Sex workers sit at the intersection of multiple marginalized identities and make up a sizable workforce: the UN estimates that at least 42 million sex workers are conducting business across the globe. Sex workers face a unique and significant set of digital, social, political, legal, and safety risks; yet their digital experiences have received little study in the CS and HCI literature. In this talk we will review findings from a 2-year long study examining how sex workers who work in countries where sex work is legal (Germany, Switzerland, the UK) use technology to conduct business and how they have developed digital strategies for staying safe online and offline. We will then describe how these findings can inform broader conversations around internet governance, digital discrimination, and safety protections for other marginalized and vulnerable users whose experiences bisect the digital and physical.
Dr. Elissa M. Redmiles is a faculty member and research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems and a Visiting Scholar at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. She uses computational, economic, and social science methods to understand users' security, privacy, and online safety-related decision-making processes and remedy inequities in those processes. Her work has been recognized with multiple paper awards at USENIX Security, ACM CCS and ACM CHI and has been featured in popular press publications such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, Rolling Stone, Wired, Business Insider, and CNET.