Their Eyes Were Watching Porn

by Jordan Carr

Considering that you are on the Internet right now, the odds are that, if you’re not in an open-plan office, either your previous or next visit will be to a porn site. And when you do so, you may do it in your browser’s “privacy mode,” in order to cover your digital footsteps. But maybe you should hold off for a minute on that. A very important new study explains that the authors “show that many popular browser extensions and plugins undermine the security of private browsing.” The long and the short of it? If you are on the internet looking at porn, you are not safe. And worse, the study details exactly what portion of you people in private browsing are looking at porn. With bar graphs. We spoke to an author of the study to get more vital information about porn safety.

(You can read the study, by Dan Boneh, Gaurav Aggarwal, Elie Burzstein, and Collin Jackson in this PDF.)

As it turns out, the only self-restraint Safari users know about is of an auto-erotic nature. The study strikes an appropriately sober tone in the results section:

We found that private browsing was more popular at adult web sites than at gift shopping sites and news sites, which shared a roughly equal level of private browsing use. This observation suggests that some browser vendors may be mischaracterizing the primary use of the feature when they describe it as a tool for buying surprise gifts.

And with that, the scientists christened “buying surprise gifts” as a euphemism for masturbation.

You may have some questions — serious questions couched in irony — about this study, and what it means for your completely unironic porning, and also, I guess, your secretive news browsing. But fret not!

I contacted Dr. Aggarwal, a man who can now call himself one of the world’s foremost experts on sneakily watching porn, and he was generous enough to write back to me about his study.

Dr. Aggarwal cited a few reasons why he undertook this study: “People are concerned about their data on various websites and whether their browsing activities are being tracked by websites. Private browsing is also marketed as a special browsing mode that provides privacy against ‘local’ attacker [i.e. somebody using your computer while you’re away from it, even though you like, totally told them not to, and they still did it anyway. Why doesn’t anybody listen to me? I can’t wait until I move out of the house and get my own place without mom and dad always going through my things!] and also to some degree against tracking websites.”

And so “we wanted to study private browsing, define its threat model and analyze how good it is at providing privacy.”

Should we be concerned about their revelations?

“The most alarming [security weaknesses] in my opinion are browser extensions [basically, plugins and add-ons]. Most of these extensions are oblivious of private mode and can store URLs of sites being visited on disk.”

Okay, so these things are inadequate now…but surely some day in the future, private browsing will be truly private, a vast wonderland where the vast, guiltless porn horizon stretches as far as the eye can see, right? Right??? Dr. Aggarwal???

“It is not possible to guarantee that no state would be saved on disk in private mode — all browsers fail in one way or the other,” he wrote.

Or not.

“We need a better browser architecture for handling extensions,” he wrote. “Browsers need to agree on the goals for private browsing that are consistent with user’s expectation and the way this mode is marketed.”

Great. Lower your expectations people, and know that someone on the internet could be watching you right now, but only if you’re important enough to them. So, from now on, when you get on the internet, just ask yourself: “Am I as important as Ben Quayle?”

Photo from the First Goatse Flickr pool by Scott Perry.