The search engine’s knowledge knows no bounds
With FaceApp’s privacy policy coming under scrutiny, a new Netflix documentary highlighting the dangers of corporate data harvesting, internet privacy (or lack thereof) has become a prevalent issue in today’s modern world. Now a new study has examined how software made by the likes of Facebook and Google is being used to track visitors of porn sites, and it’s findings are pretty disturbing.
Analysing the tracking and privacy risks related to using 22,484 pornography websites, researchers from Microsoft, Carnegie Mellon, and the University of Pennsylvania found that a scarily high 93 per cent of those platforms leak user data to third parties. Potentially the most terrifying thing about this, though, is that visitors are consenting to third party data sharing but probably don’t even realise it. Some of the sites’ policies are so convoluted that they measure grade level 14 on the Flesch-Kinkaid scale (which measures how academic a piece of writing is), which is pretty damn high when you realise that 18 is the highest score. Readers would need “a two-year college education” to understand some policies, and can take up to seven minutes to read.
But what does this actually mean? Essentially, people are consenting to these (already complex) policies without fully realising that third parties have access to such sensitive data, or the consequences that may come from that. And if it couldn't get any worse – even incognito mode won't save you here. Why? Because private browsing does not protect the user from being observed, tracked or recorded by the sites they visit or from the third parties that have access to their data. All that incognito mode does do is ensure that the browser history is not stored on the computer. So, while you may be safe from mum finding out, this may not be the case for huge corporations.
“The fact that the mechanism for adult site tracking is so similar to, say, online retail should be a huge red flag,” researcher Elena Maris told the New York Times.
So the real question here is this: is this really informed consent? The researchers would argue no stating that these pornography sites “operate with an unethical definition of sexual consent” meaning users have a “fundamentally misleading sense of privacy”. Because, while it’s clear (and scary) that people undeniably are being tracked when visiting these sites, it’s not clear how this data is being used specifically. The biggest concern is in relation to personal safety as the study warns that third parties may be able to infer sexual preferences which could potentially be used against the user. What’s more, the information harvested can be analysed to create an individual profile of the user. So if you thought Google knew you pretty well before, it knows you even better now.
God help us all.
