A group of researchers denounces Pornhub in Italy, for allegedly not complying with the rules of the General Data Protection Regulation of Europe.
When a user accesses pages like Pornhub, they are basically looking for anonymity and for their privacy to be fully protected, and it seems that on this site, at least in Italy, things are not being done well.
pornhub is facing a lawsuit, specifically in Italy, for allegedly illegally collecting various user information.
As reported by the Wired site, a group of activists filed a complaint against Pornhub Italia, stating that the site illegally handles the data of millions of people.
In addition, they claim that the site does not comply with the rules of the General Data Protection Regulation in Europe (GDPR).
According to the activist Alessandro Polidorothe site does not allow people to easily opt out of being tracked by cookies.
Apparently, not only is the site unclear about the data that is shared with third parties, but its algorithm assigns preferences based on the videos that the user has previously viewed.
The cookie problem
As far as cookies are concerned, the site only shows an informative banner about what collects them, but does not add a way to prevent tracking if the user considers it so.
According to the complaint, the site is able to store the IDs of the videos watched using the keys ‘watchedVideoStorage’ and ‘watchedVideoIds’, and every time the user watches a multimedia content of the site, even if they are not logged in the page, an identification number is added to a list of local storage of the browser.
The researchers denounce that Pornhub would be creating a parallel search history that is saved on the user’s device.
We will see what this complaint ends up with, because it is clear that users, when visiting these types of pages, do not want to leave any kind of trace and usually always choose not to be tracked in their browsing preferences.