Porn sites Pornhub and YouPorn, both owned by IT company MindGeek, today announced the switch to Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS). Pornhub made the move today (we checked before publishing so you don’t have to), and YouPorn will be upgrading on April 4.
HTTPS is a more secure version of the HTTP protocol used on the internet to connect users to websites. Secure connections are widely considered a necessary measure to decrease the risk of users being vulnerable to content injection (which can result in eavesdropping, man-in-the-middle attacks, and other data modification). Data is kept secure from third parties, and users can be more confident they are communicating with the correct website.
In their announcement, the sites underlined a recent Google Transparency Report for the 100 most visited websites in the world. Only three of the 11 adult websites on the list were using HTTPS. Now it’s four, and next week it will be five.
“Here at Pornhub, with more than 70 million daily visitors, we wanted to continue our concerted effort to maximize the privacy of our users, ensuring that what they do on our platform remains strictly confidential,” Pornhub vice president Corey Price said in a statement. “With the switch to HTTPS we are able to protect their identity as well as safeguard them against exposure to malware by third parties.”
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“As one of the most viewed websites in the world, it is our duty to ensure the confidentially and safety of our users,” YouPorn vice president Brad Burns said in a statement. “The transition to HTTPS will go a long way in solidifying our users’ privacy and protecting them against various types of malware. The data on our webpages will now be encrypted, making it significantly harder for third parties to penetrate.”
Oooh, good word choice there, Burns.
This isn’t the first time the properties have shown they take security seriously. Both sites also offer bug bounty programs with rewards of up to $20,000 for security researchers: See Pornhub’s program and YouPorn’s program.
Porn sites use HTTPS and offer bug bounty programs — this is the year 2017.
