I had the opportunity to work in the analytics team at MindGeek a couple of years ago. My team would spend days researching about all these seemingly useless fe

I had the opportunity to work in the analytics team at MindGeek a couple of years ago. My team would spend days researching about all these seemingly useless features in modern web browsers to find new and better ways to track users across all our websites. I still remember when the HTML Canvas Element [1] was introduced by Apple almost two decades ago, many of these adult websites managed to increase the accuracy of their corresponding device fingerprint algorithms [2] by leveraging the power of the new APIs. In fact, one of the reasons why Fabian Thylmann tried to acquire XVideos back in 2012 [3] was because their analytics team had engineered new ways to track users using WebGL [4] which was still quite new. I don’t know if device tracking is still relevant for their revenue model, but I am sure they still have the code running in most —if not all— their websites for one reason or another. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canvas_fingerprinting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canvas_fingerprinting [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Device_fingerprint https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Device_fingerprint [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XVideos#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XVideos#History [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebGL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebGL