Watching porn in incognito mode? Study finds you are being secretly tracked by Google, Facebook

If you are in habit of watching porn secrety, beware! Its no more a private affair as Google, Facebook and even Oracle cloud reportedly keep a track on the porn you watch even in the "incognito" mode on your laptop or smartphone. A new joint study from Microsoft, Carnegie Mellon University and University of Pennsylvania that investigated 22,484 sex websites using a tool called "webXray" came out with this startling revelation that 93 per cent of pages track and leak users` data to third-party organisations, said an IANS report.

The researchers who identified 230 different companies and services tracking users in their sample reportedly said, "Tracking on these sites is highly concentrated by a handful of major companies." 

"The majority of non-pornography companies in the top 10 are based in the US, while the majority of pornography-specific companies are based in Europe," they added. 

Of non-pornography-specific services, Google tracks 74 per cent of sites, Oracle 24 per cent and Facebook 10 per cent. Porn-specific trackers in top 10 are exoClick (40 per cent), JuicyAds (11 per cent) and EroAdvertising (9 per cent).

The researchers, including Elena Maris, Microsoft Research; Timothy Libert, Carnegie Mellon University; and Jennifer Henrichsen, University of Pennsylvania, reportedly said that they successfully extracted privacy policies for 3,856 sites - 17 per cent of the total.

The team created a hypothetical profile named "Jack" who decides to view porn on his laptop to reach this conclusion. Jack enables "incognito" mode in his browser, assuming his actions are now private, and pulls up a site and scrolls past a small link to a privacy policy. Assuming a site with a privacy policy will protect his personal information, Jack clicks on a video.

"What Jack does not know is that incognito mode only ensures his browsing history is not stored on his computer. The sites he visits, as well as any third-party trackers, may observe and record his online actions," the researchers noted.

According to the study, these third-parties may even infer Jack`s sexual interests from the URLs of the sites he accesses and might also use what they have decided about these interests for marketing or building a consumer profile. They may even sell the data. 

In the year 2017, Pornhub, one of the largest porn websites, received 28.5 billion visits, with users performing 50,000 searches per second on the site, said the report. Although statistics vary as to the amount of overall porn activity on the internet, a 2017 report indicated porn sites get more visitors each month than Netflix, Amazon, and Twitter combined, and that "30 per cent of all the data transferred across the Internet is porn", with site YouPorn using six times more bandwidth than Hulu.

Porn-viewing habits: Google to fix loophole 

After facing criticism over letting third-party organization get access to users` viewing habits even while browsing in `Incognito` mode, Google has stated that Chrome will fix a loophole that has allowed sites to detect people who are browsing the web privately. This confirms that a loophole is indeed there in "Incognito" mode allowing site owners and publishers to detect when people are browsing privately, including porn.

Barb Palser, a Partner Development Manager at Google, said in a blog post, "People choose to browse the web privately for many reasons. Some wish to protect their privacy on shared or borrowed devices, or to exclude certain activities from their browsing histories." 

According to him, Chrome will remedy a loophole that has allowed sites to detect people who are browsing in `Incognito` Mode, adding "This will affect some publishers who have used the loophole to deter metered paywall circumvention." 

Notably, Google`s acknowledgment came after the new joint study revealed the startling facts.