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I've worked in the adult industry (you can say porn) for 10 years for some of the biggest brands. I have some regrets, especially contributing in a major way to
by burnaway 8y ago
I've worked in the adult industry (you can say porn) for 10 years for some of the biggest brands. I have some regrets, especially contributing in a major way to the proliferation of free porn, pushing our product to millions of users per day and negotiating advertising campaigns in the millions$ to feed the system. Many in our audience were in developing countries and no doubt a lot of them under 18.
The latest studies confirm that heavy porn consumption affect adolescent's view of others and their self-perception in a negative way - reading these made me evaluate my role in that ecosystem.
The flip side of this is when I realized this is not something I want to carry on doing I just quit the industry. Now I'm working for a VPN company with a stand-out product and service, built by an honest team driven by the mission of helping people protect their privacy. I feel very content with that decision.
- solveit 8y ago>The latest studies confirm that heavy porn consumption affect adolescent's view of others and their self-perception in a negative way That sounds fascinating. Do you have a link to a source?
- burnaway 8y agoI suggest starting here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10720162.2012.660431 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10720162.2012.66... and checking the referenced authors' latest work as well
- exikyut 8y agoIronically your current employer's product is very probably being used by users to access your previous employers' product.
- burnaway 8y agoI don't doubt that a lot of people use VPN's for this. I also know based on surveys and internal data that the core user base of our service is using it for privacy protection and security reasons -> against ISP data collection and snooping. I don't have a problem with people watching porn, nor with someone using VPN to support this. This conscious use case however is very different from getting an unsolicited porn popunder in your face when you are streaming a football match.
- exikyut 8y agoAh, that sentiment I can agree with. I recently had a family member trip over one of those markov-chain strung-together-keyword redirect farms. It decided to stop the redirect-train at something fairly crass (a topless ad). This was straight from Google search results. First time ever; mildly unpleasant 5 minutes. I'm seeing this as the next level after that, and yeah, VPNs are comparatively a much more straightforward field.
- huhtenberg 8y agoJust wait until you realize what VPNs are mostly used for...
- yunruse 8y agoI’ll bite. I use a VPN every day, and while I will admit freely that it helps for less copyright friendly ventures, it has probably saved my privacy quite a few times, as I am almost always on public networks. In addition, I imagine many users in countries with more stringent censorship than the UK likely need a VPN to carry out their daily lives. True, a VPN can help people hide their identity to do criminal things, but there’s a reason they call ski masks that way: because they have a specific but sometimes vital use.
- al_chemist 8y agoWatching Netflix and Hulu outside USA?