BangBros bought a porn doxxing site just to literally set it on fire
Porn production company BangBros lit up the internet on Thursday evening when it announced its latest acquisition.
The company had purchased PornWikiLeaks, a site dedicated to doxxing adult industry performers and sharing their personal details online, including the real names, family information, addresses, and/or phone numbers of over 15,000 members of the adult industry.
But BangBros, whose sites include Bang Bus and MILF Soup, weren't diversifying into violating the privacy of sex workers. After buying PWL, including the data-filled drives and the domain, the company wiped the site, replacing the content with a message on the homepage explaining the change.
An excerpt:
BangBros had enough. We have purchased this site with the intention of shutting it down and removing all information associated with it. There’s no catch. No hidden thing to getting your personal stuff off of it. We simply didn’t want it out there for the world to see anymore. Yes, it’s that easy. While shutting this site down doesn’t purge the internet of all possible ties to real names and what not, it does make it one less place to harbor and find these things easily. A forum that had 300,000 posts on it, most of them negative and hate-filled, has now disappeared.
If you had anything ever posted on here, it will be removed and deleted forever from here. As well as BangBros nows owns the domain. Nothing will ever be up here besides this page that you see now. So you don’t have to worry about it coming back either.
The site's archive has also been excluded from The Wayback Machine (which will remove any site's content from its archive at the owner's request).
The new homepage message ends by directing the reader to "see what we did with the data" with a link to the following YouTube video:
In case you can't bring yourself to click on a video with the BangBros logo in the corner: Yes, that appears to be a pile of hard drives having accelerant poured all over them, with some gusto, before someone clicks open a Zippo and sets that pile on fire.
A BangBros spokesperson or spokespeople confirmed to the Adult Media Network and Vice that the post was genuine.
It hasn't been revealed how much BangBros paid for the site and its data. But all sex workers deserve privacy and safety before, during and after they do their jobs, and shutting down anything that makes that tougher is a positive step.
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H/T Vice.
Topics Cybersecurity Porn Privacy
Caitlin is Mashable's Australian Editor. She has written for The Guardian, Junkee, and any number of plucky little music and culture publications that were run on the smell of an oily rag and have since been flushed off the Internet like a dead goldfish by their new owners. She also worked at Choice, Australia's consumer advocacy non-profit and magazine, and as such has surprisingly strong opinions about whitegoods. She enjoys big dumb action movies, big clever action movies, cult Canadian comedies set in small towns, Carly Rae Jepsen, The Replacements, smoky mezcal, revenge bedtime procrastination, and being left the hell alone when she's reading.
