The above banner is for a real site that provides just the type of service one would expect with a name like Porn Wikileaks. The adult film industry, as one can easily imagine, is pretty unhappy about it, as Porn Wikileaks maintains a database that currently lists the real names, birth dates and home addresses of more than 15,000 adult film stars. Not only is Porn Wikileaks the center of extremely murky territory simply by freely providing this information, but as Gawker reported, the way Porn Wikileaks obtained said information is even murkier, as they scraped it from a patient database belonging to an STD testing clinic in California.
Though still harmful, some of the adult film star listings only list a star’s stage name, date of birth and real name, though other star listings go much further, and include a home address, information on family members (including their employers), and even photos of said home addresses taken with Google Streetview.
Freedom of information can frequently be a genuinely good thing, but adult film stars use stage names for a reason, whether it be because they may want to hide their past once they retire from the industry, or because being in the adult film industry has the potential to generate fans that may not understand the stars are regular people who don’t exactly want to have sex with every single person in the world and said stars may not want to deal with that false sentiment every waking moment. The site is hosted in the Netherlands, so U.S. authority is limited and not much can be done about the site from this side of the world.
(via Switched)
