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Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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But you don't want your specific flavor out in the open right?

    mc32 - most browsed categories on youporn last year
    ---------
    gay midget
    hairy
    whales
    scat
    tentacles

You can freak out now!

Yeah. I don't think people will freak out. I can imagine the first few people being freaked out, when it's a novel thing, their names alongside the titles they viewed, but after they see what their neighbor and their boss and their friends watched, they begin to think, "meh".

If you wanted to target a politician, instead of hacking an ad network or owning both a porn site and a mainstream social network, you could just start a salacious rumour.

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

...and who could resist repeating a meme that libeled Glenn Beck, using his own style of rhetorical insinuation? Hoist by his own petard, as it were.

I would think a lot of people would pay to keep such information secret though. Maybe not enormous sums individually but given data that you can personally verify this would be a fairly effective threat.

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.

I think this would tremendously backfire. It wouldn't be too difficult to figure out which companies have leaked customer data, which is now being used for extortion, and they'd likely lose more money than they could gain from the ad clicks.

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.

The sites themselves wouldn't likely leak these data, rather it could be compromised.

From the article: "All that's needed are two nominal data breaches and an enterprising teenager that wants to create havoc."

A very substantial proportion of porn viewers don't restrict their browsing to "reputable sites", and a very insubstantial portion of porn viewers have the will and inclination to retrace their browsing history trying to work out which ad network or tracker beacon is responsible for the disclosure in order to report them to site owners which may or may not be part of the scam. It's not as if nobody is selling clicks to websites making amateurish attempts to persuade you to pay up or face investigation.

    > but given data that you can personally verify

But of course, you can't.

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.

Presumably they can't verify it, but I feel like real data would be much more likely to convert to 'sale'. Besides if that's the particular strategy the site takes then it may well develop a reputation for reliability in some sort of way.

My point is: you will always have the plausible deniability that the blackmailer has simply invented dirty data, and mixed it with real clean data

I understand and I agree. My point is just that sites make money with fake claims of viruses on your computer - I think real browsing history would scare the money out of enough unsophisticated people to make it profitable.

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