Posted on 07/18/2019 10:30:14 PM PDT by bitt
The New York Times reports that a new study by researchers from Microsoft, Carnegie Mellon, and the University of Pennsylvania scanned 22,484 porn sites and discovered that they are riddled with tracking tools feeding data back to third party tech firms such as Facebook, Google, and Oracle.
“Our results indicate tracking is endemic on pornography websites: 93% of pages leak user data to a third-party,” the study concludes. The study scanned the sites in March of 2018 and found that 74 percent of trackers came from Google or its subsidiaries, 24 percent came from Oracle and 10 percent came from Facebook. The study claims that even enabling “incognito mode” on web browsers did not protect users from the trackers.
The rough translation of the percentage figures reveals that out of 22,484 websites, 16,638 sites had Google trackers, 5,396 had Oracle trackers, and 2,248 Facebook trackers. Researchers warned that this information leak should be extremely worrying for many users: “The fact that the mechanism for adult site tracking is so similar to, say, online retail should be a huge red flag.”
Elena Maris, a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft and the study’s lead author, stated: “These porn sites need to think more about the data that they hold and how it’s just as sensitive as something like health information. Protecting this data is crucial to the safety of its visitors. And what we’ve seen suggests that these websites and platforms might not have thought all of this through like they should have.”
A Google spokesperson told the Times: “We don’t allow Google Ads on websites with adult content and we prohibit personalized advertising and advertising profiles based on a user’s sexual interests or related activities online. Additionally, tags for our ad services are never allowed to transmit personally identifiable information to Google.”
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
ping!!!!!!! Don’t be evil, huh?????/
Oh noes.
What a shocker.........................
If those folks depended on income from folks like me, they’d be belly up within a few short weeks.
95% of all websites on the whole world internet have trackers from Google (Including this one-— Yes, Free Republic has a Google tracker on every page.) Many websites have not only several Google related trackers, but also trackers for Amazon, Facebook, Twitter etc.
And people are surprised that porno sites have them?
Big Brother wannabes are watching you.
Well then my first, middle and last name is evil because I’ve looked at porn a trillion times since the 90s until I recently got close to my 50s (now 51) and lost most interest.
You all are holier and more moral than me!!
I can live with that pretty easily :)
But I’ll go to confession anyway. I try to make it every 10 years. There for 2 hours!!
I lost interest in porn after my first marriage. Funny thing is, the sex during my second marriage was better than my first and all the freaky shack-ups combined. I think I ran my gas tank too dry too fast. Pity.
“So, students, we want you to visit as many porn sites as possible as part of our research.
Why are you snickering?”
That’s funny!
I recall a few years back the SEC found widespread porn viewing by their workers. I’m sure that many government agencies are rife with porn viewing.
Why would this be a surprise?
Plenty of non-porn sites are riddled with trackers too.
Example:
cnn.com has 25 trackers according to Ghostery
Seems like a seemy type of work. I'm guessing eye bleach was probably used hourly by most of the " researchers".
“Trackers” are mostly innocuous. Google analytics is a powerful tool that tells you where people are from geographically, when they visited your site, for how long, and who referred them.
They don’t have access to your personal data, unless you enter it into the site. The worst thing they know is your IP address.
Such personal narratives as yours are better left to your support groups.
Not too long ago I ‘stumbled’ into a girlie site. Almost immediately this official-looking notice appeared in the middle of my screen saying my computer was infected (i.e., hijacked). It let me close the message, but then popped up immediately. It told me not to shut off the computer and that I must call a particular phone number.
I would then close the browser completely, the only way possible, using Task Manager (the pop-up blocked out all other means), but when I reopened the browser, it would immediately go to that page, with that message. After trying about 5 times to close the page before the message could appear, and losing each time, I would up uninstalling the browser, and then re-installing it. That worked, thankfully. I knew I was being BS’d because the problem only affected one browser (I keep 7 different browsers on my computer, for various reasons), but still, it was impressive code, the way it immediately took over the browser the moment that I opened it - probably fools a lot of people.
aka NSA
uhmm...anyone see anything wrong with that sentence?
That’s a great Dilbert cartoon!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.