MENLO PARK, CA - it was another hard week for Facebook (FB) as it closes out a tumultuous year. It was revealed on Monday that the tech giant not only sold access to direct messages to other industry behemoths, but that they also sold compiled lists of users’ sexual fetishes to the pornography aggregation site Pornhub.
Just as Netflix and Spotify used access to 2.2 billion Facebook users’ seemingly private communications to improve their recommendation algorithms, so has the video pornography site similarly used extracted information about personal sexual fantasies and proclivities to enhance their user experience. “Beyond just mining for explicit textual desires such as ‘I wanna tongue-punch your fartbox’ to show that user more anilingus content, we’ve expanded into what we call ‘meta content’,” explains Beverly Harris, Pornhub’s chief analytics officer, “such as an individual user’s propensity to respond favorably to both dick pics.” Should someone continue conversation, or even solicit, self-photography of another’s genitalia, the porn site will flag these users as “Down to Fuck (DTF)” and offer them more hardcore videos as soon as the arrive at Pornhub’s homepage.
Although Facebook is currently reeling from such an improper exposure of private user data, Pornhub sees it as a benefit to everybody. “We’re giving porn-watchers a nudge down their true paths” Ms. Harris says, “some toward their complete sexual depravity” as recommendations will appear for “super weird stuff, like tentacle hentai, or diaper stuff” if regression analyses of Facebook messages reveal that certain users might be into that kind of thing.
Although Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive officer, appeared before congress in April to answer for the data breach that allowed Cambridge Analytica to improperly harvest user data to sway the 2016 presidential campaign, he appears particularly worried about this most recent scandal should he have to potentially testify to all kinky shit he asks his wife, Priscilla Chan, to send him at work.