Safer Digital Intimacy For Sex Workers And Beyond: A Technical Research Agenda

TL;DR

The paper addresses safety risks in digital intimacy, particularly for sex workers, by proposing a threat model and outlining ten concrete technical research directions across deplatforming, payment, privacy, content protection, and multi‑profile strategies. It synthesizes background on sex work and technology usage with harm mechanisms (deplatforming, payment inoperability, outing, content theft) and maps concrete threat surfaces. The contributions include actionable research directions (e.g., certificate infrastructures for content, robust content matching, usable privacy-preserving payments) and a call to center marginalized communities in deployment to maximize safety for both professional and recreational digital intimacy. The work highlights that technology alone cannot eradicate stigma or policy-driven harms; instead, it offers practical, community‑driven paths to reduce risk and improve safety while acknowledging regulatory and ethical considerations.

Abstract

Many people engage in digital intimacy: sex workers, their clients, and people who create and share intimate content recreationally. With this intimacy comes significant security and privacy risk, exacerbated by stigma. In this article, we present a commercial digital intimacy threat model and 10 research directions for safer digital intimacy

Figures (1)

• Figure 1: Stylized visualizations of sex work platforms.