How Facebook Outs Sex Workers
How Facebook Outs Sex Workers
By Kashmir Hill Yesterday 2:20pm
Leila has two identities, but Facebook is only supposed
to know about one of them.
Leila is a sex worker. She goes to great lengths to keep
separate identities for ordinary life and for sex work, to avoid stigma,
arrest, professional blowback, or clients who might be stalkers (or worse).
Her “real identity”—the public one, who lives in
California, uses an academic email address, and posts about politics—joined
Facebook in 2011. Her sex-work identity is not on the social network at all;
for it, she uses a different email address, a different phone number, and a
different name. Yet earlier this year, looking at Facebook’s “People You May
Know” recommendations, Leila (a name I’m using using in place of either of the
names she uses) was shocked to see some of her regular sex-work clients.
Despite the fact that she’d only given Facebook
information from her vanilla identity, the company had somehow discerned her
real-world connection to these people—and, even more horrifyingly, her account
was potentially being presented to them as a friend suggestion too, outing her
regular identity to them.
Because Facebook insists on concealing the methods and
data it uses to link one user to another, Leila is not able to find out how the
network exposed her or take steps to prevent it from happening again.
“It’s not just sex workers who are careful to shield
their identities,” she said to me via Skype. “The people who hire sex workers
are also very concerned with anonymity so they’re using alternative emails and
alternative names. And sometimes they have phones that they only use for this,
for hiring women. You have two ends of people using heightened security,
because neither end wants their identity being revealed. And they’re having
their real names connected on Facebook.”
When Leila queried secret support groups for sex workers,
others said it had happened to them too.
“The worst nightmare of sex workers is to have your real
name out there, and Facebook connecting people like this is the harbinger of
that nightmare,” she said. “With all the precautions we take and the different
phone numbers we use, why the fuck are they showing up? How is this happening?”
It’s not a question that Facebook is willing to answer.
The company is not forthcoming about how “People You May Know,” known
internally as PYMK, makes its recommendations. Most of what Facebook does
reveal about the feature is on a help page, which says that the suggestions
“come from things like” mutual friends, shared networks or groups, or “contacts
you’ve uploaded.”
When the suggestions turn out to be unnerving, that
explanation is both vague and woefully incomplete. A Facebook spokesman told me
this summer that there are more than 100 signals that go into PYMK. All someone
like Leila—who was not connected to her clients by anything like mutual
friends, networks, groups, or contacts—can know is that the data that exposed
her must be something else, in that large undefined set of factors.
Leila suspects either that Facebook collected contact
information from other apps on her phone or that it used location information,
noticing that her and her clients’ smartphones were in the same place at the
same time.
“We do not use information from third party apps to show
friend suggestions in People You May Know,” a Facebook spokesperson wrote via
email. Facebook has said before that it doesn’t use location information for
People You May Know, and the spokesperson confirmed that policy: “People You
May Know suggestions are not informed by your smartphone’s Location Services.”
So the linkage between Leila and her clients remains a
mystery. While the algorithmic black box that is PYMK is simply creepy to most
of us, the intrusive network analysis can have serious consequences for people
in the sex work and porn industry. One sex toy reviewer devoted a section of
her digital security advice to the feature, her cleverest suggestion being to
choose a profile photo that doesn’t show your face.
“People think because you have sex on camera, privacy
isn’t a big deal for you,” said Mike Stabile, spokesperson for the Free Speech
Coalition, a California-based advocacy group for adult performers. “But in this
industry, privacy is so important. Performers worry about stalkers on a daily
basis.”
Stabile says concerns about People You May Know also go
the other way, when people’s accounts for their sex work persona are
recommended to people they know in their real, vanilla lives like relatives and
friends.
That’s what Ela Darling worries about. Darling, who
manages virtual reality adult broadcasting at CAM4, has been working in
pornography for eight years, but her family members don’t know that.
“I don’t want my 15-year-old cousin to discover I’m a
porn star because my account gets recommended to them on Facebook,” Darling
told me by phone.
To combat this, she searches Facebook every few weeks for
the last names of her family and extended family to see if any of her relatives
have joined the network or created a new account. If they have, she blocks
them.
Darling used to have a second, private account under her
legal name for connecting with people she knew in her normal, vanilla life, but
it was getting recommended to her fans, revealing her “real” identity to them.
Some of them began harassing her and trying to track down her family.
“We’re living in an age where you can weaponize personal
information against people,” Darling said. She’s not sure how Facebook linked
her porn identity to her legal identity, but it meant one had to go. She
deleted her private account a few years ago, leaving only her public, porn one.
“Facebook isn’t a luxury,” Darling said. “It’s a utility
in our lives. For something that big to be so secretive and powerful in how it
accumulates your information is unnerving.”
The outing problem is, like Facebook’s ongoing fake-news
scandals, a result of the company’s growth-above-all strategy: First round up
as many users as possible, then start cleaning up (or not) the side effects of
operating at that scale. People You May Know may be incidental to an individual
user’s experience, but it extends the reach and density of the network.
“For sex workers, this is a huge threat. This is life or
death for us,” Leila said.
An obvious solution, from a user’s point of view, would
be for Facebook to fully explain what data it uses to make friend suggestions,
and to allow users to filter it or opt out of the People You May Know feature
entirely. That way, someone concerned about having their identity
exposed—whether a sex worker, a domestic violence victim, or a political
activist—wouldn’t have to worry about having their account shown to someone who
shouldn’t see it.
“An opt out is not something we think people would find
useful,” the spokesperson wrote. “For example, even for people who have been on
Facebook for a long time and already have lots of friends, most of us like to
know when someone we know has joined Facebook for the first time.”
According to the Facebook spokesperson, while there is no
way to clearly and directly opt out of the People You May Know feature, there’s
an undocumented trick that does enable users to stop appearing in it. It just
requires them to shut off their ability to receive any friend requests at all.
“People can always control who can send them friend
requests by visiting their account settings,” said the spokesperson. “If they
select ‘no one,’ they won’t appear in others’ People You May Know.”
This solution, which is not explained in any of
Facebook’s many help pages, would allow Leila to protect herself from exposure,
although at the expense of one of Facebook’s basic functions. And it wouldn’t
work for Darling as her account exists for fans to find and follow. So the need
for a PYMK opt out remains.
“We take privacy seriously and of course want to make
sure people have a safe and positive experience on Facebook,” the Facebook
spokesperson wrote. “For people who choose to maintain a separate identity,
we’ve put safeguards in place to help them understand their privacy choices,
moderate comments, block people, control location sharing, and report abusive
content.”
Facebook also says you can just “X” out anyone who
appears in “People You May Know” that you don’t want to know. Sometimes,
though, just appearing there means the damage is already done.
This story was produced by Gizmodo Media Group’s Special
Projects Desk.
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