Private porn browsing won’t stop Google and Oracle tracking your tastes

Industry Contributor 21 Jul 2019 - 2 min read

Private porn browsing won’t stop Google and Oracle tracking your tastes

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Tags: porn, data, privacy, Oracle

Oracle is one of the surprise big trackers of porn viewing habits, alongside Facebook and Google, and incognito mode makes no difference (The Register).

Key points:

Study of 22,000 porn sites led by Microsoft, Carnegie Mellon University and University of Pennsylvania indicates 93 per cent leak data to third parties
45 per cent of sites expose or suggest a specific gender/sexual identity or interest likely to be linked to the user
79 per cent of sites leak an average of nine cookies to third parties, just 17 per cent encrypted
Google tracks 74 per cent of porn sites, Oracle 24 per cent, Facebook 10 per cent, Cloudflare and Yadro 7 per cent, and New Relic and Lotame 6 per cent
Incognito mode makes no difference

There’s a firehose of data around people’s porn preferences being leaked in the name of relevant advertising. The study raises some serious questions around consent and compliance under data protection regulations such as GDPR, which has explicit rules around the sharing of sensitive data.

It’s also interesting to see who’s collecting that data, with Oracle the third largest tracker. (Oracle has spent the best part of two years weaponising Google’s own data arsenal against it in a lobbying effort on Washington, employing a ‘magic suitcase’ stuffed with comms equipment to show congressmen just how much data Google collects from Android phones.)

The release of the study, co-authored by Microsoft, comes as regulators start to get to grips with big tech and privacy. Given the implications for targeted advertising, marketers are increasingly keen to understand where there data is coming from, and whether it is compliant.