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Characterizing Web Pornography Consumption from Passive Measurements

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Passive and Active Measurement (PAM 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCCN,volume 11419))

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Abstract

Web pornography represents a large fraction of the Internet traffic, with thousands of websites and millions of users. Studying web pornography consumption allows understanding human behaviors and it is crucial for medical and psychological research. However, given the lack of public data, these works typically build on surveys, limited by different factors, e.g., unreliable answers that volunteers may (involuntarily) provide.

In this work, we collect anonymized accesses to pornography websites using HTTP-level passive traces. Our dataset includes about \(15\,000\) broadband subscribers over a period of 3 years. We use it to provide quantitative information about the interactions of users with pornographic websites, focusing on time and frequency of use, habits, and trends. We distribute our anonymized dataset to the community to ease reproducibility and allow further studies.

The research leading to these results has been funded by the Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF) through project ICT15-129 (BigDAMA) and the Smart-Data@PoliTO center for Big Data technologies.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    As of October \(17^{th}\), 2018 www.alexa.com/topsites.

  2. 2.

    www.pornhub.com/insights/2017-year-in-review.

  3. 3.

    www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/03/30/porn-websites-beef-up-privacy-protections-days-after-congress-voted-to-let-isps-share-your-web-history.

  4. 4.

    www.shallalist.de/categories.html, www.similarweb.com, and dsi.ut-capitole.fr/blacklists/index_en.php.

  5. 5.

    support.google.com/analytics/answer/2731565?.

  6. 6.

    github.com/piwik/device-detector.

  7. 7.

    A deeper analysis can be found in our previous work [16].

  8. 8.

    https://goo.gl/UgLqAj.

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Correspondence to Luca Vassio .

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Morichetta, A., Trevisan, M., Vassio, L. (2019). Characterizing Web Pornography Consumption from Passive Measurements. In: Choffnes, D., Barcellos, M. (eds) Passive and Active Measurement. PAM 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11419. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15986-3_20

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15986-3_20

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