The Quest to Make Porn Sites More Secure
Wired:
Every time a major hack becomes public—Target, Yahoo, take your pick—Mike Stabile is grateful it’s not an adult site. As the director of communications for the Free Speech Coalition, an adult entertainment industry trade group, he knows what the fallout could be, and that it’s potentially a lot worse than another password dump.
“It’s one thing if your credit card information is stolen from something like Nordstrom,” Stabile says. WWhen you’re dealing with an adult company, it says a lot about you. It’s tremendously exposing, especially if you’re closeted or in a community that’s going to frown upon that.”
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That all changes today, as the FSC and the Center for Democracy and Technology, a digital civil liberties nonprofit, embark on a quest to make pornographic sites safer to browse. Together, they hope to bring the encryption protocol HTTPS to online porn, securing an incalculably large portion of the web along with it.
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The initial goal of the FSC and CDT partnership isn’t to force HTTPS on porn sites but to educate them as to its importance, and help with the transition. It’s not a monetary commitment, but an instructional one. The FSC has members who need to encrypt; CDT can show them how to do it.
“Initially it’s about raising awareness, introducing why they would want to do this and why it might not be as much of a burden,” says Hall. “I’m hopeful that when they see the benefits, they’ll realize they need these things yesterday.”
