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Does Pornhub Track You? We Scanned 13 Aylo Sites to Find Out

Updated March 2026 · Blacklight by The Markup · Marcus T.

Every few months, some article goes viral claiming Pornhub is a surveillance machine harvesting your browsing habits for shadowy data brokers. The Reddit threads write themselves. "Your ISP knows everything." "Incognito doesn't help." "They sell your data to advertisers." None of these articles ever cite a specific scan or produce actual numbers. They just gesture vaguely at the concept of tracking and let your anxiety do the rest.

So we pointed Blacklight at Pornhub and let the tool do what panic articles won't: measure. The result — 2 trackers, 0 cookies — was quieter than expected. No fingerprinting. No session recording. No keystroke capture. Two trackers on one of the fifty most visited websites in the world. CNN.com runs more.

That should have been the end of the article. It wasn't. Because Pornhub isn't a single website. It's one door into a building with 13 rooms — and the hallways connect in ways the privacy scare articles never mention.

The Thing Nobody Mentions: Pornhub Is 13 Websites

Pornhub is owned by Aylo. Used to be called MindGeek until the rebrand in 2023 — same people, new name, less Googable history. Aylo also owns RedTube, YouPorn, Tube8, PornTube, Brazzers, RealityKings, Twistys, Sexy Hub, Babes Network, Trans Angels, and Gay Wire. Every single one of these sites processes payments through Probiller. Same company. Same billing infrastructure. Same place where your credit card data lives.

So I scanned all of them. And the pattern that came back is — honestly — the most interesting thing I've found in this entire project.

Aylo runs trackers on the sites where you don't pay. And doesn't on the sites where you do.

You're Not the Customer. You're the Product.

Look at the table again. The free tubes — Pornhub, RedTube, YouPorn, Tube8 — average 1.7 trackers per site. The premium studios — Brazzers, RealityKings, Twistys — average 0.0. RedTube is the worst thing Aylo operates: 2 trackers and 3 cookies, which is more tracking infrastructure than some of the sketchier cam sites I've scanned.

The reason is obvious once you see it. Free tubes make money from ads. Ads need data. Data comes from trackers. The moment you start paying — Brazzers, RealityKings — Aylo doesn't need to sell your attention to advertisers anymore. You already opened your wallet. The trackers go away because the business model changed.

This isn't unique to porn. It's the same model as every free app on your phone. But nobody talks about it in this context because nobody scans porn sites with independent privacy tools and publishes the comparison tables. That's the gap we exist to fill.

What Actually Protects You (Three Things, in Order)

I get asked this constantly. "What should I use?" People expect a complicated answer. It's not. Three tools, layered, each one covering what the others miss.