Your favourite porn sites may not be quite what they appear. A report by the Internet Watch Foundation reveals that there’s been a rise in the practice of storing child abuse images within otherwise legal porn sites — and it warns that it could put regular porn viewers at risk of prosecution.
The Foundation explains that the approach places illegal child porn images on websites in such a way that the site outwardly looks legal. Visit it like a normal user and you’d never be able to see the images. But apparently if you navigate the site in the correct way, it’s possible to uncover the illegal images. The Foundation claims to have found 743 such sites in 2015.
While it may not sound like too big a deal for most people, Fred Langford, chief executive of Internet Watch Foundation, points out to The Guardian that it could land perfectly innocent people in trouble. “Some people may think they’re going to legal adult content but they unfortunately have picked up the cookies on the way that means that they are served the child sexual abuse material,” he explained.
You can take some comfort in the fact that the numbers are small — though the report also points out that there’s been a 118 per cent increase in illegal child abuse imagery found online over the past year. So it may pay to browse porn sites with just a little more caution in the future.
[Internet Watch Foundation via Guardian]
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