Here’s our nominee for most evil Web service of the week: FindHisPorn.com. For a one-time low price of $49.99only $19.95! Limited time offer!, you can allow a dubious piece of Java voodoo onto your PC (Windows only) and let it scrape the contents of your hard drive and show you all the porn it finds. It’s just perfect for spying on that special someone in your life.
Find His Porn is cynically exploiting the paranoid and freaked-out, violating privacy, jeopardizing security and taking people’s money. It has been created under a total veil of secrecy. Oh, it’s also “perfect for ? Boyfriends, ? Husbands and ? Kids” with the “goal of empowering women everywhere.” With its marketing finely tuned, Find His Porn profits off of people’s engrained norms, broken trust and technical ignorance.
How evil is Find His Porn? Let us count the ways.
“I told all my girlfriends about it!”
We’ll start with the marketing. “We started Find His Porn with the goal of empowering women everywhere,” says the About page. “With over 1 million adult websites being visited by males on average 15 minutes per day, it’s naive to think he’s not watching porn behind your back too.” Hm. How is this empowering anyone? We asked them via [email protected], their only public point of contact. We can’t wait to see what they say.
“Technology has advanced to the point where traditional ways for women to keep track of their guys just don’t work anymore.” That is the attitude of Find His Porn. Heterosexual relationships have a “tradition” of spying and distrust, and you – the straight female customer – need this Web service to keep up with the times.
“As opposed to typical monitoring software…”
Not only does Find His Porn exploit people’s relationship problems, it also takes advantage of their technical naïveté. “No downloads!” boasts the Learn More page. It just “scans your computer hard drive” with its “advanced algorithm,” creating “a much deeper and more complete search then [sic] you could ever do by yourself.”
“No downloads,” of course, but it is only compatible with Windows computers with Java. If you’re not sure “if have Java,” as the FAQ page eloquently says, you can click a link to go download it. No downloads, though. ;^)
This is a one-time thing. You PayPal it some money, and it runs the scan on the computer you’re using. You get a thorough rundown of the porn on the disk and in the Web history, and then it’s gone. You have to pay to see it again. The site says Find His Porn does not store the results of the search.
We’ve reached out to our contacts at Sophos to see if they can help us get a detailed rundown of what this software really does. But Find His Porn doesn’t want you to worry about all that. Just fork over the cash and let the thing go to work. It’s so easy. There’s a demo video on the Find His Porn homepage. Warning: It contains some explicit filenames, and it’s exploitative and NSFW for a few seconds at the end.
Find His Porn is taking too much money, offering a dubious technical solution to an emotional problem. If you’re having trouble in your relationship, this is not a solution. It’s a scam.
Try Communicating Instead
We’re not taking a position on the propriety or impropriety of porn, whether consumed in a relationship or not. However, if you’re in a relationship and have concerns about your partner’s viewing habits, we strongly recommend that you consider talking to your partner rather than overpaying for a one-time application to spy on your partner.
Aside from the obvious concerns about the safety and efficacy of the application, if you don’t trust your partner to discuss this with you honestly, the relationship has larger issues than whether someone’s looking at porn.
Now then. Let’s lighten up a little, huh?
