BlackBerry 10 users who like to enjoy adult entertainment on their devices may want to think twice about opting into the device’s music sharing feature. While at first glance the “Show What I’m Listening To” feature sounds like it would merely share your music listening habits with your BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) contacts, what it actually does is record all activity in the media player and tells your friends and colleagues about it, regardless of content type. So many users turned this feature on thinking they would broadcast fairly benign information about what kind of music they enjoy, and instead wound up revealing something they would have preferred to keep private:

“BBM records any usage of the phone’s media player and can push these visits and downloads to all messenger contacts, much like a status update. So your grandmother might be notified that you’ve been listening to the new Justin Timberlake album, or she might know that you have a fetish for, uh, granny porn.“

BlackBerry users unwittingly sharing porn preferences is not just an unfortunate (if funny) accident, it’s an example of how a lack of transparency about what information we are sharing online creates a wide gap between the experiences users want and what the ones they get. Facebook’s controversial Beacon advertising system revealed user purchases to friends with only an opt out mechanism, in some cases ruining big events like engagements. One of Google’s early forays into social media, Google Buzz, created the wrong kind of buzz by auto-populating the network with users’ most used private gmail contacts without asking. In at least one case, this breach of privacy revealed a woman’s location, workplace and several interactions with a current boyfriend to her abusive ex-husband. Google Buzz’s privacy breaches eventually resulted in a Federal Trade Commission settlement.

These incidents are wildly out of line with Internet users’ preferences. As early as 2000, 86 percent of internet users favored “opt-in” privacy policies requiring sites to ask people for permission to use their personal information and 54 percent believed that tracking of users on websites was harmful because it invades their privacy. A more recent 2012 survey found that 73 percent of search engine users would not be okay with a search engine tracking their searches and using that information to personalize future search results because it feels like “an invasion of privacy,” but that is almost exactly how Google’s Personalized Search works when users are logged in.

It should be noted that users’ stated preferences do not always match their actions. While asking directly about user privacy preferences gets very straightforward answers, behavioral economists have shown that the way privacy disclosure is framed can leave consumers unaware of the trade-offs they are making, even though they place an inherent value on remaining in control of their personal data. Consumers believe they deserve privacy and control over their data, but the Internet is so riddled with seemingly unintrusive requests to give up personal information a small bit at a time, that users often wind up doling out little pieces of their privacy without fully understanding the implications. Entire industries have sprung up devoted to piecing together the zip code we gave to our supermarket, the things we searched for online, and even key words that appear in our emails, in order to build detailed profiles of who we are.

And while consumers feel strongly they should have the right to be left alone, current regulatory protections do not guarantee that. Online privacy protections are a “patchwork” in the United States with different protections for different sectors and are significantly less strict than in Europe. While the Obama administration suggested a new broader approach to privacy more than a year ago, a draft of legislation has yet to materialize.

What do the American Library Association, Hilton Hotels, and Attorney General Eric Holder all have in common? If you said they all facilitate the country’s “pornography epidemic,” gold star for you.

Morality in Media, a conservative organization trying to change the country’s laws in order to, among other things, ban pornography, released its list of the top 12 “facilitators of porn in America” list this week. Topping the list was Holder, who in addition to earning the title as the nation’s top law enforcement officer is now also seen in some circles as the top pornography-sympathizer. The group complained that Holder isn’t doing enough to fight pornography:

The Hill has more:

Patrick A. Trueman, president of Morality in Media, said the attorney general leads the group’s “dirty dozen” for shutting down the Department of Justice’s Obscenity Prosecution Task Force in 2011.

“Holder’s actions keep the porn industry thriving. He not only refuses to enforce obscenity laws currently on the books that prohibit the distribution of hardcore pornography, but he even disbanded the office charged with enforcement,” Trueman said in a statement.

The Department of Justice folded the organization, which investigated and prosecuted distributors of hardcore pornography, into the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section.

It’s tough to imagine a bigger waste of taxpayer money than using limited prosecutorial resources to target porn depicting legal acts between consenting adults. Child porn is illegal and should be prosecuted with vigor, as the only way to produce such material is to sexually assault a child. Naughty films involving consenting adults, by contrast, enjoy robust protection under the First Amendment. As the Supreme Court explained in Miller v. California, prosecutors may target adult materials only when “the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value,” and only when “the average person, applying contemporary community standards” would find the work appeals to an inordinate interest in sex. Subsequent decisions make clear that few, if any, adult works meet this standard.

Nevertheless, ridding the nation of pornography has become something of a cause celebre among social conservatives. The movement gained notoriety during the Republican presidential primaries when an Iowa-based conservative group named The Family Leader put out a pledge, signed by Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) and former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA), that called for a ban on “all forms of pornography.” (After the pledge created national controversy, the group’s leader backtracked and claimed he only wanted to ban women being forced into pornography.)

The other nine winners singled out by Morality in Media include Comcast, Facebook, Google Play, LodgeNet, Twitter, Wikipedia, Cosmopolitan Magazine, Barnes & Noble, and the Department of Defense, which allegedly “has a serious pornography problem, and it is doing next to nothing to combat it.”

Last week, Los Angeles voters approved Measure B, which requires adult film stars to wear condoms during sex scenes. Shortly after the measure passed, a trade group supporting the porn industry announced their intention to sue to have it struck down. According to a letter from the industry-affiliated Free Speech Coalition, “[w]e believe that the law is not only unconstitutional on the grounds of forced expression, but also falls within the jurisdiction of the state of California rather than local government. Therefore, we will file suit and challenge this intolerable law in court.”

As Antonio Haynes points out, the legal arguments backing this lawsuit are not implausible. To the extent that the ballot measure is understood as a restriction on adult filmmaker’s expression — as opposed to being viewed as a workplace safety regulation — the First Amendment does not often look kindly upon attempts to ban certain kinds of expression. Ultimately, however, the fate of the law may rest upon a factual disagreement between the law’s supporters and the adult film industry. Haynes claims that the porn industry’s existing testing regime is so effective that “rates of [STD] infection appear to be smaller in the adult film industry than in the population at large.” Meanwhile, a forthcoming study in the Journal of Sexually Transmitted Diseases found that “roughly a third of the 168 adult film actors who participated in the research project were found to have a previously undiagnosed STD.”

To the extent that the ballot measure can be justified as a relatively unintrusive way to cure a genuine public health problem, it is much more likely to survive constitutional scrutiny.