Sex brainwave

One of the most resilient myths about sex is that men think about it every seven seconds. It’s one of those “facts” that survives because it feels right, despite plenty of research to the contrary. For example, the Kinsey Institute reports that 54% of men daydream about sex every day or several times a day. But, of course, we can’t know definitively how much anyone thinks about sex… yet.

Research into people’s sexual thoughts and desires heavily relies on self-reporting, but it may not in the future. Chinese scientists claimed in June that they had developed a device that can detect when a man – it was only tested on men – is watching porn. The researchers at Jiao Tong University in Beijing showed a group of men a series of graphic images, which are illegal in China, then sent their brainwave patterns for analysis.

The academics say they took those results and developed a helmet that can be used to identify when an individual is viewing a pornographic image or video. They propose that China’s jian huang shi – “porn appraisers” – could wear the device to improve the efficiency of the automated systems the Chinese state uses to scour the internet for what it considers obscene content. They didn’t address the fact that many of the jian huang shi are women.

Research into people’s sexual thoughts and desires heavily relies on self-reporting, but it may not in the future

Beyond assuming that women don’t and won’t watch porn, the study was hampered by the researchers being legally required to cover up the most explicit areas of the sample images. They also reported that they struggled to find sufficient training material. As unbelievable as it might sound, they really did find it hard to uncover porn on the internet.

The paper sketches out a vision of a helmet-wearing jian huang shi sitting in front of a screen with a large number of photos presented to them non-stop until they blink. All the time, the device would be scanning for tell-tale brainwave indications. It’s hard not to think of Alex in A Clockwork Orange, his eyes propped open as he’s blasted with a series of images. However, that China could implement the system is not the stuff of science fiction; brainwave scanning has been used to measure the performance of workers in state industries and on the country’s railways since around 2014.

Despite repeated government threats/promises (delete as applicable) to introduce legislation that more tightly restricts access to explicit material in the UK, it’s unlikely we’ll see our own army of porn appraisers any time soon, nor that they’ll be kitted out with brainwave-scanning helmets. But the data created by our choices online, and even offline, already enables a kind of mind-reading.

Our browsing histories, combined with information from apps that collect location data, paint elaborate pictures of our lives. That’s why the adverts we’re served can seem so eerily well-targeted. It’s also why so many people are convinced their phones are listening to them. But aside from some fringe cases of rogue apps surveilling their users, it’s behavioural tracking data that’s down to advertisers seeming like mind readers.

Even apparently “anonymised” data can be connected back to individuals. In 2017, a pair of German researchers managed to acquire a database of three billion URLs visited by three million internet users in the country. Journalist Svea Eckert and data scientist Andreas Dewes were able to find things like Twitter usernames in the long list of URLs but also to create “fingerprints” that could be compared to more public data sources like social media accounts and public playlists on YouTube.

Dewes and Eckert identified people from as few as ten unique URLs. Their discoveries included finding out what medication a German MP was taking and the porn preferences of a Dutch judge. Valerie Wilms, a Green Party member of Germany’s federal parliament, agreed to allow the pair to reveal to her what they had found in her browsing data.

They were able to tell her where she’d travelled, what she’d researched in the course of her political work, and even details about her tax return. Wilms told the German broadcaster NDR that: “Of course, this can hurt and it leaves people vulnerable for blackmailing.” She also said she felt spied on. Another politician, Lars Klingbeil, then spokesperson on internet politics for the SPD, said: “I did not know that this data could be so identifying. Maybe we are naive.”

In truth, most of us know that a great deal of information is being collected about us when we go online and use apps on our phones. But convenience is seductive, as is the common mindset that “if you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve got nothing to hide”. That’s a very dangerous kind of naivety, which assumes good faith on the part of those in authority and that your choices will never be looked at in the worst possible light.

Talking about the data brokers who sold him the supposedly anonymous data, Eckert told Vice: “I have this feeling that [they] don’t know what’s in the data. When I made these phone calls about buying data, they spoke as if they were selling stones of apples. These companies have lost their minds when it comes to data collection.”

Five years on, very little has changed. Perhaps we should spend as much time thinking about the data we’re giving away as we do daydreaming about sex, but that’s about as likely as researchers struggling to find porn on the internet.

Mic Wright is a freelance writer and journalist based in London. He writes about technology, culture and politics