In that solitary dialogue between your brain and the screen while surfing the internet, it feels like whatever you view is yours and yours alone. But contrary to that feeling of privacy, your internet browsing is constantly being tracked by companies who are building an online profile of you.
This may not bother you when shopping for jeans or looking up movie times, but what about when you’re researching sensitive medical information, or viewing things of a private sexual nature?
A forthcoming study—authored by Annenberg School for Communication alumni Elena Maris and Timothy Libert and doctoral candidate Jennifer R. Henrichsen—analyzed over 22,000 pornography websites and found that 93% of them were sending user data to at least one third party. Google alone was tracking users on nearly 75% of the sites studied.
The research began when Libert, now core faculty at the CyLab Security and Privacy Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, contacted fellow students at Annenberg about a collaboration on privacy and pornography. Currently a postdoctoral fellow with Microsoft Research’s Social Media Collective, Maris, who focuses on the relationships between media and tech companies and their users, and Henrichsen, who studies the implications of surveillance and tracking on journalists, were excited to work with Libert, who had previously published research on online health privacy.
“Particularly in studies of technology and the internet, both technical and cultural sensibilities are needed to make sense of the complex challenges of the digital age,” says Maris. “Our study is a great example of the rich collaborative work that can emerge when people working with different methodologies and areas of expertise come together to think about the same problem.”
Using webXray and policyXray, software developed by Libert, the researchers were able to identify third party trackers present on pornography sites and extract sites’ privacy policies. The team then analyzed the data, finding an overwhelming lack of privacy and lack of transparency about privacy on these adult websites.
Read more at Annenberg School for Communication.
