Visits to porn sites tracked by hundreds of companies

Nearly 900m internet users were tracked by hundreds of third-party internet and advertising companies when they visited pornographic sites this summer, according to Ghostery, a company that monitors online tracking.

Those tracking details can include information about the URL of the site, how long a person stays on the site and how many clicks they make there.

As a debate rages about digital privacy, concerns for the hundreds of millions of internet users who visit pornographic sites boil down to one issue: whether those activities are tracked and ultimately used to make judgments about them.

Privacy advocates fear that details about visits to adult-oriented sites could be incorporated into the vast dossiers that internet, advertising and data companies create about individuals, and are used to tailor the ads and content people see, among other purposes. Porn sites are estimated to make up at least 15 per cent of the internet.

A credit card company, for instance, could choose not to target ads to a person who frequently visits porn sites, judging them to be a higher risk customer. A gambling operation, meanwhile, could target more ads to people who spend hours visiting adult sites, considering them to have more addictive tendencies.

While some companies said that browsing behaviour from adult-oriented sites is not used to determine what ads people see, several internet and advertising companies' privacy policies do not explicitly bar the practice. Regulations and the industry's self-regulatory guidelines also do not prohibit the tracking or use of data related to a person's interest or participation in adult entertainment.

"As privacy professionals, we can over-think things at times, particularly when you start to look at how the technology works. But what do end users actually care about?" said Andy Kahl, director of data analysis at Evidon, the web analytics and privacy firm that owns Ghostery. "An average internet user browses things that they don't want other people to know about."

The news comes after revelations that the US National Security Agency tracked the visits to porn sites of six Muslims that could be used to harm their reputations, according to a document provided to the Huffington Post by Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower.

According to Ghostery data, 869 trackers were found on adult sites this summer. A majority of those tracking companies also gather information about people's activities as they surf the broader web. The information is based on data collected between June and August this year about the online activity of people who opt into Evidon's GhostRank panel.

Pornography dominates the web. About a quarter of online searches, or 68m per day, are for porn, according to analyst estimates. Those sites increasingly are reliant on advertising to make money, with subscription revenues plummeting from $20bn in 2005 to $10bn in 2011. Of the more than 5m pornographic websites, more than 85 per cent are estimated to be ad supported.

While pornographic sites long worked with ad technology companies that operated exclusively with adult entertainment sites, they more recently are tapping the same technologies and services that operate on the safe-for-work web.

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