More than 2 billion people visit Pornhub each month, spending an average of nearly eight minutes browsing and watching videos, an eternity in the age of the Internet. This activity has the potential to generate huge amounts of data.
Pornhub is currently facing a series of legal challenges across Europe over the data it collects. Complaints filed in the European Union allege that the porn site does not follow basic data collection policies under the GDPR, given that there are not many websites larger than Pornhub.
Activists and researchers in Italy are filing a complaint against Pornhub, claiming that the company is “illegally” handling the data of millions of people. The complaint is based on a technical analysis of the website and its privacy practices, and is also based on previously unreported complaints in both Italy and Cyprus, where Pornhub is headquartered in Europe. The complaints allege that the company is violating Europe’s strict GDPR rules, which govern how people’s data can and should be used.
Pornhub doesn’t make it easy for people to opt out of being tracked by cookies, the site is also unclear about what data it shares with third parties, and its algorithm “assigns” sexual preferences to people based on the videos they watch, according to Alessandro Polidoro, a digital rights activist and the lawyer leading the litigation.
Polidoro represents #StopDataPorn, a collective that includes researchers and civil liberties organizations involved in the action. Polidoro spoke to WIRED about the legal complaints but did not disclose the text, citing privacy concerns.
The complaints, which could take years to resolve, come as the world’s leading online adult industry faces increased scrutiny from privacy regulators around the world, with governments blocking sites that ask people to show ID to access adult material.
Polidoro says the group found “many” potential problems with how Pornhub uses people’s data, but has decided to focus on three areas. First, there’s the issue of people giving consent to be tracked, Polidoro says. Under European privacy laws, if a website wants to track someone, it has to get that consent. That’s why websites are required to have cookie consent pop-ups.
If you open YouTube, for example, in Europe, you’ll see a pop-up that explains how cookies are used and gives people the option to accept, decline, or customize them. But if you open Pornhub, you’ll see a banner at the bottom of the page that says the website uses cookies, includes an option to find out more, and a button that says “OK,” but doesn’t provide any way to opt out of cookies tracking you. (The banner doesn’t appear in the U.K. or U.S., according to WIRED testing.)
“Pornhub doesn’t ask for consent,” Polidoro says. “Pornhub is about sexual preferences and doesn’t ask for consent.” Polidoro says cookies are used whether someone clicks “OK” or not.
The second piece of GDPR concerns, Polidoro says, has to do with how Pornhub shares the information it collects with other companies owned by its parent company MindGeek, which is based in Canada and was recently acquired by private equity firm Ethical Capital Partners. The #StopDataPorn collective says there is little transparency about what data is being shared and how it is being used.
The third set of complaints alleges that Pornhub uses people’s data and “unilaterally assigns sexual preferences to each individual without their knowledge,” according to the collective. Polidoro says that watching a small number of videos is enough to show more about the type of content being viewed.
Freely available tools that monitor trackers used by websites, such as Blacklight and Privacy Badger, show that Pornhub data is being passed to Google through its own analytics and tag management platform, as well as through TrafficJunky, MindGeek’s own advertising platform.
TrafficJunky says its ads are being viewed 3.2 billion times a day.
The tracking technology used by Pornhub is able to store the IDs of videos that are viewed, using the keys “watchedVideoStorage” and “watchedVideoIds,” which are located on your computer or phone, WIRED tests found. Every time you watch a video, even if you are not signed in to Pornhub, an ID number is added to a list in your browser’s local storage. “They basically create a parallel search history that is stored directly on the user’s device,” Polidoro says.
A MindGeek spokesperson says the company does not comment on pending litigation and will respond “as appropriate and in a timely manner.” “MindGeek is committed to protecting user privacy and is continually implementing measures to safeguard the personal data of everyone in its community,” the spokesperson says.
Pornhub’s privacy policy, which details the data it can collect about people, says it uses cookies for multiple purposes. For example, it uses cookies to help people log in, to “personalize and improve” people’s online experience, to record how many people use its website, and to track which pages people visit and serve ads. “You can set your browser to refuse all or some browser cookies, or to notify you when cookies are being sent,” the privacy policy says. It also says Pornhub has Google Analytics IP anonymization enabled, so full IP addresses aren’t stored.
Emily van der Nagel, a social media lecturer at Monash University in Australia who researches social media identities, says that while Pornhub’s privacy policy includes what data it collects and uses, it’s “probably unlikely” that the average user would look at this information.
“If the data collection appears to be happening at a technical level, by an opaque organisation, with no understanding of the social consequences, then users are unlikely to seek to intervene in or out of the data collection,” Nagel says.
“If there’s a real threat of social harm, such as when pornography preferences emerge as targeted ads and are prominently displayed on a work computer, then users will know what data pornography websites are collecting about them and seek to intervene in that data collection and use.”
While a new GDPR complaint has been filed in Italy, the #StopDataPorn group also filed broader complaints last year through officials in Italy and Cyprus.
Irene Loizidou Nicolaidou, Cyprus’ data protection commissioner, says she cannot comment as there is a “pending audit” of Pornhub and the case is ongoing.
Much of the research behind the complaints was completed by Tracking Exposed, a digital rights group that developed a custom browser extension to analyze Pornhub’s personalization algorithm. The group published a peer-reviewed analysis of Pornhub’s algorithm in May 2022.
The complaints are likely to draw attention to the amount of data pornography websites collect and how they handle that information. Generally, pornography companies can collect vast amounts of data about who visits them. In 2019, researchers analyzed 22,484 pornographic websites and found that 93% of them leak data to third parties, 44.97% “expose or imply” a gender or sexual identity that could be linked to the user, and 79% use tracking cookies from third-party companies.
Google trackers were on the vast majority of websites, the research found. “Since Pornhub is modeled after YouTube, it’s no surprise that similar social media data practices are also present,” says Susanna Paasonen, a professor of media studies at the University of Turku in Finland who studies sexuality and pornography. “
The degree to which this is obvious to casual users is, however, impossible to predict.” Paasonen points out that in recent years Pornhub has highlighted how much data it can collect through its Insights series, which details traffic trends on the website and provides some transparency. “But since there are no opt-outs, as required by GDPR, and I doubt many users read their privacy policy, which makes tracking pretty obvious, transparency to users is questionable,” Paasonen says. For most people, using privacy browsers or privacy-enhancing browser extensions can help limit what data is collected and how it is tracked.
More than 2 billion people visit Pornhub each month, spending an average of nearly eight minutes browsing and watching videos, an eternity in the age of the Internet. This activity has the potential to generate huge amounts of data.
Pornhub is currently facing a series of legal challenges across Europe over the data it collects. Complaints filed in the European Union allege that the porn site does not follow basic data collection policies under the GDPR, given that there are not many websites larger than Pornhub.
Activists and researchers in Italy are filing a complaint against Pornhub, claiming that the company is “illegally” handling the data of millions of people. The complaint is based on a technical analysis of the website and its privacy practices, and is also based on previously unreported complaints in both Italy and Cyprus, where Pornhub is headquartered in Europe. The complaints allege that the company is violating Europe’s strict GDPR rules, which govern how people’s data can and should be used.
Pornhub doesn’t make it easy for people to opt out of being tracked by cookies, the site is also unclear about what data it shares with third parties, and its algorithm “assigns” sexual preferences to people based on the videos they watch, according to Alessandro Polidoro, a digital rights activist and the lawyer leading the litigation.
Polidoro represents #StopDataPorn, a collective that includes researchers and civil liberties organizations involved in the action. Polidoro spoke to WIRED about the legal complaints but did not disclose the text, citing privacy concerns.
The complaints, which could take years to resolve, come as the world’s leading online adult industry faces increased scrutiny from privacy regulators around the world, with governments blocking sites that ask people to show ID to access adult material.
Polidoro says the group found “many” potential problems with how Pornhub uses people’s data, but has decided to focus on three areas. First, there’s the issue of people giving consent to be tracked, Polidoro says. Under European privacy laws, if a website wants to track someone, it has to get that consent. That’s why websites are required to have cookie consent pop-ups.
If you open YouTube, for example, in Europe, you’ll see a pop-up that explains how cookies are used and gives people the option to accept, decline, or customize them. But if you open Pornhub, you’ll see a banner at the bottom of the page that says the website uses cookies, includes an option to find out more, and a button that says “OK,” but doesn’t provide any way to opt out of cookies tracking you. (The banner doesn’t appear in the U.K. or U.S., according to WIRED testing.)
“Pornhub doesn’t ask for consent,” Polidoro says. “Pornhub is about sexual preferences and doesn’t ask for consent.” Polidoro says cookies are used whether someone clicks “OK” or not.
The second piece of GDPR concerns, Polidoro says, has to do with how Pornhub shares the information it collects with other companies owned by its parent company MindGeek, which is based in Canada and was recently acquired by private equity firm Ethical Capital Partners. The #StopDataPorn collective says there is little transparency about what data is being shared and how it is being used.
The third set of complaints alleges that Pornhub uses people’s data and “unilaterally assigns sexual preferences to each individual without their knowledge,” according to the collective. Polidoro says that watching a small number of videos is enough to show more about the type of content being viewed.
Freely available tools that monitor trackers used by websites, such as Blacklight and Privacy Badger, show that Pornhub data is being passed to Google through its own analytics and tag management platform, as well as through TrafficJunky, MindGeek’s own advertising platform.
TrafficJunky says its ads are being viewed 3.2 billion times a day.
The tracking technology used by Pornhub is able to store the IDs of videos that are viewed, using the keys “watchedVideoStorage” and “watchedVideoIds,” which are located on your computer or phone, WIRED tests found. Every time you watch a video, even if you are not signed in to Pornhub, an ID number is added to a list in your browser’s local storage. “They basically create a parallel search history that is stored directly on the user’s device,” Polidoro says.
A MindGeek spokesperson says the company does not comment on pending litigation and will respond “as appropriate and in a timely manner.” “MindGeek is committed to protecting user privacy and is continually implementing measures to safeguard the personal data of everyone in its community,” the spokesperson says.
Pornhub’s privacy policy, which details the data it can collect about people, says it uses cookies for multiple purposes. For example, it uses cookies to help people log in, to “personalize and improve” people’s online experience, to record how many people use its website, and to track which pages people visit and serve ads. “You can set your browser to refuse all or some browser cookies, or to notify you when cookies are being sent,” the privacy policy says. It also says Pornhub has Google Analytics IP anonymization enabled, so full IP addresses aren’t stored.
Emily van der Nagel, a social media lecturer at Monash University in Australia who researches social media identities, says that while Pornhub’s privacy policy includes what data it collects and uses, it’s “probably unlikely” that the average user would look at this information.
“If the data collection appears to be happening at a technical level, by an opaque organisation, with no understanding of the social consequences, then users are unlikely to seek to intervene in or out of the data collection,” Nagel says.
“If there’s a real threat of social harm, such as when pornography preferences emerge as targeted ads and are prominently displayed on a work computer, then users will know what data pornography websites are collecting about them and seek to intervene in that data collection and use.”
While a new GDPR complaint has been filed in Italy, the #StopDataPorn group also filed broader complaints last year through officials in Italy and Cyprus.
Irene Loizidou Nicolaidou, Cyprus’ data protection commissioner, says she cannot comment as there is a “pending audit” of Pornhub and the case is ongoing.
Much of the research behind the complaints was completed by Tracking Exposed, a digital rights group that developed a custom browser extension to analyze Pornhub’s personalization algorithm. The group published a peer-reviewed analysis of Pornhub’s algorithm in May 2022.
The complaints are likely to draw attention to the amount of data pornography websites collect and how they handle that information. Generally, pornography companies can collect vast amounts of data about who visits them. In 2019, researchers analyzed 22,484 pornographic websites and found that 93% of them leak data to third parties, 44.97% “expose or imply” a gender or sexual identity that could be linked to the user, and 79% use tracking cookies from third-party companies.
Google trackers were on the vast majority of websites, the research found. “Since Pornhub is modeled after YouTube, it’s no surprise that similar social media data practices are also present,” says Susanna Paasonen, a professor of media studies at the University of Turku in Finland who studies sexuality and pornography. “
The degree to which this is obvious to casual users is, however, impossible to predict.” Paasonen points out that in recent years Pornhub has highlighted how much data it can collect through its Insights series, which details traffic trends on the website and provides some transparency. “But since there are no opt-outs, as required by GDPR, and I doubt many users read their privacy policy, which makes tracking pretty obvious, transparency to users is questionable,” Paasonen says. For most people, using privacy browsers or privacy-enhancing browser extensions can help limit what data is collected and how it is tracked.