Mugen Monday - Thirteenth Edition

There are far more dangerous things in this world than your Internet searching habits. Imagine you’re scrolling for the sauce after you gazed through that one doujin manga recommendation video on Instagram, with the finely crafted source code (if you know you know) in your copy-paste board (or whatever it is called), would you be okay if an Internet Service Provider were to be keeping tab of your search history?

Other than the part where your obvious ‘ara-ara’ senpai kink will be laid out to whoever gets to access that data, is there something really dangerous about this whole endeavour?

Let’s give some examples -

Now imagine a similar situation but just put apart the part where it’s an ISP taking your data. Imagine the same thing being done on a relevant scale, but instead by this million-dollar (billion?) streaming industry. Amazon Prime, Netflix, Crunchyroll - Crunchyroll? 

Well, to break it to you, Crunchyroll has been part of this huge scandal whereby a certain court order claimed a lawsuit against them, in what turned out to be a privacy breach.

Apparently, Crunchyroll has been sharing their user data with third parties, including but not limited to Analytics of both Meta, and Google, and even some hands in Amazon Prime.

What does this mean? Can your credit card information be jeopardized?

Read this for more: Crunchyroll scandal simplified: what’s this settlement about and should you make a claim?.

Which data of yours is actually worth being sensitive about?

The system most websites use for payment gateways is often hardwired going through a rigorous process of encryption and decryption. Now while some third-party independent gateways like Razorpay are really well known, Netflix uses its own getaway system.

This much detail probably is not much of use to you, because in a Capitalist society, you cannot just not trust Netflix with your payment. Whether they get a share of your credit card info is quite a complex matter, perhaps something to be discussed in a more lengthy article later on.

So no, it’s not exactly your credit card info that Crunchyroll has been sharing, such measures are more reserved for your run-of-the-mill shady dark web-like website that asks for a survey every next click. Companies like Crunchyroll would face thousands of years of death if a crime of such a huge level was ever even conceptualised.

However, the data they can share are more statistical, although technically less sensitive.

1. Data like what Anime each individual is browsing through the search bar,

2. Users’ search history, 

3. and a User’s frequency of search for a particular Anime.

All of these very minute details which an average Anime watcher will hardly care about, can be quite vital data to check through for multiple entities.

How can this data be used? 

They can mainly contribute towards the advertising industry, for manufacturers, middlemen and affiliate partners to know which show to base their revenue model around.

As such, even if such data were to be collected, it was quite incidental that Crunchyroll laid out a Privacy Policy arranging the same clauses. Yet no such thing was done.

For all you know, Crunchyroll has altogether denied even having collected such data and has only agreed to pay the almost $16 million settlement amount because apparently they ‘don’t want to make the issue any bigger than it should be’ and to avoid collateral damages.

Our editor Rishiraj at my behest talks greatly on this matter, read on to see his thoughts.

And well happy reading, for those who dare dream.

- From the Editor’s Desk

Rhytham Das, Editor-in-Chief, Spiel Anime