I hope your employer and/or customers would share your attitude! Some people, depending on their occupation, might find their jobs at risk even with fairly "vanilla" viewing habits.

Perhaps your sex life is somewhat vanilla.

Imagine you are turned on by eating shit or being peed on - would you still feel so comfortable sharing g details about your sex life?

And of course, the wide spectrum in between

> I feel extremely fortunate that I am unashamed of my sexuality, sex drive, or sexual interests

You're also lucky to live somewhere where you wouldn't face job loss, familial estrangement or even anything up to capital punishment for it.

I remember the head of security for a large ISP in the mid-90s tapping the IRC PRIVMSG traffic and extorting some gay guys who weren't out.

> While I'd prefer that my porn history remain private

Thats a problem as well. Right now, you're 'safe'. But having that data available attached to you can also be dangerous to you in the future.

For example, the current wave of trans-hate can easily show you as a sympathizer. That can be criminalized quite easily, given 1/4 of the country hates trans people existing.

Being gay is right now not a crime in the USA, but it has been. And many regressive countries, predominantly Muslim, also have strong punishments for gay actions. Again, this material could easily be proof of a "deviant lifestyle" and legal punishments.

No, if I consume porn, I download from Piratebay, or hop on VPN and not login. And given I live in a state that Pornhub banned due to onerous age verification/identity tying, the whatif above could easily become true. Ive read Project2025 and saw those exact plans.

Agreed, but this was search and watch history. I can see an argument for not keeping search history, but if I'm paying for Spotify, YouTube, or Netflix, I'd like to go back to that song or video I enjoyed last week but can't recall the name of

In other words, this is data we as consumers want to be able to access, and therefore want kept.

I believe Bruce Schneier suggested more than twenty years ago now that we think of personal data as like a form of toxic waste or pollution, but this metaphor doesn't seem to have caught on widely.

A leak of politicians' dirty habits should hopefully do it.

We already had some of that with the Target credit card fuck up that birthed PCI rules, which in turn birthed lots of payment card processors just so companies could wash their hands of all card holder PII rather than meet with their insane auditors.

Interestingly enough there's a legislative push to make companies verify your real ID, I believe many porn companies already do this.

No clue but don’t some states require that you prove your age to view content? That would force you to share private information that could be leaked like this which is even more worrisome.

Maybe it’s similar to onlyfans where people get to chat with or receive messages from a model. People also create accounts to upload content.

Yeah, if users end up paying for this leak, this unfortunately ends up, practically, being a stupidity tax...

EDIT: Best argument for paying for porn is to support the performers, but paying for a generic porn streaming service hardly seems the best way to do this.

Why do you have a HN account? The internet is full of words.

This is a shining example of why I will never upload my ID to something I do not want publicly associated with me.

Websites that uses third-party analytics will at minimum send the IP address, time and the url when users access pages. It also very likely they will send API calls if the developers want to track those.

So if any calls looks like "https://example.invalid/api?confirmemail=user@example.invali..." would cause a leak of the email. I have seen multiple companies and websites do this (either with email or username) when signing up or after first login, and I would strongly guess that most of not all of them uses some kind of analytics for that request that leaked data.

Web developers are supposed to scrub their sites so that doesn't happen, but then the main arguments in favor of using third-party analytics is the convenience of enabling it globally with minimum effort and then getting pretty graphs for free. There are occasionally HN posts about self-hosting analytics and the common response is that its too hard and too much work.

https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/05/mixpanel-passwords/

3rd party user tracking can slurp up a lot of unexpected data, and no one ever wants to disclose problems when a vendor loses things like this. MixPanel has a long history of problems/

>This data includes a PornHub Premium member's email address, activity type, location, video URL, video name, keywords associated with the video, and the time the event occurred.

I had always known, albeit intuitively, that registering to porn websites was a dumb idea.

Time has proved me right.

I don’t love location tracking but their statistics blog posts are usually pretty funny/interesting. And I’m guessing part of this is to work with specific laws. I read that in US states with draconian laws, they’re actively blocking users.

Why as an engineer, would you log the entirety of a user’s info on mixpanel? I mean come on, how hard is it to have an obfuscated unique id for your users that can’t be traced back to them when logging info in third party apps? What benefit can you possibly get from logging email ids in mixpanel?

With an anonymous name and a throwaway email of course.

You might know that. I might know that. I can assure you that there are lots of people out there who don't realise it.

work email to sign up to a site like pornhub

Unless you actually work in the adult entertainment industry, that seems like a massively stupid move; one that would likely lead to termination.

But that transferred very sensitive data to a third party without anonymising the amount.

Just by replacing the email with a random anonymizedAccountId the impact would have been reduced from disaster to who cares. This was bad design from the start.

We may see some interesting news in a few days.