Developers of an app helping people recover from porn addiction have been criticized after a major security flaw has exposed the masturbation habits and personal details of hundreds of thousands of users.
Pornography addiction is something that has become an increasingly relevant talking point in the internet age, as the sheer amount of adult content available online has led some to have a potentially unhealthy relationship that could even affect their real-life romantic encounters.
An increase in awareness has arrived hand-in-hand with new tools that help people deal with their potential addictions, and while forums on sites like Reddit have proven to be a vital service, apps designed to monitor your activities have captured the attention of many.
One of the most popular of these apps is called Quittr, which boasts a '97% improvement in life quality' alongside over 900,000 instances where people have successfully quit porn while using their app.
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The app itself allows you to track how many times you masturbate, write down how watching porn makes you feel, and exchange tips and share your experience with others through community message boards.
It has certainly proven to be a success – especially for developers Alex Slater and Connor McLaren, who are reportedly earning over $500,000 per month from the app – but a recent security breach has left them in hot water as incredibly sensitive information has been left exposed.
As reported by 404 Media, intimate data from over 600,000 Quittr users has been leaked as a consequence of a security breach, made even worse by the developers failing to deal with a vulnerability that was exposed several months earlier, as pointed out in another report from 404 Media that didn't explicitly name the app in an attempt to protect users.
Data exposed from the breach doesn't just include the frequency of each user's masturbation habits or their relationship with pornography, but also their age — and roughly 100,000 (or one in six) of the affected users are minors.
It appears as if the issue stems from a misconfiguration with Google Firebase, which caused a similar data breach with the 'Tea' app last year, and an independent researcher informed Quittr's creators of the vulnerability last September.
Slater claimed that it would be 'fixed in the next hour' according to WhatsApp messages reviewed by 404 Media, but this didn't happen with the developer later claiming that he though it was 'a bit of a joke' and that it 'was never an issue'.
UNILADTech has reached out to Alex Slater for comment on the situation.