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Freshman year of college was an interesting time for me, there were a lot of new and exciting things around me and very little privacy when it came to those experiences. That is especially true when it came to my college roommates.
Through circumstances that I no longer remember, one of my roommates once told me that he only watched porn on his phone because it was easier and kept his phone safe from any viruses meant for desktop/laptop computers.
But a recent study tries to claim that my roommate was wrong.
Mobile tech and security firm Wandera did a little investigation into the security of risky sites (porn sites, gambling sites, and pirating sites) as well as mobile phones and states that there is barely any security at all.
Their results found that malware can be found on any kind of site, but at least a quarter of malware targeted towards phones are found on porn sites.
Turns out that watching porn on smartphone systems, and Wandera specifically pointed out Android systems, is much more dangerous than watching on desktop computers.
Top 50 Porn Sites / via Wandera
In addition, it seems that most porn sites are susceptible to data leaks. During their research, Wandera found that 40 out of the 50 biggest porn sites, like Pornhub, XVideos, and Xhamster, are all showing signs of data leaks and potentially leaking out your personal information.
Keep in mind however that you should have some suspicion about this research. After all, it was conducted by a mobile security firm that seeks to benefit from scaring consumers into buying their services. (In fact, the end of the article about their research was a plug for their services).
And folks, I was just going to end this article after stating that, but my own suspicisons keep bothering me.
You see, Wandera's claims that only a quarter of malware makes "watching mobile porn on your smartphone a much higher risk than watching it on your PC" just seemed off to me. So, I did a little more digging. And it seems, my suspicions were right.
Earlier research, like the one conducted by Security expert Conrad Longmore, has stated that there is about a 50% chance of getting in contact with malware while surfing porn sites on PC.
He found that PC visitors to Pornhub and Xhamster have a 53 and 42 percent chance respectively of contacting malware.
In addition, a 2010 study done by a research team bought 47,000 clicks to a test porn site. By the end of the study, they estimated that around 20,000 clicks might have created contact with malware. That's about 43%.
So, it seems that my college roommate was right when he said that watching porn on cell phones is safer than watching on a computer.
If Wandera's research is right that there's a 25% chance of contracting some sort of malware, that is still lower than the 40-50% chance other researchers have found.
It also seems that Wandera needs to be more honest and just say they conducted research to get attention for their services, and did a very bad job of doing it.
Update (9/12/2017): An earlier version of this post agreed with the research done by Wandera saying that phone use was risker. But, after further thought and research, the article has been updated to refute that claim.
I see I got a namecheck
I see I got a namecheck
There's a difference between coming into contact with malware and being infected by it. For example, if your computer or smartphone is fully patched and up-to-date in software and has some sort of anti-virus application then you are less likely to become infected than if the equipment is old and full of security flaws. With a smartphone it will also depend on what browser you are using, for example the inbuilt one with the Android OS should be avoided because it doesn't get updated as often as (say) Chrome or Firefox. iPhones get about 5 years of updates from launch, Android ones usually a maximum of two. So it goes on. It is certain however that recent years have seen a very sharp increase in mobile malware. So I think the answer to your quite interesting question is still.. who knows?