Porn Platforms Hate Them for Exposing Their Mischief With These Two Weird Tricks

The talk examines how the nonprofit Tracking Exposed audits the recommendation system of a major adult platform. The speakers created test accounts across gender identities and sexual interests, then compared what each one was shown. Graphs of the overlap revealed two clusters: a heteronormative group and a less heteronormative one that was harder to map to channels.

The middle section covers the tooling. Potrex is a browser extension for collecting recommendation data. Guardoni is a Node-based tool that launches a clean Chromium profile from a JSON list of steps, captures screenshots, and records cookies, local storage and third-party trackers. The team argued that the trackers operating around adult sites have received little scrutiny from regulators or researchers.

The legal portion argued that online adult content sits in a legal vacuum, with gaps in laws, platform policies and norms around gender expression. It reviewed GDPR and its privacy-by-design principle, earlier EU rules on cookies and intermediaries, and the incoming Digital Services Act. The talk ended with policy, advocacy and litigation as possible routes, and a Q&A where the audience debated whether recommender bias is a technical or social problem. The practical takeaway is a repeatable method for auditing opaque recommenders with controlled accounts and clean browser profiles.