British high-rank officers have threatened to release the porn browsing history of soldiers who are currently using Wi-Fi to access blocked sites. Furthermore, this penalty may now also apply to regular users misusing public Wi-Fi.
Soldiers at the Royal School of Military Engineering are currently in trouble for being caught watching pornography while connected to Wi-Fi. According to the webzine the Sun, troops have accessed blocked sites 21,000 times, visited gambling sites 2,321 times, and watched violent clips 206 times, in the span of one week.
Officers at the Minley establishment in Surrey, are now running investigations to take measures against soldiers who use Wi-Fi to enter blocked sites, and according to the british army, they are “using software to identify [the] personnel attempting to access [these] blocked sites.” Accordingly, soldiers who view porn may soon receive an unpleasant surprise when their porn browsing history is made public and their permission to access Wi-Fi is revoked.
As of recently, this issue not only concerns british soldiers, but ordinary people whose private porn browsing history might also be exposed. Last February, Brett Thomas, a software engineer and blogger, warned online porn lovers about the possibility of their names and porn browsing histories being released to the public, and emphasized that even people watching porn on Incognito mode may run the risk of having their browsing history made public. In order to see the porn watched by users, hackers only need to get their hands on logs containing identifiable data of one porn website.
Generally, private data exposure is an important issue that should to be taken into careful consideration. Remember the well-known privacy breach that occurred in August 2014, when private photos of Hollywood celebrities like Jennifer Lawrence and Kim Kardashian were leaked? What if, the next leak is a list of names of all the people watching porn worlwide? Data privacy must be ensured in the best possible way to prevent this leak from becoming the next big privacy scandal.