Brett Thomas, a San Francisco-based software engineer, has written in a post on his blog that if you've watched porn online in 2015, "even in Incognito1 mode", then brace2 yourself because "you should expect that at some point your porn viewing history will be publicly released and attached to your name".
旧金山软件工程师布雷特·托马斯在其个人博客中写道:2015年,如果你在网上观看过色情片,“即便你看的时候使用了隐身模式”,也要有所准备,因为不知道什么时候,你的色情片浏览记录和你的大名将一起被公之于众。
In 2014
hackers4 claimed to have leaked the password details of more than 13,000 Xbox and Playstation users, as well as users of online stores, and there have been regular instances of hackers posting internet users' bank details online. In these instances users have been easily identifiable, but
browser5 footprints, global identifiers and user tracking mean that even supposedly
anonymous6 internet users could potentially be identified.
In August last year
purportedly7 naked photographs of more than 100
celebrities8 were leaked online by a
hacker3 onto the website 4chan. Mr Thomas, a Harvard graduate, argues that "regular people" could be next. "I think the next big internet privacy crisis could expose the private and potentially embarrassing personal data of regular people to their neighbors," he writes. He even suggests how it could work - by matching up an internet user identifiers with the logs from an adult website the user has visited, it would be possible to infer "beyond
plausible9 deniability" what films the user has been watching.