Oh fuck
Incognito mode won't stop smut sites sharing your pervy preferences with Facebook, Google and, er, Oracle
Google, Facebook, and, surprisingly, Oracle are among the top ten third-party companies that frequently track your personal sexual interests every time you watch porn, according to new research. Switching to incognito mode in your browser might darken your screen and provide you with the perfect ambiance to surf the most …
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Friday 19th July 2019 14:00 GMT deadlockvictim
Katrinab's list
katrinab: That's easy:
• Heterosexual dating sites
• Pregnancy related stuff
• Nursery schools
• Vetinary equipment for cows
• Blockchains
• Ambulance chasers
There is a good film based on this list, I'm just try to work out the sequence of events. If one follows from the other, I'm curious to see the jump between «Nursery Schools» and what follows.
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Friday 19th July 2019 14:57 GMT katrinab
Re: Katrinab's list
Presumbably my [vomit] husband [vomit] decides to start a farm and expects me to look after the cows.
It fails, so we "invest" in bitcoin scams [by scam I mean you don't actually receive any bitcoins in return for your money which is an entirely separate issue to the debate about whether or not bitcoin is itself a scam]
Then the ambulance chaser scams us out of yet more money on the pretext of getting back the money we lost on imaginary bitcoins.
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Friday 19th July 2019 07:21 GMT Anonymous Coward
I don't visit porn sites so I'm safe from spying
Ha ha, of course not.
It seems that there is a thriving 'track the hell out of everybody' ecosystem with products and enthusiastic ad-related forums that push tracking that browsers just don't do anything about.
Privacy in this context only means privacy in relation to someone else who has local access to your machine. Anyone who thinks it does anything much with respect to the pool of sharks that is today's web is, sadly, mis-informed.
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Friday 19th July 2019 08:22 GMT Anonymous Coward
Paranoid much
And what do you expect the END GAME of this is?
Let's face it
Unless you're world famous nobody cares what you do your data is just data. Not special and MEANING NOTHING
cue MASSIVE OVERREACTION. oh no the data about an url you visited - you, some anon random in a world of billions of people - is in a massive database in a large company somewhere
Spare me your psychologically ADDLED fears of what will happen. You know what will happen with all your data
NOTHING
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Friday 19th July 2019 09:42 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: nobody cares what you do your data is just data.
Until you annoy someone who does care, and can (mis)use it against you. The future need not be the same as now.
Maybe you or someone you know suffers some significant wrong due to corporate or government incompetence, corruption, or malpractice, and so you start campaigning to fix things. Now that "just data" could be weaponised to attack or your credibility personally. But maybe it's not you, since you prefer to keep your head down and hope to stay invisible, but instead someone you know. Except they are too clean or too careful, or a bad choice from a PR perspective, so instead you become the target as "they" begin to apply indirect pressure.
Hang on, I think my my tinfoil hat has just worn out. I'll have go and get a fresh one :-)
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Friday 19th July 2019 10:31 GMT Kane
Re: Paranoid much
Hey, Hey, Hey! It's time to play The Game again! I will reduce the rantings to only the UPPER CASE LETTERS from big bad bob's post (we know it's you bob, no need to be shy!), and see if it makes something more intelligible!
Letsa Go!
END GAME.
MEANING NOTHING.
MASSIVE OVERREACTION.
ADDLED.
NOTHING.
Well, wasn't that fun!
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Friday 19th July 2019 11:05 GMT Charlie Clark
Re: Paranoid much
Unless you're world famous nobody cares what you do your data is just data.
Speaks one who fails to realise how much companies are prepared to pay for data on each and everyone of us and who will quite happily and openly talk about data as currency. The only thing they won't do is tell you how much your data is actually worth to them. You have to infer this from some of the deals they do such as Facebook's purchase of WhatsApp for $ 20 bn. At the time WhatsApp had about 400 mn users so that's around $ 50 per user as a rough guide.
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Friday 19th July 2019 13:56 GMT timlibert
Re: Paranoid much
Hi, study co-author here quoted in the article. In some parts of the world you can still be killed for being gay, so the "END GAME" may actually be getting killed because you looked at the wrong kind of porn. Even short of that, the embarrassment caused by the Ashley Madison hack result in people killing themselves - it is likewise within the realm of reason that if porn habits were leaked (always a risk), the consequences could be grave.
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Friday 19th July 2019 20:12 GMT CountCadaver
Re: Paranoid much
i.e. UK.gov or Holyrood.gov decides that x type of porn is now illegal and the law applies retrospectively / that or if its found in your browsing history your a sick pervert........
Already there have been multiple attempts to ban porn entirely in Scotland, generallty pushed by extremists such as SWAP, only failed last time after an intervention from Feminists Against Censorship....
Anti sex / porn fanatics won't give up, they'll run their committee hearings over and over, court the media, call "witnesses" who support their view, get them to weep on camera about how distressed porn makes them and how these people appearing in it are unwittingly brainwashed and exploited, along with "it deems ALL women so MUST be stopped IMMEDIATELY" and try through attrition to get their own way.....
Holyrood particularly is becoming a Fruitopia, catering to some of the most illiberal proposals I've ever heard......
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Friday 19th July 2019 14:45 GMT Bill Gray
Re: Paranoid much
I can't honestly say that it's actually much of a problem in my own case. (Quite aside from my not being "famous", my interests are pretty vanilla... nothing involving catcher's mitts, aquatic waterfowl, or appliances requiring three-phase power. If people know I sometimes have enjoyed looking at attractive women who seem to have mislaid their clothing, I'm not fussed about it.)
For me, the concern is that this tracking data can be used by anybody who has access to it for nefarious purposes. (US TLA to Russian/Chinese legislator, or vice versa : "We have the following data on your somewhat astonishing preferences; would you like to help us or have us leak all?" TLA to its own legislators: "Increase our funding and let us do what we want, or...")
Circa 1990, I almost got a US security clearance (contract involved got cancelled). I recall the big concern was whether my colleagues and I could be blackmailed for anything. At the time, that would have required a lot of investigation by Soviets that was unlikely to occur. Now, though, I doubt such data is more than a few keystrokes away for government agencies.
Note that I don't intend this as a slam against a particular government. Any TLA in any country would eagerly abuse this sort of data for use against other governments; to disarm unilaterally would be foolish.
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Friday 19th July 2019 20:18 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Paranoid much
LGB isn't an issue but Trans is still heavily discriminated against. Newspapers running dogwhistle campaigns against trans activists. Gregor Murray hounded out of Dundee City Council after a relentless withhunt by DC Thomson paper "The Courier" and then censured by the standards committee for referring to an abusive and anti trans campaigner as a TERF (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist) - a very apt term for said activist, yet the female led committee decided that TERF was an insult.
SNP also chose to take the side of one of their Grandees Joan McAlpine after she issued anti trans comments and to compound it,she then invited a radical feminist, who is banned from twitter for anti trans bigotry to address the Scottish Parliament, under the heading of "protecting women".
Its the 80s and 90s anti gay witchunts again, just this time targeted at the trans community.
Shameful and newspapers are getting away with running hate campaigns without challenge
I have friends who are trans and the bigotry they face daily is horrific and utterly shameful.
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Saturday 20th July 2019 20:20 GMT Muscleguy
Re: Paranoid much
Except TERF is used by TRA's as an insult and meant as such. It also a label meant to shame people.
That you know oppressed Trans people doesn't mean it is okay to open ALL female only spaces to ANYONE who self declares. It isn't your friends, I hope, who are the problem but throwing decades of hard won safeguarding under the bus is not the route to justice and fairness for Trans people.
The problem is the TRA's are not interested in dialogue and in finding middle compromise solutions. It is their way lock, stock and barrel or get called Transphobic, TERF and threatened with violence and have a lynch mob persuade twitter etc to ban you for pointing out biological facts. This has and continues to happen.
I'm a Physiologist and Developmental Biologist and I do not subscribe to magical thinking. I also have a wife (separated), two daughters, three sisters and five nieces. So I get to care about safeguarding issues and I will give up biological reality over my dead body and I'm 6' and broad shouldered if any TRA's fancy using their lady bats on me. I presume you know about lady bats? and what they are for.
And tell me what sort of person, Mermaids, want to give children drugs so their bodies do not go through puberty and stay pre-pubescent? Again your Trans friends might be the nicest people ever but Trans is being used as cover for paedophilia and rape and getting access to vulnerable women in what should be safe spaces. Most of them are agressive TRA's.
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Sunday 21st July 2019 22:19 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Paranoid much
Get a life - Paedophilia and rape??? Shrillness and false allegations much?
There are kids who have gender dysphoria as diagnosed by specialist doctors and this isn't something pushed by their parents, these kids go through hell on earth trying to be themselves and whats worse than feeling like your stuck in the wrong gender's body? Injections delay puberty nothing more, It means should this kid reach 16/18 and they are still deadset on feeling like they are in the wrong body then transition surgery is easier and it avoids the psychological trauma in the meantime (And these kids can and do commit suicide from being forced to go through puberty into what is to them the "wrong gender"
Equally if they change their mind, they stop the medication and they go through puberty quite rapidly.
And anti trans activists have NEVER threatened violence against any trans person? Never committed violence against any trans person? NEVER verbally abused any trans person? NEVER falsely accussed any trans person? NEVER incited a newspaper hate campaign? NEVER used the term "tranny" or any other anti trans pejorative? (answer they have and still do)
FYI I have a seriously disabled wife so far more vulnerable than virtually any other woman and she is fully supportive of trans people and has never felt threatened by trans people, as opposed to other women who she has witnessed many times verbally abuse other women, assault other women and worse.......
You bandy about your job title like it makes you an expert on gender dysphoria, it doesn't, just reminds me of a guy who was an adult volunteer with the cadets who thought he knew everything medical and liked to intimate he was virtually a Dr, why? because he worked for the blood transfusion service....
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Saturday 20th July 2019 14:30 GMT Bill Gray
Re: Paranoid much
@toejam13 : "...As being LGBT becomes more normalized, that threat is disappearing."
That very point was raised during my circa 1990 near-clearance event. The gent guiding us through the process said that the TLAs were rather happy that homosexuality was no longer quite such good blackmail material in the West. He didn't say it, but I assume the fact that it's still top-notch blackmail material in Russia, the Middle East, and China also makes (US) TLAs happy.
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Friday 19th July 2019 17:22 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Paranoid much
It depends. One of the most famous porn actresses of the 80s, Traci Lords, turned out to be 15 when she started in the biz. She's the main reasons for those big "custodian of records" messages. No, before you ask, she looked like just all the other ladies, these were AAA porn movies done by major porn studios. That is to say, refreshingly "romantic and normal" compared to the much nastier stuff and simulated abuse that is quick becoming the norm in some modern porn.
2-3 years later, the news leaked that she had used fake IDs and all but her last film, done legally, got taken off-market. Much better screening got put in place, amidst the rumor that she hadn't been the only one.
Flash forward to today. Her last film wasn't great, but Pornhub will show clips of some of her other movies. Which technically means the viewer is then watching underage porn. This could apply to other "vintage" movies, because the records had been so spotty until then. Combined with this ubiquitous knowledge about who's fapping to what and there could be some nasty surprises waiting if someone was really motivated to go after you and you happened to be a nostalgic lad with the same tastes as millions of others in your age cohort.
Good job on the article and paper.
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Saturday 20th July 2019 19:06 GMT Muscleguy
Re: Paranoid much
I am applying for a low level govt job*, through to the interviews in fact but it is still subject to fairly intensive vetting. All your recent addresses for eg. They didn't say anything about social media logins but you never know or maybe they don't need to know.
*It's a glorified call centre that also does online, they need 100 bodies stat so I'm not taking my progress thus far too much to heart. I will go get a haircut though and decide which tie to wear. I've already decided the one with Tas the Tasmanian Tiger arms up and growling has already been nixed. But reserved for Dress Down Friday if I get hired.
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Friday 19th July 2019 08:26 GMT Anonymous Coward
Incognito mode isn't incognito
Well duh. The only thing that incognito mode prevents is your wife finding out. Even Comcast still knows what you're doing. It's the equivalent of using a burner computer which you use once and throw away afterwards. Your ISP still knows it's you; the websites still know your IP; any service you log into still identify you.
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Friday 19th July 2019 11:46 GMT STOP_FORTH
Re: Incognito mode isn't incognito
The real irony is that a website like the Reg doesn't know (or at least, doesn't say) that incognito mode doesn't actually do very much at all.
If you use IE, Firefox, Edge, Chrome, Safari or Opera, you might want to head over to www.nirsoft.net and download their browser history application.
Only works on later versions of Opera (Chrome-based ones.)
You need to fiddle around a bit to get Edge to work with this.
Do come back and tell us what you find!
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Friday 19th July 2019 14:57 GMT Roland6
Re: Incognito mode isn't incognito
>you might want to head over to www.nirsoft.net and download their browser history application.
BrowsingHistoryView and ChromeHistoryView do give some interesting results.
What is also interesting is that it seems Chrome doesn't actually attempt to 'clean' the history cache until it starts up.
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Friday 19th July 2019 12:38 GMT Anonymousse Coward
Re: Incognito mode isn't incognito
The funny thing is that you think that posting as a user name is somehow different than posting as AC. Back in the good ole days of the internet we all used screen names that allowed us some semblance of hiding our real identities. Along comes Facebook and now everyone realizes that hiding your identity is pointless for 99.9% of the world because no one else knows who you are and/or doesn't care anyway.
There are always going to be cases of people using information against other people in ways that are not the nicest but it still doesn't matter. As society transforms and our population continues to grow the idea of needing to remain anonymous has less value because there actually almost no way to remain anonymous beyond the fact that we're all anonymous because we no longer care who anyone else is.
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Friday 19th July 2019 19:06 GMT JLV
Re: Incognito mode isn't incognito
Don't be stupid.
Some things can come back to bite you at any time. Things that can be objectionable to some, things that you said in the heat of the moment, ill-considered postings. Best keep them at arms length.
Keeping your activities moderately private, by either AC or other means, bring in 2 benefits:
- Plausible deniability, which largely assumes that people won't care much if it's not clearly you.
- An unpleasant exposure to the person making the claim. I am not sure which politician in the 90s tried to leak a list of his opponent's unsavory VHS rentals, but it ended up as a shitstorm on their head instead. How did they access that data?
But, yeah, if you're a FB or Instagram user who can't stop blabbing about the sandwich you had for lunch, I get that none of this makes any sense to you. Nor does it make it sense if you buy into FB's self-appointed quest to graph everyone to everyone and everything else.
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Wednesday 24th July 2019 12:18 GMT JohnSheeran
Re: Incognito mode isn't incognito
I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm not saying you're right. I'm saying that it doesn't really matter. It only matters if you are in the public eye or are somehow impacted by public opinion. Even then, I'm not sure it matters as much as you think. Case in point; Donald Trump. He was recorded making statements on numerous occasions that would have ended most everyone else's political career yet he plowed forward and didn't acknowledge the statements and it hasn't held him back. While I think it's all a bad precedent and I don't like where this is all heading I also recognize that it just doesn't seem to matter either way.
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Friday 19th July 2019 13:42 GMT timlibert
Re: Incognito mode isn't incognito
Hi, study co-author here quoted in the article. One thing to keep in mind is the average El Reg reader knows vastly more about computers, the Internet, and tracking than normal people. There is ample research that shows average people have near zero understanding of how this stuff works and in many cases think common forms of traffic monitoring and price discrimination are illegal (when they are fully legal in the US, less so in the EU).
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Friday 19th July 2019 09:30 GMT Roland6
Re: Just out of curiosity
>If you block 3rd-party cookies in your safety settings, and use NoScript and an ad blocker, are you safer from tracking ?
Only if you also enable their usage in incognito mode as this seems not to be the default setting.
(I tend to use incognito mode as a quick way to get around those sites that detect ad blocking - I allow ad's but what you see and what remains after I close the session will be limited.)
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Friday 19th July 2019 15:56 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Just out of curiosity
Agreed. There are several research papers regarding user-tracking using methods other than cookies, and from what I recall, between your IP address (IPv6 being worse than IPv4) and your browser fingerprint, you can be tracked sans-cookies with a fairly high degree of certainty.
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Friday 19th July 2019 11:57 GMT Spangle
Re: Just out of curiosity
Assuming youre using your phone - orbot and orfox are handy. I use orfox to browse with noscript. Video doesnt stream well over tor though so if im going to watch youtube i put my other browser through the vpn option of orbot.
As far as i know... this means theres a file somewhere about a guy in iceland that youtube knows about.
My isp has nothing but a tor node
And unless i am of interest to the government... i dont think anyone can collect info on me outside phone version os etc etc.
If theres a flaw in my plan - please advise.
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Friday 19th July 2019 17:56 GMT timlibert
Re: Just out of curiosity
The structural incentives of computer science research place a high premium on papers proving weaknesses in Tor, and for a lot of people there is significant professional prestige to be gained from breaking it. While I don't always agree with the way academic incentives are structured, in this case it offers some degree of confidence that very smart people would very much like to find and publish a flaw and do so as quickly as possible to scoop other researchers.
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Saturday 20th July 2019 07:37 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Just out of curiosity
If you block 3rd-party cookies in your safety settings, and use NoScript and an ad blocker, are you safer from tracking ?
Asking for a friend, of course.
Only if you use your friend's IP address. Irrespective of what you do, the moment you pull data from a website you'll end up with an entry in access.log because that's simply how things work (well, Apache, no idea about MS stuff, that may just send it straight to Microsoft to boot). If you don't have it locked down, it wll also flag your presence via images that the website loads from 3rd parties - even the FONT may be enough if they use Google fonts (that's cached, but it still gives them an initial hit, plus changing parameters at Google's end may limit that cache timing).
So, best use someone else's IP address. PS: if you use a VPN, you merely give the VPN provider access to your surfing habits.
Of course, the best approach would be to use the Tor network, but that is (a) usually a bit short on usable bandwidth and (b) quite often blocked by sites (not just the dodgy ones) because the majority of traffic from those nodes are hacking attempts.
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Friday 19th July 2019 11:20 GMT andy 103
Well, yes
It even says this in the "how private browsing" thing works for Chrome
https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/7440301
When you browse privately, other people who use the device won't see your activity.
Chrome doesn't save your browsing history or information entered in forms. Cookies and site data are remembered while you're browsing, but deleted when you exit Incognito mode.
Your activity might still be visible
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Your activity might still be visible to:
Websites you visit, including the ads and resources used on those sites
So, it won't save cookies permanently whist using Incognito. But it will quite happily read the ones that were set when you weren't.
Solution: use Incognito for everything, from day 1. Close and re-launch the browser after your, ahem, "sessions".
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Friday 19th July 2019 13:07 GMT Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse
Re: VPN and DNS over HTTPS
Just make sure it's (A) not a free VPN - they have to make their money somehow, so guess how they do it? (B) One that is very clear and open about its privacy intent, what data it stores, and that it implements PFS, and (C) not one of these browser based VPNs such as Opera - which isn't actually a VPN at all - but a web proxy.
I'm so sales shill, but I use AirVPN. I did my research well.
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Friday 19th July 2019 12:47 GMT Mr Sceptical
22,484 !!
HOW MANY???
Just how many variations of the word porn, pr0n, tubes, domesticated mammals, insertable objects are there? Far more than I imagined it seems. Must cater for every fetish under the sun (or in a dungeon)...
I'm genuinely curious how they identified this many sites - do you Google for 'porn' and check every single search result? I can only think of a few famous ones.
And just how long did the 'research' take? "Sorry, can't come in today, I've got RSI again..."
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Friday 19th July 2019 13:41 GMT timlibert
Re: 22,484 !!
Hi, I'm the co-author of the paper quoted in the article. In regards to your question we downloaded the top one million Alexa sites, then extracted any sites that had "porn" in the title, url, or meta description. It turns out it is a totally unique sub-string which is very helpful for matching. The tracking analysis was done by an automated system, webXray.
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Friday 19th July 2019 15:07 GMT Harry Stottle
Don't forget "Canvas Fingerprinting"
Even if you trust your VPN provider (I do. I use and recommend the - open source but paid - PIA ) that only protects you from IP tracking. The growing threat is the use of Canvas fingerprinting for which you need to install tools like "CanvasFingerprintBlock" for Chrome (and derivatives) or the equivalents for Firefox, Opera etc.
And I strongly recommend (for ALL browsing, whether or not onanistically motivated) the use of Sandboxie (or an equivalent), set for automatic deletion on exit, so that anything the bastards drop onto your system is automatically wiped at the end of each browser session. This combination enables you to permit all the cookies they can eat without rendering any part of your system or browsing patterns subsequently trackable.
Oh, and timlibert: did your survey perchance check how many of the sites were using Canvas Fingerprinting?
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Friday 19th July 2019 21:23 GMT timlibert
Re: Don't forget "Canvas Fingerprinting"
Most of my research is focused on attribution of the tracking (eg figuring out what companies are getting the data, where they are based, their policies, etc) than how the tracking is happening. With sufficiently large pool of IP addresses, timestamps, and basic UA data there is a lot of tracking to be done with fairly high reliability that doesn't need any client-side magic (See Yen et al, 2012, Host fingerprinting and tracking on the web: Privacy and security implications). While I'm not a gambling man, I'd be fairly comfortable placing a wager that the machine learning PhDs working in adtech can do quite a bit on HTTP logs.
In my opinion VPNs shouldn't be trusted unless you roll it yourself, mainly because if you do roll it yourself you'll at least be sufficiently aware of the limitations to be smart about it.
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Friday 19th July 2019 16:17 GMT jelabarre59
team of researchers
A team of researchers at Microsoft, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), and the University of Pennsylvania in the US analysed 22,484 pornography websites...
And I'm sure they had to make sure those sites were well and thoroughly studied... All for science, of course.
And they probably passed on the more "scientifically curious" ones on to their colleagues to make extra studies on.
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Friday 19th July 2019 19:10 GMT The Nazz
Dear websites, Researchers ....
Asking for a friend, natch, but could you please include "NO TATTOOS" as an option, in fact as a default filter? Thanks.
As you will know i, i mean my friend, is partial to that era where the rather fetching french ladies actually look decent with their clothes on. Within the "Golden Age" of porn, circa 1977-1984 (give or take a bit) my friend reckons you'd be (un)lucky to see more than a handful (ooooh errr missus) of tattoos. Suntans, tan lines galore. FTW.
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Friday 19th July 2019 23:12 GMT Anonymous Coward
Don’t care
Someone needs to write an app that while I’m sleeping will play (search for) random midget porn videos.
I’d like to see the profile/model they come up with, dude watches 6 hours of midget porn every night... that would be hilarious. Maybe add 1 hour of sex toy research and dungeon accessories... LOL
I wonder if a future employer would be impressed “never seen anyone with that much stamina and dedication”.
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Monday 5th August 2019 22:41 GMT Maty
Outfits such as Google etc might know all your smutty details, but its hard to weaponize that stuff against individuals.
Let's say for example you have absolute 100% certain evidence that random politician, let's call him BJ (appropriately) has been browsing highly inappropriate websites. If you publish this information, people are going to reasonably ask where you got it from. Somehow I can't see Google or his ISP coming forward and saying 'Well yes, it was us. We keep everyone's highly private information and we don't keep it secret.' Well, they could do it once - then the shitstorm from a very worried and guilty public is going to hit them hard.
Furthermore BJ can go the Trump route, and just shrug it off as just another slur. He can reasonably point out that anyone with the means to verifiably discover that information also has the means to credibly fake it. In an age of deepfakes, a film showing him personally receiving the Order of Lenin from Putin for sabotaging the British economy can be dismissed as just a clever video manip.
After all, everyone knows you can't trust stuff you find on the internet.