Porn Viewing History Could Be Next Big Data Privacy Scandal, San Francisco Tech Blogger Writes
SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) -- A San Francisco-based software engineer is predicting that the next big tech-privacy scandal could involve the online pornography browsing history of regular internet users.
Brett Thomas wrote in his blog that hackers could develop porn viewing history using browser footprints left behind by viewers.
"If a malicious party obtained identifiable access logs for just one of the websites that know your name, and view logs for just one of the adult websites you've visited, it could infer with very high probability – beyond plausible deniability – a list of porn you've viewed," Thomas wrote in the blog.
Thomas writes that the tech community should be taking a more proactive approach to keeping data private, because policy measures could be "hastily enacted in response to such an event."
A Motherboard report found that thirty million Americans are watching porn online regularly. Salon reported that one porn site has even been sued for exploiting a software flaw to track the other adult sites their viewers had visited.