Google's watching you watching porn

Friends, you're going to wish you were still making the scene with a magazine after reading this sentence: Google's web trackers are all up in your fap time and there's pretty much nothing (except maybe using a more secure browser like Firefox, read up on cyber security tips from the EFF, refusing to sign into a Google account and never going online without the protection of a VPN) that anyone can do about it.

From The Verge:

Visitors to porn sites have a "fundamentally misleading sense of privacy," warn the authors of a new study that examines how tracking software made by tech companies like Google and Facebook is deployed on adult websites.

The authors of the study analyzed 22,484 porn sites and found that 93 percent of them leak data to third parties, including when accessed via a browser's "incognito" mode. This data presents a "unique and elevated risk," warn the authors, as 45 percent of porn site URLs indicate the nature of the content, potentially revealing someone's sexual preferences.

According to the study, trackers baked up by Google and its creepy always-watching-you subsidiaries were found on over 74% of the porn sites that researchers checked out... for purely scientific reasons, of course. And the fun doesn't stop there! Facebook's trackers appeared on 10% of the websites and, for the discerning surveillance aficionado, 24% of the sites the researchers checked in on were being stalked by Oracle. According to The Verge, "...the type of data collected by trackers varies... Sometimes this information seems anonymous, like the type of web browser you're using, or your operating system, or screen resolution. But this data can be correlated to create a unique profile for an individual, a process known as "fingerprinting." Other times the information being collected is more obviously revealing, like a user's IP address or their phone's mobile identification number.

It's enough to give someone performance anxiety.

Image via Wikipedia Commons