What Porn Streaming Sites Do With Your Data
In 2018 and beyond, it’s safe to assume that at least one company will constantly monitor everything you do on the Internet and profit from that data.
Yes, including porn.
A recent report from Quartz focuses on PornHub and its parent company, think tank MindGeek . While MindGeek’s website doesn’t mention anything about adult entertainment – its site looks like a template for a corporate website – the company owns a number of highly successful porn streaming sites and production companies. According to the report, MindGeek’s success is partly due to the fact that it collects data on everyone’s porn viewing habits and uses it to create more engaging porn.
What data does PornHub and its affiliates collect? In accordance with itsprivacy policy, PornHub records each user’s IP address and cookies, including their location, the time they visited, and what hardware / software they use to browse the site. PornHub (or any other porn site) matches the data from its sites with what the user is doing on the site – the videos they click, the videos they watch, how long they watch, etc. It is also, of course, attentive. keeps track of what people are looking for.
In addition, users can leave a ton of reviews on porn sites. To create a free account, PornHub users must provide their name, date of birth, and gender. With this account, they can (and often do) comment, download videos for offline viewing, and list their favorite videos, among other things. As with social media, every action you take on a porn site is a data point that needs to be recorded.
MindGeek extracts more of this data by altering small aspects of the video or its metadata to something that attracts more people – a practice called A / B testing that is constantly being done on the Internet. As you will see in the Quartz article, the results of this testing led to the creation of scripts that require very specific details depending on the user’s preference. Funnily enough, this isn’t much different from how Netflix uses your data for their shows.
Compared to other data collection companies such as Google, Microsoft and Facebook, MindGeek claims to relatively respect the privacy of its users. MindGeek told Quartz that while it uses user data to create porn and helps match videos with people, it does not sell that data to third parties. I’m not sure if this will make anyone more comfortable or satisfied with the situation, especially since PornHub often publishes reports that very extensively investigate how people use it. (His 2018 review came out this week.)
Of course, your web browser can also track your online activity , so chances are good that MindGeek isn’t the only one who knows what you’re watching. (Do you think that the private browser protects you? Then let’s clarify. It is not).
While it seems like it should be more confidential, there are no special steps that would need to be taken to specifically protect your porn viewing habits. Using anti-tracking software like DuckDuckGo can help, but to truly protect yourself, you need to use a VPN . The point is, you are not going to interfere with PornHub or any other tube site from following what you watch. The best thing you can do is make sure they don’t know who you are.
… Or you can go back to reading the magazines. It’s probably safe.