SOUTH AFRICA - NEW DATA BREACH MEANS SA CELLPHONE USERS TRACKED AS THEY SURFED PORN

A new data breach suggests South African cellphone users could have been tracked as they surfed pornography, though Vodacom and Telkom say their customers were not affected.

Google and Facebook do track porn surfing, though, even in browsers set to "private" or "incognito".
If you don't want to leave a record of your online habits (porn or otherwise), you can pay a couple of dollars for anonymity.

A South African company has reportedly leaked a massive database of web browsing history along with mobile-phone identifiers, and in some cases social media usernames, allowing some individuals to be identified – and linked to the pornography they viewed.

The breach was discovered by researchers at specialised review site vpnMentor, and first reported on by MyBroadband this week.

The unencrypted and publicly-available database it discovered ran to more than 890GB and contained more than a million records "from customers of numerous ISPs based in African and South American countries", vpnMentor said.

It provided a redacted example of the kind of detailed information it found relating to the kind of pornography one user downloaded, with some file names so explicit that they, too, were redacted.


Surfing example
(vpnMentor)
The data appeared to be gathered by a web filter created by Conor Solutions, a unit of JSE-listed Adapt IT. Conor Solutions counts Vodacom and Telkom among its customers, and the database features MSISDN numbers – mobile phone numbers – which suggests the data was scraped as cellphone users surfed the web.

Adapt IT confirmed it was aware of a breach of what it described as a "web usage logging portal"

Vodacom and Telkom said they do not use web filters from Conor, and do not believe their users' data had been compromised.

But the incident suggests that cellphone companies – or their suppliers – can not only track web surfing by their customers, but can inadvertently publish that information online.

Even if mobile providers do not engage in such tracking, Facebook and Google do, while websites – including pornographic websites – can use techniques such as "fingerprinting" to gather a lot of information about you, albeit falling short of linking that to a telephone number.

See also: Facebook and Google are tracking the porn you're watching, even when you're in incognito
While setting a browser to "private" or "incognito" mode means the sites you visit won't be captured in the browsing history of your computer or phone, that does nothing to mask your activity from your internet service provider (ISP) – or any third parties it gives access to that data.

You can, relatively easily, prevent the gathering of that information, as long as you are willing to spend a couple of dollars a month, and have at least a slightly slower internet connection.

via - BUSINESSINSIDER