pornhub.tracking.exposed was the first technical tool to collect data on Pornhub’s personalization algorithm.
Over the years, it has been used to understand more about the porn industry giant, to produce academic material, and to report a compliance to data protection authorities. This timeline is a summary of the project’s achievements.
- February 2019: alpha release of pornhub.tracking.exposed on github, firefox and chrome extension store; Check out the initial problem assessment about Pornhub content dynamics.
Claudio Agosti, Giulia Corona
- January 2020: the first Collective Observation inviting Redditors to follow a sequence of predetermined actions. Around a hundred participants watched porn for science. The collected evidence was enough for us to start to understand how Pornhub recommendations work.
Salvatore Romano, Giulia Corona, Claudio Agosti
- January 2021: With University of Milan and others we start to design a set of experiments, found plenty of evidences, and selected some for a future academic publication.
Ilir Rama, Lucia Bainotti, Alessandro Gandini, Giulia Giorgi, Silvia Semenzin, Claudio Agosti, Giulia Corona, Salvatore Romano
- March 2021: The first Reset grant allows us to focus on strategic litigation. We started collecting evidence to bring PornHub to court.
Salvatore Romano, Giulia Corona, Claudio Agosti, Alessandro Polidoro
- September 2021: We obtained a Digital Freedom Fund grant to focus on using GDPR against the potential violations of Pornhub, this allowed us to scale in different EU countries and repeat the data collection.
Claudio Agosti, Marc Faddoul, Alessandro Polidoro
- March 2022: Filed a legal report in Italy (so called “Segnalazione” pursuant to art. 144 of the Italian Privacy Code).
Salvatore Romano, Giulia Corona, Claudio Agosti, Alessandro Polidoro
- May 2022: Published the paper: The Platformization of Gender and Sexual Identities: An Algorithmic Analysis of Pornhub on Porn Studies journal.
Ilir Rama, Lucia Bainotti, Alessandro Gandini, Giulia Giorgi, Silvia Semenzin, Claudio Agosti, Giulia Corona, Salvatore Romano
- August 2022: Filed a GDPR compliant in Cyprus, where Pornhub legal seat is located.
Salvatore Romano, Giulia Corona, Claudio Agosti, Alessandro Polidoro
- June 2023: Tracking Exposed completed its course, and StopDataPorn announced to the public with a Press Release, and Filed a GDPR compliant in Italy.
StopDataPorn collective
- July 2023: first reaction to PornHub response: New Announcement: “Tech giant gets spanked for not asking consent, then tries to clean up the mess with tiny cookie banner”.
StopDataPorn collective
- August 2023: the Digital Freedom Fund released a public update describing the progress, check them out!
Follow the updates on StopDataPorn.