Online Porn Could Be the Next Big Privacy Scandal
brettpthomas.com
brettpthomas.com
Surely much older than that.
1) "sex scandals" - it seems politicians or others in power can't go to prison for stealing a lot of money or even murdering someone. But if they are involved in a sex scandal - well god may have mercy on their souls! Their careers are basically over then. It's also why intelligence agencies can have tremendous power over politicians, judges and so on, if they can "discredit them" through their porn or sex habits. That should stop happening. It should be a non-issue for everyone.
2) the more people are "okay" with porn or sexuality in general, the less likely it will be for some politicians one day to manage to pass a bill that criminalizes either porn in general, or specific kinds of porn or sexuality (like say gay porn).
That seems to be mostly an american thing.
Over here in Europe hardly anyone bats an eye when the latest sex-party involving Berlusconi, François Hollande/Sarkozy etc. is revealed.
People only get upset when truly dirty stuff comes out, such as the child abuse ring involving british government figures[1].
[1] http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/12/18/uk-britain-abuse-id...
Many people are well aware that once these filter-systems are in place, they will inevitably be used not only to suppress porn, but also to "accidentally" suppress other things[2]. There has been quite a bit of backlash[3][4], but I guess we know how these things tend to pan out...
[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/10172298/One-surveilla...
[2] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20141208/06160229348/uk-we...
[3] http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2285176/petition-as...
[4] http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/thousands-sign-petition-against-uk-...
No laws have been passed yet to enforce ISPs to do this, just pressure from David Cameron and campaigns by the Daily Mail and 'parent' groups and stuff, although David Cameron did say if the recently implemented system was not effective enough they would have to legislate (the problem now, is whether the 4-8% takeup on all but one isp is 'effective'.)
When trying to view an adult content website using my mobile data connection, I arrived on that wonderful "blocked content" page. To get it removed, I could use a credit card. Oh, but not any credit card. The one I have from my country of origin wasn't valid, not even the one from my previous country of residence. I needed a UK credit card, which I didn't have yet. The only option was to go back in a store, with my passport, and say "Yes dear Sir/Madam I would like my internet with porn enabled please". It was (almost) faster to setup a vpn.
Also, note that I say _adult content_, not even porn, as some website that do not contain specifically porn are blocked as well.
Otherwise I absolutely agree with your comment. I don't give a sh*t whether you, my co-workers, my boss or my wife watch porn.
I'd be rather more astonished to find out that some guy never watched it. It used to be complicated, but since the late nineties it's all 'just a click away' and free.
Unfortunately, however, plenty of shrill, god-fearing think-of-the-childrens do give a shit, and will hold your "sins" against you.
Just hope that they're not going to be making major decisions about your life.
I think on some level, the situation of "modern man" is one where we cultivate the image of our higher functions and logic while hiding the more primitive, animal sides. For many people, sexual activity and elimination are just too "gross" and primal for comfortable observation. Of course that transgression is the fuel for several fetishes but that's only tangentially related.
The other thing to consider is that fantasies are often a way to address those primitive motivations and desires in a way that doesn't interfere with the operation of modern society. Maybe a woman likes the fantasy of a dominant or forceful partner even if actual coercion or rape would be horrifying. Maybe a man likes to fantasize about sex with a room full of women or people who look like his boss. In reality he's not going to attend orgies or pursue his employer but the fantasy is a way of exorcising and addressing what his lizard brain keeps pestering him about.
When others learn of these fantasies and interests, how do you know they aren't going to draw the wrong conclusion? Your coworker probably isn't a rapist or a rape victim or planning to pursue their boss or someone who goes cruising for anonymous sex with lots of partners but when their porn history is exposed, how do their coworkers not recoil from them or judge them harshly for those thoughts?
I guess in a perfect world we would all just accept sex fantasies as what they are but in reality, the line between public and private life is one that seeks to minimize the conflict that would arise if we really knew everything about other people.
I quickly learned two things: the viewpoint of your coworkers matters more than any facts, and we Americans are terribly prude.
If someone wants you gone, you're probably going to be gone; it doesn't matter what you do.
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)
Maybe browsers shouldn't have access to system fonts except a specific set. Websites can't assume fancy fonts are installed anyway, I don't think it would be a problem?
- You need to convince only one browser. People that care about privacy will use that browser.
- You don't need licensing, they still use the OS fonts. They just limit the fonts available.
- You don't need to convince web developers because they already use these fonts and only these fonts. Who's using Papyrus?
- 1997 websites are going to break. Again, new websites use only a set of system fonts or fancy web fonts.
Tor Browser overview: https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/
There's a long tail to fingerprinting that's pretty daunting. E.g., you can detect OS by looking for idiosyncrasies of the low level networking stack. One project did attempt to solve this but hasn't been touched in years: http://ippersonality.sourceforge.net/
Perhaps there is a security/privacy gap in the market here, a browser that appears identical with every other install and manages it's own fonts etc.
[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.
I'm imagining the typical popup - 'Warning your browsing information is compromised - pay us to remove the offending data!'. Add to that page a list of actual viewing history and I think conversion ratios would increase.
Reputable porn sites tend to be more secure than your average company website specifically because they know that privacy is important to their viewers. Being known for leaking your viewer data would be suicide.
From the article: "All that's needed are two nominal data breaches and an enterprising teenager that wants to create havoc."
> but given data that you can personally verify
If I have your browsing history, and it's clean, I can threaten to throw in some random unpleasant links, and still threaten to release it as "credible looking". If I have your browsing history, and it's dirty, and I do release it, you can just claim I have tainted it as part of a blackmail attempt.
mc32 - most browsed categories on youporn last year
---------
gay midget
hairy
whales
scat
tentacles
Pick a catchy enough claim combining a particular politician, a particular porn genre and then maybe an intriguing twist ("in the toilets at a cancer charity function!?") and there's every chance that an anonymous story could start doing the rounds.
Reminds me of the Glenn Beck rape/murder hoax: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/glenn-beck-rape-murder-hoax
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".
If it's really a low status taste (e.g., furry, femdom, cuckold), the attacks write themselves. If it's more mainstream, it isn't hard to twist it into something deeply revealing about their character (e.g., "omfg look at how he objectifies asians").
Here is a real life example of this, albeit not based on privacy leaks but on something I chose to reveal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7945286
Are you, or were you ever religious? A lot of people are, and probably majority were in the past. Pretty much every mainstream religion teaches that there is an all-seeing god who watches you all the time. And that includes being watched while in toilet. Or while in bed with your spouse. So I wonder - if people were used to be watched by an omnipotent god, how is that different from being watched by omnipotent cloud?
For the record, I haven't in any way made my mind about the issue. I am just exploring the concept that maybe we don't need as much privacy as most think we need, and maybe it would be better for the whole mankind to limit those expectations.
That's an interesting meta point which is much wider than this discussion (it also encompasses PRISM etc)
But plenty of us don't believe in the omnipotent God, and most of those that do don't expect Him to adversely affect their every day life by forwarding on their browsing history to their spouse, the local newspaper or the police.
Fair enough, though I don't think I ever saw that meta point being touched in any of the discussions about recent privacy issues, and I wish it had - it seems to be important for the future of mankind.
> most of those that do don't expect Him to adversely affect their every day life
To be honest, a lot of the stuff we want to be "private" about probably wouldn't adversely affect our daily lives as well. For instance, if I were to be discriminated by my employer for being a Trekkie (because everyone who cares can know everyone elses fandom affiliations), that employer would be doing himself a big disservice by dismissing potentially good people because of irrelevant criteria and will be outcompeted by one who doesn't discriminate (unless he wants to create a Star Wars-oriented workplace to improve cohesion and morale; let the market decide then if this actually makes sense).
The only big objection I can see is with insurance - while on the one hand I'd be totally fine for insurance companies to bill people by their risky behaviour, it would have nasty consequences for health-related policies; having access to medical data makes insurance more expensive for people who need it the most. But I suppose there could be workarounds.
I read The Circle recently and thought "no one could possibly go for this". And yet here we are already in 2015
My point is, if one stops treating the vague notion of "privacy" as some kind of end-goal and focuses on costs and benefits, it seems reasonable that we might be losing more than we are gaining as a civilization by fighting for as much "privacy" as possible.
If you take the aspect of watching gay porn alone: people will lose their jobs over this if their boss is conservative or they work for a conservative institution. People will lose their families or be beaten up or killed for that in fundamentalist societies or regions. Look at russia, the middle east, african countries.
And even if sexual orientation would be no problem at all in our society, perhaps in five or ten years from now that may change. All over europe right-wing political movements are rising and in the USA, well...
So, it's great that you have no problem. And yes, people should be more relaxed about watching porn. But in reality they aren't, and the decision whether someone wants other people to know about his sexual preferences or orientation has to be his and his alone.
Privacy is a human right and it's _important_. Technology should aid people in every way possible to guard their privacy, their dignity and their personal choices. To hold this as a value is not going against the progress of mankind. In fact, it's relatively easy to change technology and there is no reason at all not to do it.
e: english grammar
I know, and I agree that having porn habits suddenly public worldwide will cause short-term problems there (though one could argue that sudden reveal of how common some preferences are could also force their societies to reconcile official values with reality).
> So, it's great that you have no problem. And yes, people should be more relaxed about watching porn. But in reality they aren't, and the decision whether someone wants other people to know about his sexual preferences or orientation has to be his and his alone.
Well, for one, part of the progress of mankind is people being more relaxed (that seems to be the only stable solution with good cost/benefit tradeoff).
But in general, the very notion of being able to be private seems misguided. If you really want to make revealing someone's sexual preferences his and his alone decision, you'd have to reduce human interactions to text-only chat.
Scratch that - even that wouldn't help, you could always infer stuff from prolonged conversation.
The point is, we really suck at hiding anything and it makes no sense to limit our ability to perceive and interpret the world to perserve a flawed notion of "private information".
> Privacy is a human right and it's _important_.
I'm not convinced. We give up a lot of privacy to form a society.
Fundamentalists don't care for statistics and they usually aren't very open to new ideas. Besides if they would have lists of people watching gay porn, they'd probably have a minority anyway.
> If you really want to make revealing someone's sexual preferences his and his alone decision, you'd have to reduce human interactions to text-only chat.
Of course not. Gay people in countries where they are oppressed have to hide their sexual orientation and they succeed with that. And in more open societies people decide for themselves whether they want to 'come out' to others or not. Nobody has the right to take that decision from them.
If this decision is taken away from them, it may destroy their life. And if that happens because their browsers didn't guard their privacy, the technology sucks.
> We give up a lot of privacy to form a society.
No, our society is based on the individuals' privacy. That is why we vote in secrecy and why we value a persons' liberty.
Privacy doesn't mean that everything I do is a secret. It means that I have the right to choose what I want to be a secret and what not. And I should be able to count on that, since it's a human right.
Take a look at what happens in reality. People are killed all over the world for their beliefs, their political opinions, their sexual orientation. Peoples lifes depend on their privacy. It that is taken away from them, that is totalitarianism.
> That is why we vote in secrecy
Just to address this one thing though - from what I understand, we vote in secret so that we can't be forced to vote against our will by external actors via e.g. blackmail - not because we value privacy per se. Am I wrong here?
No, you're right. But I'd say that we implicitly value the privacy of the voting booth as a tool to guarantee a free election.
Thanks for thinking about this. :)
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.
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.
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.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/10/28/att-says-...
Fortunately most people switch over to a non-carrier network via 802.11 when they're at home with their mobile devices.
The EFF has a nice demo of it: https://panopticlick.eff.org/
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.
Sounds like fraud and extortion to me. Were criminal charges filed?
"Web browsers leave an essentially unique footprint every time you visit a web page, even in Incognito mode (and even without supercookies). This is well established; many web tools such as Panopticlick will confirm that you give a website lots of information about your computer every time you visit."
"Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 5,053,325 tested so far."
Step 1: Open an incognito window and watch some british milfs getting creampied by black dudes.
Step 2: go to cuteoverload.com and tweet the URL of some snuggly G-rated kittens.
I've now fingerprinted you across both xhamster and cuteoverload.
Additionally, once you tweeted something on cuteoverload, I just learned the the tweet_id of something attached to your twitter handle, which I tied to your browser fingerprint. Provided the tweet is public I can then get any personal info you make public in your twitter profile.
Pretty straightforward docs on how to do it: https://dev.twitter.com/web/tweet-button https://dev.twitter.com/web/javascript/events
I believe facebook offers similar data via the api (not sure if it includes your id), never tried to do it with pinterest.
I only need you to engage in one of many non-obviously trackable social interactions ("YES send me a cute kitten every day to my email!") on kittens.com to identify you.
Just finding out that someone watches porn at work is really uninteresting from my european point of view...
Many people don't want their porn habits made public for all sorts of reasons and it is not your place to judge.
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.
I use all the usual plugins, like Disconnect, uBlock, https everywhere, but recently I have been using a Firefox plugin called 'priv8' to sandbox the login sites I use the most (means I am not signed into google or facebook for my regular browsing). I honestly do not have that much of a in depth knowledge of browser tracking, so I am not exactly sure if this makes much of a difference.