Any sex worker who advertises online or posts pornographic content has heard that the internet is forever and that people will eventually find out what they do for work. That used to mean that we had to be prepared for people to stumble across porn that featured us, or for friends or family to notice our escorting ads when seeking someone to pay for sex. In our current era of the internet, due to the rise of AI and improvements in facial recognition technology, finding our work personas has become far easier and can be achieved by uploading a single photo to a website built for the purpose.
It has been possible to use face ID websites to find someone across the internet for quite a while, but as a sex worker I have hesitated to discuss the issue. The more widespread that awareness of these websites becomes, especially to clients, the more likely people are to use them to invade sex workers privacy. Unfortunately, knowledge of these malicious websites has become so widespread that the most dangerous people already know all about them. I can’t let fear permanently silence me on the topic.
When I search an image of my face using one of these facial recognition websites, the results provide links to my escorting ads as well as my social media and dozens of sites where pornographic videos of me have been leaked. I have no choice but to maintain a state of detachment from that reality, because the alternative is to live with the constant fear that people I meet or who read my writing are looking me up. I know that with the click of a button someone who I never shared my work persona with can find porn of me, and that acknowledging that is likely to encourage curious people to seek it out even as I denounce it.
I can scroll and see links to my personal social media right next to directories of leaked nudes which include those I posted on OnlyFans or Reddit years ago. I’ve deleted my old accounts, but the pictures and videos were downloaded long before then, mere days or weeks after they were originally posted. As much as I’d like to pretend it doesn’t get to me, because I knew my content would be stolen from the moment I first started doing sex work, I could never have predicted the ease with which my old content could be found.
Transphobic and whorephobic people who detest that I advocate for trans rights and sex workers’ rights are able to look up images of my naked pre-transition body to laugh at. My estranged parents, who denounce me for my job to the rest of my family that I no longer speak to, can track down any new escorting advert or porn profile that I make. Online crushes of mine who I flirt with can go and find videos of me masturbating to decide if they think we’d be sexually compatible based on the act I put on for viewers, instead of talking to me about my interests and desires.
As violating as it would be if someone I was friends with decided to use this technology to find pictures of my naked body without my permission, I am fortunate to be at a point in my life where I don’t feel shame over my naked body. I’m not devastated over the idea that someone can seek out sexual content of me, even if I am bitter about the fact they can do so for free at a time where I am struggling to pay my bills. What made me feel like the bottom dropped out of my stomach when I first found out about this technology was its utility for stalking and the impact it would have on my future job prospects.
I’ve had clients use this technology to find my LinkedIn or Facebook accounts and message me there. People who’ve read articles I’ve written about how I do not enjoy selling sex have used it to find my escorting profile and book me, getting off on the knowledge that I dislike them and engaging in behaviours I’ve specifically written that I hate – only to reveal how they know me and found me at the end of the booking. Whilst no employer has ever used this method to do a background check on me before hiring, I know better than to think it isn’t a possibility.
My life circumstances are such that everyone I care about knows and accepts me as a sex worker. I’ve been disowned by my family, so I don’t live in fear of them finding out. Most sex workers are not in this position. A single person finding out their status as sex workers could potentially ruin their careers outside of sex work and their relationships. Friends of mine who no longer do sex work, and whose experiences included coercion and trauma when they did, have been broken down by the discovery that facial recognition puts porn they shot at 18 right next to a link to their Instagram profile.
Getting any sexual content taken down from websites that have stolen and re-uploaded it is not impossible, but it is a process that usually involves providing your real personal information as part of a takedown notice. Sex workers are often scared of fighting back against content thieves for this reason. Plenty of platforms will also ignore the law entirely and leave sex workers helpless to keep their images private. Even if we are able to get all of our pirated content removed, facial recognition is still able to connect our real identities to whatever accounts are active if there’s a single picture of our faces on them.
Posts used to go viral in the sex worker community which advised newcomers to the profession to never post the same selfie on their work accounts and their personal ones, so that no client could use reverse image search to find out their real names. That advice is practically useless now that facial recognition can connect any photos of the same person. As soon as we show our faces in porn or on our escorting ads, our identity is discoverable, and that is essentially permanent. Using different names no longer protects our identities when we can be found from our faces alone.
It doesn’t matter how miserable or scared this makes me; I have to keep doing sex work. Rent comes out of my account every month and I have to find ways to pay it, no matter how much the risk increases. The more connected my identity gets to sex work, the harder it becomes to find any other kind of employment, and at a certain stage it becomes useless to try. No matter how much the danger increases, or how much harder it becomes to keep our sex worker personas a secret, there are large numbers of us who simply cannot afford to stop.
The need to destigmatise sex work is as urgent as ever, because every avenue we have to hide and protect ourselves is being eradicated. Whorephobia is all the more deadly in a world where any sufficiently motivated person can out you as a sex worker from the moment you show your face.
Protecting sex workers means protecting our privacy. Protecting sex workers means putting a stop to facial recognition technology. Don’t use it and don’t encourage its use.
Protecting sex workers means creating a world where we’re so safe and respected that we don’t need to hide our identities in the first place.
Jack Talks About Sex Work 