Relax, your personal habits will be protected.
That’s the message from two of the world’s most popular adult internet sites — PornHub and YouPorn — after the passage of a bill on Tuesday in Congress that would allow online service providers to sell surfing history and other data to marketers.
“Here at Pornhub, with more than 70 million daily traffic, we wanted to keep our concerted effort to maximize the privacy of our users, making sure that what they do on our stage remains strictly confidential,” said Corey Price, the website’s vice president. “With the switch to [Hypertext Transport Protocol Service] we have the ability to guard their identity in addition to safeguard them against vulnerability to malware from third parties”
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While YouPorn will produce the dip, pornHub switched on Thursday to HTTPS. The sites, according to an announcement from the sister sites yesterday, are a couple of the most-visited sites. One of those 100 sites, 11 are destinations for porn and other adult content, but just three — RedTube, YouPorn and Pornhub — will default to HTTPS.
“The information on our webpages will then be encrypted, which makes it considerably harder for third parties to penetrate,” explained Brad Burns, YouPorn’s vice president. “Nowour community members may peruse our site even more safely, knowing they have that extra layer of security.”
What’s this mean to the average online porn consumer?
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Websites which adopt HTTPS — ones with a green padlock facing the URL — will give the user more peace of mind with encryption to keep information protected from third parties like net providers, in addition to protection against hackers and also the assurance that the website is authentic.
“If you are visiting websites that enable HTTPS, you don’t have to worry so much about what they are doing to observe your own traffic,” Joseph Hall, chief technologist at the middle for Democracy and Technology, told WIRED.
Meanwhile, the White House on Wednesday declared that President Trump plans to repeal the Obama administration’s broadband solitude rules, which would have mandated that employers get approval from consumers before selling sensitive data like medical history and financial particulars to other firms.
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“The market for net users’ information is extremely opaque,” Peter Eckersley, chief computer scientist in the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told The Post. “ISPs are making billions of dollars annually by selling information about their clients, but we don’t know which ISPs, and just how much they’re selling, and also which sort of data are fetching the greatest prices, because those trades are conducted in secret.”
On Tuesday, the White House explained in a blog post why Trump wants to ditch the Federal Communications Communication rule requiring broadband ISPs to gain consent from customers before selling their personal information to third parties.
“In particular, the rule requires ISPs to get optimistic’opt-in’ consent from consumers to utilize and share specific information, such as program usage and internet browsing history,” that the blogpost read. “It also permits ISPs to utilize and discuss other information, including email addresses and support tier info, unless a client’opts-out.’ The principle departs in the technology-neutral framework for internet privacy in doing this. This causes rules that apply very different regulatory regimes dependent on the identity of the online actor.”
