• by George Simpson , Featured Contributor, July 18, 2019

This week’s feel-good Internet business story in TheNew York Times revealed that Google (or one of its subsidiary companies like DoubleClick) had tracking cookies or pixels on 74% of some 22,484 pornography sites.

Facebook, which does not permit pornographic content or nudity on any of its platforms, had trackers on 10% of the sex websites scanned by the study. Most bizarrely, Oracle had trackers on 24% of the sites. 

None of the offenders had a reasonable or even remotely logical reason for the trackers. Oracle, which was presumably so aghast at having been found out, offered no explanation at all.

“The fact that the mechanism for adult site tracking is so similar to, say, online retail should be a huge red flag,” Dr. Elena Maris, the study’s lead author, told the Times. “This isn’t picking out a sweater and seeing it follow you across the web. This is so much more specific and deeply personal.” 

The entire population of these United States is in denial about web porn, which everyone thinks it is just terrible and a further step toward the fall of Western civilization — yet they have all been there, done that and tried to figure how just how much time Junior spends on those same sites every day. (Not that teens need porn sites, since their cell phones enable them to create their own).

Without going into the misogyny, degradation and human trafficking involved in at least some content, porn has replaced the awkward middle-school class that tried to thread the tiny needle of explaining sexuality without being prurient or offending more conservative local parents. 

It has also largely replaced YOUR little birds and bees chat that you keep putting off, hoping it instead gets covered in that awkward middle-school class. What you think will be enlightened, balanced wisdom on how to become a sensitive, considerate, responsible sexual teenager and adult was preempted a couple of years prior by shared links.

I am not so certain most people care that everyone else knows they have been to porn sites (with the very real exception of your wife), but with Google and Facebook and Oracle trackers all over the place, exactly what you are looking at on porn sites in no longer a secret. And you will never get away with saying that you were just curious to see what happened when people “did that” to each other. It is now recorded history that you spent two and a half hours “just glancing by mistake” — and squarely meeting the conventional definition of a perv if it ever gets out.

With folks like That Trash Heap in the White House and his associate Jeffrey Epstein setting examples for your kids, I’m not sure that porn should be your biggest worry, but it might be worth dropping the Times story on your kid’s pillow, then explaining what ad trackers are and do.

It’s entirely your choice to tell them you’re in the tracking business yourself.