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Comment by rkagerer | Hacker News Reader

The article seems a little sensationalized, but even viewed in a generous light it's still downright creepy.

...clients include Google, Yelp, Microsoft, McKinsey, Pepsi, Sephora, Home Depot, Condé Nast, Intuit, and many others.

It is possible to determine from the collected data what date and time the anonymized user visited YouPorn and PornHub, and in some cases what search term they entered into the porn site and which specific video they watched.

Although the data does not include personal information such as users' names, it still contains a wealth of specific browsing data, and experts say it could be possible to deanonymize certain users.

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For context, the sentence starts with:

> Some past, present, and potential clients include...

Keyword "potential".

Exactly. That word makes me discredit the entire list.

Although, the subtitle does say

> Its clients have included Home Depot, Google, Microsoft, Pepsi, and McKinsey.

From the PCMag article, it seems that Jumpshot's marketing materials claimed they'd worked with some companies that denied actually doing business with them when contacted by reporters, hence the "potential" clients - it's not clear who's lying.

The article is actually rather generous, particularly when it says "could be possible to deanonymize certain users." Having done my own research on that [1], I would have formulated this as "allowed to deanonymize most users."

[1] https://palant.de/2020/01/27/avasts-broken-data-anonymizatio...

Yeah it's creepy, but I wonder how that data is used? Like, what ads will Google show me depending on the type of porn I watch?

IIUC, porn is used as an example to highlight that these are very personal details that are being sold, and porn preferences are things people often fear more of leaking than - for example - their financial data.

John Oliver, in his work on the NSA scandal had Snowden explain individual NSA programs based on "dick picks", to help people visualize and clarify the consequences of what otherwise is just generically described as "selling/stealing your data".

Yeah people always assume the buyers of the data are companies like Google, and not some group who wants to blackmail you if you don't give them five Bitcoins.

> porn preferences are things people often fear more of leaking than - for example - their financial data

I remember this being the opposite - for nude pictures instead of porn preferences at least.

Avast did a study where 77% of US respondents said that between nude pictures and financial data they would rather have nude pictures of them leaked[0].

Maybe it's because financial data is directly tied to one's well-being but except for certain professions nude photos aren't.

Then again nude photos aren't necessarily the same as porn.

[0] https://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/11/17/study-smartphone-u...

Dating sites, for one.

Hard to find a dating site that specializes in ... looks up his profile ... oh boy, that's some weird stuff.

Why concentrate on intended use? More interesting is what, er, unanticipated value-add might be there.

Could a malicious actor create a blackmail-bot? It wouldn't even need to be that great - just something a little more believable than the "I took over your computer and videoed you masturbating" spam.

Could more subtle, targeted blackmail operation involve this data? There is a lot of this sort of thing in politics.

We know PIs, bail-bonders and other folks on the fuzzy LE/commercial coercion industry line were heavy users of realtime cellphone tracking. I imagine the more creative ones have considered the value of these data pits, too.

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