I'm a developer who's been running Blacklight privacy scans on adult websites. Not for moral reasons — for data. Over three months, I scanned 130 sites across 12 categories. Here's what I found about browser fingerprinting specifically, and why it matters more than tracker counts.
The Setup
Blacklight is The Markup's open-source inspection tool. It loads a URL in a headless browser and monitors for:
- Ad trackers (third-party scripts loading from known advertising domains)
- Third-party cookies (cookies set by domains other than the one you're visiting)
- Canvas fingerprinting (JavaScript that reads canvas rendering output to identify your device)
- Session recording (scripts from services like Hotjar/FullStory that replay user sessions)
- Keystroke capture (scripts that log keyboard input)
- Evading cookie blockers (techniques to set tracking data despite browser protections)
I ran this on 130 adult sites. Here's the fingerprinting data.
Fingerprinting Detection Results
Out of 130 sites scanned, 7 had fingerprinting detected (5.4%):
| Site | Category | Trackers | Cookies | Fingerprinting | Other Flags |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Toonily | Manga | 56 | 186 | ✅ | — |
| Motherless | Free Tubes | 1 | 7 | ✅ | — |
| CrushOn AI | AI Porn | — | — | ✅ | Mozilla warning |
| FetLife | Dating | 0 | 0 | ✅ | — |
| POVR | VR Porn | 1 | 0 | ✅ | — |
| F95Zone | Adult Games | 7 | 18 | ✅ | Session recording |
| Hitomi | Manga | 4 | 8 | ✅ | — |
Why Fingerprinting Matters More Than Cookies
Cookies are the privacy concern everyone talks about. GDPR banners, cookie consent, "we use cookies" — it's the visible layer. But cookies have a fundamental limitation from the tracker's perspective: users can delete them. Incognito mode doesn't carry them. Browser extensions block them.
Fingerprinting bypasses all of that.
Canvas fingerprinting works by having JavaScript draw something to an invisible <canvas> element and then reading back the rendered pixels. Different GPUs, different font renderers, different OS configurations produce slightly different output. Combined with other signals — screen resolution, timezone, language, installed plugins, WebGL renderer string, audio processing characteristics — the result is a unique identifier for your device that persists across sessions, across cookie clears, across incognito windows.
On a regular website, fingerprinting is a privacy concern. On an adult website, it's an identity concern. Especially on these platforms:
FetLife — 0 trackers, 0 cookies, fingerprinting ✅
FetLife is a social network for BDSM and kink. Users maintain pseudonymous profiles. They share sexual interests they may not want connected to their real identity. Many users explicitly compartmentalize — different browser, different email, different device.
Fingerprinting undermines that compartmentalization at the hardware level. If you use the same laptop for FetLife under a pseudonym and for Gmail under your real name, a fingerprint can potentially correlate those sessions. Not through FetLife itself necessarily — but through whatever third-party service receives the fingerprint data.
The 0/0 tracker/cookie scan looks clean. The fingerprinting makes it not clean. This is why looking at only tracker counts misses the story.
Motherless — 1 tracker, 7 cookies, fingerprinting ✅
Motherless is the only free tube site where fingerprinting was detected. It's also the only free tube site named in federal court documents for CSAM uploads. The FBI has traced user activity through the platform multiple times.
Fingerprinting on a site with this law enforcement history means your device is uniquely identifiable on a platform that has been subject to federal investigation. Even if you never create an account.
Toonily — 56 trackers, 186 cookies, fingerprinting ✅
The worst scan in the project. Fingerprinting is almost academic when 56 tracking services are already profiling you, but it closes the last escape hatch. Even users who aggressively block cookies and trackers can be identified by fingerprint.
What Developers Can Learn
If you're building a web application — any web application — here's what this data tells you:
1. Fingerprinting is a deployment choice, not an inevitability.
123 out of 130 sites I scanned did NOT have fingerprinting. Including sites with billions of monthly pageviews (XNXX, Pornhub, XVideos). If the largest porn sites on the planet can operate without fingerprinting, your SaaS product can too.
2. Session recording + fingerprinting is the worst combination.
F95Zone has both. The session replay captures what you do. The fingerprint identifies who you are. Together they create a behavioral record tied to a device identity. If you use Hotjar or FullStory, understand that you're creating this combination on your own site.
3. Zero tracking is achievable at any scale.
XNXX: 0 trackers, 0 cookies. Billions of pageviews. Archive of Our Own: 0 trackers, 0 cookies. 548 million monthly visits. Tinder: 0 trackers, 0 cookies. 75 million monthly active users. The "we need tracking for analytics" argument doesn't hold. Self-hosted analytics (Umami, Plausible, Matomo) provide everything you need without third-party surveillance.
4. The Blacklight tool is free — use it on your own sites.
themarkup.org/blacklight — enter any URL and get a full privacy scan. If you're deploying third-party scripts on your production site, you should know what they're actually doing. You might be surprised.
The Full Dataset
I publish Blacklight scan data — trackers, cookies, fingerprinting, session recording, keystroke capture, VirusTotal results — for every site I review at nsfwranker.com. Currently 130 sites across 12 categories. The data is in every review's safety section.
If you're working on anything privacy-related — browser extensions, privacy dashboards, ad-blocking tools — the dataset might be useful. The adult web is the internet's largest unexamined privacy surface.
Top comments (0)