy for them to have a very specific dossier on all users. Moreover, it would be financially beneficial, because it'd be easy to maximize engagement with that stuff and a past record of engagement time, and that information would also aid conversions to their other paysite products (of which there are many.) The fact that they run so many paysites probably means they can associate specific sexual tastes (and schedules) with a credit card number.

Mindgeek have also shown themselves to be extremely savvy technologists, so this stuff is probably already being done. If it's your own ad network, is it really a third party, though? The plethora of domains does give the user the impression that they're leaving one business and moving to another, when it's really more akin to switching rooms.

example of unexpected situation: I used a credit card to join vanillanormalromance.com, but I watch weird stuff on redtube.

-----

edit: for some reason it didn't occur to me, but there would clearly be an interest to sell these categories to other porn sites, facebook-style, generating even more info from people not on Mindgeek sites.

I feel like I remember a few Mindgeek/Manwin devs being good HN posters.

jedberg4• 7 years ago

I’ve met their head of data science. They’re doing all that stuff and have been for many years.

Porn has always been leaders in technology. They were the first to embrace home video and can arguably be credited for VHS winning over BetaMax despite being inferior, because it was cheaper and all the porn was VHS only.

edgarvaldes2• 7 years ago

can arguably be credited for VHS winning over BetaMax

This is something that is always mentioned, but sometimes I wonder if it is not a myth, or a simple exaggeration or simplification.

gist2• 7 years ago

Porn has always been leaders in technology.

This is typically repeated but I question if there is actual proof of it rather than one of those '8 glasses of water a day' which just keeps getting passed along or some kind of plausible and believable anecdote.

pimmen• 7 years ago

I’ve met their head of data science. They’re doing all that stuff and have been for many years.

This sounds very much in violation of GDPR. Are they just betting on people being too embarrassed to take them to court?

lone_haxx0r• 7 years ago

Moreover, it would be financially beneficial, because it'd be easy to maximize engagement with that stuff and a past record of engagement time

Maybe they don't recommend the best video for you (i.e. the one you'll like the most) but one that is relatively good fit for your taste, without being too good, so that you spend more time on the site. If you know what I mean.

pessimizer6• 7 years ago

I was thinking the same thing when I typed that:)

9quuujeioq• 7 years ago

[porn] is very easily classifiable with a list of the physical features of actors (with maybe a few behavioral distinctions), the actors in the video, how they are matched ("how" doing a lot of heavy lifting here) and possibly director, producer, and age of content, it would be easy for them to have a very specific dossier on all users. Moreover, it would be financially beneficial, because it'd be easy to maximize engagement with that stuff and a past record of engagement time

See, this was my thinking when I created an account and tried to train the recommendation algorithm.

I was sorely disappointed when the secret sauce turned out to be nothing more than:

    for vid1 in watch_history[:-10]:
        for vid2 in all_videos: // Notice how it does not exclude watch_history
            best[Levenshtein_distance(vid1.title, vid2.title) + Math.random()] = vid2
    return ksort(best)

I would conclude their engagement maximizer is meant to give me the worst possible recommendations just so I spend more time on the site and load more pages (ad banners) before I find something, but then it would have taken the highest Levenshtein distance instead of the lowest. I'm not sure what the sibling comment from jedberg ("They’re doing all that stuff and have been for many years.") is on about, because they are definitely not matching the video content. I'm guessing it's still too computationally expensive. Reverse psychology (letting you think that you are getting personalized hits but giving you unrelated stuff instead) seems a bit too much like a conspiracy theory. And the theory of giving you something somewhat-good does not explain why it always matches the title and never anything else.

pessimizer6• 7 years ago

I've never really gone to tube sites (I just know how much business they do), but I can't believe it's that bad. I'd also think it would be cheap enough computationally, and iafd.com has pretty much compiled and indexed everything already.

Maybe there's an opening for someone who can do it cheaply, or they've discovered that it's not worth it?

your-nanny3• 7 years ago

YouTube has been criticized for it's recommender system tending to push viewers to more and more extreme content. I think the porn tube industry no different.

your-nanny3• 7 years ago

so somebody here thinks pornhub's recommendation system doesn't also encourage the viewing of more and more extreme content? if so, say so, don't be lazy.

brettz3• 7 years ago

No we aren't doing that. Ads are contextual on TrafficJunky/Pornhub. Too few people actually making accounts and purchases compared to the billions browsing anonymously.

propogandist2• 7 years ago

what's the % of users you see using ad-blockers?

separately, has there been any consideration given to googleanalytics (+google fonts) usage on your properties, and Google's ability to track visitors across your sites and the web?

pyuser583• 7 years ago

Mindgeek uses PHP. I’m not sure how that meshes with “very skilled technologists.”

BTW, I’m a hardcore Python snob who will eventually watch the world dissolve into an oblivion of Golang, Elixir, and Scala.

Nyandalized• 7 years ago

You can write poor code in any language. Language itself has very little other meaning than how well it does it's job in the given context. PHP is great for fast development, has a lot of developers available, and comes with great tooling for the web.

Traditional downsides like poor threading and overall performance were/are overshadowed in that most webcalls are always I/O bound. PHP7 has made great strides on this though, especially on memory usage.

jstewartmobile• 7 years ago

Between Stormy Daniels, "grab 'em by the p", and Epstein's community service for pedophilia, perhaps we are living in a post-blackmail era?

NXVIM, pizzagate, Weinstein, Epstein, the Catholic Church--all I see now are echoes of Elizabeth Bathory and feudalism.

tdy721• 7 years ago

I always liked how thepiratebay.org seemed to make that tracking really transparent. Visit that site on a machine and observe the advertising. It’s not the deep shadow fingerprint we evolved into. But it’s something that has informed me over the years.

Just visited on my mobile and didn’t get the same effect. It was different back in the day.

300IQGAMER2• 7 years ago

I assume most people won’t sign up with their work or personal email or otherwise put revealing info on a porn site, so is this really an issue?

ComputerGuru3• 7 years ago

Assume again. It’s probably safe to assume (I know, right?) people are more cautious with websites used to arrange cheating for married individuals than with the typical porn site, and yet as the Ashley Madison disaster revealed, people are just plain stupid when it comes to online privacy.

300IQGAMER2• 7 years ago

I doubt people use personal email or put other revealing info on those sites anyway. Would this be an issue if you didn’t?

svachalek• 7 years ago

If you've ever put that kind of information anywhere on the internet using the same browser, it's best to assume they can connect you. From browser fingerprinting to IP logging to security exploits, they'll find a way. You can definitely make it more difficult for them but without going all the way to TOR or something like it, it's best not to assume you have any secrets.

_b4ut• 7 years ago

Maybe a good moment to commemorate the infamous RedTubeGate from 2013 in Germany:

A couple lawyers and fishy business men launch an ad campaign on RedTube. Through that advertisement they collected IP addresses of visitors.

Before launching that campaign they allegedly bought the rights for three cheap porn flicks.

Now they also claim that they have some miraculous software which allows them to track who has been watching those flicks on RedTube. They even get a totally unclear blueprint for that software officially certified by a surveyor. [4]

Then they appeal to a court in Cologne for the real world addresses corresponding to the IP addresses arguing they can prove those poor schmocks watched their illegally uploaded crap flicks.

Suddenly thousands of people receive letters threatening legal action if they do not agree on paying a fee of 250 Euro. Many people comply out of fear for their reputation and just pay.

1: https://web.archive.org/web/20140822000304/http://www.wbs-la...

2: https://www.joyofdata.de/blog/tool-visualization-connections...

3: https://web.archive.org/web/20140911214044/http://www.cracka...

4: https://www.abmahnhelfer.de/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/EV.pd...

(many of the original sources have been deleted and are only available through archive.org)

technothrasher• 7 years ago

Prenda Law had a similar scam going here in the US, but used BitTorrent instead of RedTube.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenda_Law

bujak3000• 7 years ago

The difference is that bittorrent is uploading content. People are getting sued left and right for Bittorrent cases in germany but for streaming, that was a new one.

mirimir8• 7 years ago

I can't imagine visiting port sites without using at least a VPN. And without using an ~anonymous persona, and ~anonymous payment methods. And full-disk encryption. And as I recall, I never did.

But people obviously do. And get nailed by stuff like RedTubeGate, and the Ashley Madison leak. It's mind-boggling.

Edit: OK, so I get the "I love my porn, and you closed-minded idiots can just sod off". That's easy to say, when you live somewhere that porn is legal and ~accepted. But many who read HN aren't in such places. And they may not realize just how much they're not in such places. Until the come to a prosecutor's attention, and they're screwed.

rv-de• 7 years ago

I've never visited a p..n site with a VPN.

Swizec2• 7 years ago

I watch porn. Like everybody else on the planet.

Why hide something so mundane? It’s like pretending you don’t poop. We all know you poop. You’re human.

Reminds me of a failed study I read about. Researchers wanted to look into the effects of porn and couldn’t find a big enough control group. There simply aren’t enough people who don’t watch porn to make the study viable.

PS: in terms of malware it’s religious sites you gotta worry about. https://www.pcworld.com/article/254694/religious_sites_carry...

shrimp_emoji• 7 years ago

I can't imagine visiting any site without a VPN.

I mean, I can, but it does make me feel naked, nowadays.

Who do I want knowing my visit to example.com:

(1) my local sysadmin + my ISP + example.com

(2) my VPN + their ISP

Migration of leaked info to fewer and farther parties wins every time.

ct520• 7 years ago

wow now thats a hustle LOL

cm21872• 7 years ago

Reminds me of a 1990s scam, can't remember if I saw that in a movie or if it did really happen. Some dodgy magazine advertisement for porn videos or something. Customers orders, write a check to a totally innocuous company name. Then the company claims they ran out of stock and issue a refund check, with a "porn xxx sexshop" company name, and of course no customer wants to present that check to their bank or having that name appearing on their bank statement.

stupandaus• 7 years ago

This is a line in "Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels" (Guy Ritchie film)! Was this a scam in the real world as well??

toomanybeersies• 7 years ago

Funnily enough I was talking to the cashier at a sex shop the other day about what it shows up as on my bank statements. I personally don't care, but was curious.

Turns out it just shows up as the name of the shop, they don't bother to try and hide it these days. Pretty sure strip clubs still show up with innocuous names though, but it's been over half a decade since I've been inside one.

bigiain• 7 years ago

A similar scam just got slapped down by a UKjudge:

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/07/30/virgin_slaps_golden...

homakov• 7 years ago

What does porn have to do with sex though?

Tracking Sex: Implications of widespread data leakage and tracking on porn sites

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