Kashmir Hill’s recent column on history sniffing not only got a response from YouPorn, but it seems to have resulted in YouPorn being sued when users became aware of what had been occurring. She writes:
Calling all YouPorn watchers! Two California men, David Pitner and Jared Reagan, have filed a class-action lawsuit over the site’s practice of “history sniffing,” or checking out other porn websites that visitors have been to through exploiting a Javascript security flaw.
The practice works through checking whether your browser registers certain links as previously visited, by seeing if they are assigned the color “purple” — that nifty change of color that tells you that you’ve already clicked on a link. I exposed YouPorn’s exploitation of the security flaw here last week, based on an academic paper published a few months back.
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Since I published the article on YouPorn’s sniffing on Nov. 30, YouPorn quietly removed the history-sniffing code from its website. So at least for now, amateur porn lovers’ browser histories are safe.