Google Admits Porn Turning Out to be the Killer App for Cell Phones

By Alice Hill
RealTechNews

When you think of internet porn (and I know you do!) the desktop PC or the laptop in a hotel room far far away springs to mind. This is why many cell phone providers doubted that cell phone porn would catch on. After all, who wants to sit in an airport and get caught watching grainy adut movies or racy stills?

Turns out - a lot of people do. The cell phone is becoming the preferred platform for adult Web searches for a number of reasons. The biggest one is privacy. Company-owned hardware can trace where you surf and what you look at, while home PCs are where the kids often are and it’s easier to pop in a DVD if you are…alone.

The cell phone on the other hand, with increasingly bigger and brighter screens allows the mobile traveller a way to view video and still content without anyone being the wiser. And the numbers as Google recently admitted are starting to add up.

Nowadays the cellphone is the device of choice for those seeking out porn on the web, according to research by Google. Computer scientists Maryan Kamvar and Shumeet Baluja analysed 1 million searches made using the firm’s mobile search software. They found that “adult” material constituted 20 per cent of the searches on cellphones, but only 5 per cent on PDAs. Just 8.5 per cent of searches on desktop computers are for adult material. The Google team say that people regard their phones as intensely personal devices and so “may feel more comfortable querying adult terms” on them, perceiving a smaller chance of others discovering their activities. Source: New Scientist

We Say: The porn theory of technology states that if there’s a porn angle the device will succeed. This should make cell phone carriers with new 3G/TV offerings happy, but with Google’s recent legal setback with Perfect 10, this may be a bigger headache down the road.

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