by ffn on 2/24/15, 7:12 AM
Honestly, as an employer, I really wouldn't care if my employees watched porn in his free time as long as he keeps it to himself. Our attraction to naked bodies of the opposite (or same) sex is as old as walking upright and is deeply and fundamentally a part of our humanity since our ancestors roamed the Serengeti. And while for the sake of social norms I'm more than willing to put aside my "dirty pastime" in a professional setting in today's modern age, if society is going to come around into my private life and "expose" that I look at porn in my off hours, I see no reason to feel ashamed or apologetic for it (unless it's my girlfriend who finds out, then all bets are off, and I will feel as much shame and apology as necessary).
by siegecraft on 2/24/15, 7:38 AM
Everyone commenting seems to be very blase about this. I guess they are forgetting that there countries where it is still illegal/dangerous to be openly gay. Besides that, probably useful in targetted blackmail/extortion plots but not a huge threat to the common man.
by michaelvillar on 2/24/15, 6:43 AM
It always confused me of why this hasn't been fixed yet.
It seems like most of the uniqueness is from the list of fonts and plugins.
Couldn't browsers limit that by asking user permission before providing it? (Fair question and I'm waiting to be wrong)
by vbezhenar on 2/24/15, 7:11 AM
Browsers should improve incognito mode so websites won't be able to distinguish Chrome@OS X from Firefox@Windows. And may be allow easier integration with proxy services. Privacy is important.
by supercoder on 2/24/15, 6:32 AM
I think the reader will suffer more from obtaining a list of my viewed porn than me.
by sjp2705 on 2/24/15, 6:40 AM
Write a script to continuously scrape and hit every porn video on every porn site. It's obviously impossible for you to watch all that porn and unlikely any hacker will try to intuit your exact history (which would be difficult and not worth the effort). Problem solved.
by mc32 on 2/24/15, 6:04 AM
Unless there is big money in this, I don't think this will be the next big privacy scandal, with the exception of politicians --they could get worried (people who have a big stake in maintaining an image). But your average Jurgen and Silvie, not so much.
[edit]That's to say, porn, for all practical purposes, is mainstream. It's an open secret. I don't think people are going to hyperventilate, freak out. I mean, 50 shades, the movie, is a marketing juggernaut in middle America --and beyond.
by lwhalen on 2/24/15, 7:05 AM
I'm surprised the article doesn't mention an even bigger point - very few porn sites provide end to end TLS. Through, uh, research, redtube doesn't have ANY TLS available, and xhamster has a 'some content on this site is not delivered over TLS' warning.
by TeMPOraL on 2/24/15, 7:16 AM
>
yet another reason that the tech community should take a more proactive approach ensuring data privacy.Or maybe yet another reason for people to get their shit together.
Seriously, this is not an issue of privacy - it's an issue of society potentially overreacting to things. So Jane Doe watches porn. Big deal. John Doe watches it too. Like 80% of country's population. It's an open secret, like going to shrink used to be. It only holds power over you if you expect people around you to behave like apes (which they often do - see being gay 30 years ago, or being not pro-gay now).
I know very well that it's easier to influence tech than society; hell, it's even easier to influence biological factors than social ones. But ultimately, we can't blame it on tech when it's lack of civility that's the problem. Maybe it's the very expectation of privacy that makes people such bigots?
Either way, it's another data point for "privacy vs. progress of mankind, pick one".
by Chinjut on 2/24/15, 7:36 AM
I see a lot of people saying, essentially, "I don't care that anybody knows I view porn; that's totally mainstream". And, yeah, I feel the same way.
But on reflecting on it, I find there's more nuance to it:
I don't care that anybody knows I view porn; that's totally mainstream. But to have people know the specifics of my tastes in porn? Suddenly, I would begin to feel embarrassment; I'd worry I'd be thought a weirdo for getting off to X which is considered a fetish instead of Y which is considered standard stuff, etc.
by Padding on 2/24/15, 9:09 AM
This may or may not be an issue for targeted attacks on high-profile individuals (which in turn likely have the means to avoid them). But I don't think crosslinking moderately-reliable browser identifiers across different websites, so as to be able to extort "average Joes", will really be that profitable.
Remeber that there's a lot of people watching porn and a lot of people on facebook-like sites, so those unique broswer identifiers won't be so unique any more in the end. Also there's a lot of money involved in both porn and facebook, so trying to meddle with them get you sued if you endager their profits.
The real issue I see however is credit card data and how easy it would be for corrupt authorities to abuse it. I looked into options for anonymous credit cards just because of this, but sadly that gets you into really shady money landering territory really quickly.
by rl3 on 2/24/15, 6:34 AM
The easiest way to mitigate this is to view your porn on a mobile device or tablet, if able.
Mobile browser fingerprints are far more uniform than their desktop counterparts.
Host address correlation would however remain fairly effective in most circumstances, so it would be prudent to conceal that as well.
by llamataboot on 2/24/15, 5:28 AM
This is assuming that there is data to be breached though. Unless it was some realtime MITM attack, I don't think many porn websites are storing the browser footprints of all their visitors in a database. But, I could be naive.
by hopfog on 2/24/15, 8:05 AM
There's an ongoing criminal case in Sweden where a website streamed their porn movies for "free". However, in the fine print it said that in order to watch this you need to pay X. So basically the company could bill you just for watching.
This wouldn't be any problem since people are anonymous. The twist is that the company behind it actually had a deal with some of the phone network operators where they sent the phone number as a header for mobile devices.
The result was that hundreds of people got invoices and were told that their personal details would be exposed if they didn't pay.
by mrits on 2/24/15, 6:01 AM
There will be a small percentage of error that all of us will fall under.
by sparaker on 2/24/15, 5:57 AM
I think this should only be applicable to sites where you are logged in, as otherwise its going to be pretty difficult for them to identify using your name.
by dismal2 on 2/24/15, 7:23 AM
Of course it's deniable, just say the person is clearly trying to blackmail you, or that you watched that one but not that truly terrible one. Also who cares. Now if they could hack into your camera while you watch and you happen to be a person in the public eye, that could turn into a short lived manufactured controversy that gossip sites and cable news live on.
by staunch on 2/24/15, 6:00 AM
Most people would suffer much more from a leak of their email, photos, or code than their porn browsing habits.
by Roritharr on 2/24/15, 7:35 AM
When reading the headline I expected someone had done facerecognition over redtube, xvideos and the like and created a database with people in pornvideos, making it easy to lookup for future reference...
Just finding out that someone watches porn at work is really uninteresting from my european point of view...
by heyalexej on 2/24/15, 7:47 AM
Porn websites, as it stands, are better secured than your average Bitcoin exchange. Nothing to worry about.
by nsxwolf on 2/24/15, 5:33 PM
Flabbergasted that the HN crowd harps on endlessly about privacy until it's about porn. Then it's all about get over your hangups, radical transparency.
Many people don't want their porn habits made public for all sorts of reasons and it is not your place to judge.
by Riesling on 2/24/15, 9:05 AM
There is a huge privacy problem even without browser fingerprinting. Some porn sites use google analytics. I find this irresponsible, especially since most people have their real word ID bound to their google account.
by netheril96 on 2/24/15, 8:36 AM
Well, it appears my browser fingerprint is rather unique. Guess I should install some new fonts now and then and thus change my fingerprint.
by colinb on 2/24/15, 8:19 AM
isn't this what throwaway Linux VMs where invented for?
Elsewhere in this thread someone mentions a conspiracy of service provider and porn [alleged] criminal. So I guess Fapuntu-64 won't work for that, but for all else, it seems a good solution, so long as your desktop is not your telephone.
by houseofshards on 2/24/15, 6:59 AM
does it mean if there is a browser just for browsing non-login sites and doing nothing else (do all browsing that requires a login or identification of any kind from a different browser), this problem can be prevented ?
by supercoder on 2/24/15, 6:27 AM
Guess I'll start buying burner phones for porn every 2 weeks.