Incident 408: Facebook Reportedly Outed Sex Workers through Friend Recommendations

Description: Facebook's "People You May Know" feature reportedly outed sex workers by recommending clients to their personal accounts or family members to their business accounts with no option to opt out.

Tools

New ReportNew ReportNew ResponseNew ResponseDiscoverDiscoverView HistoryView History
Alleged: Facebook developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed sex workers using Facebook.

Incident Stats

Incident ID
408
Report Count
1
Incident Date
2017-04-15
Editors
Khoa Lam

Incident Reports

Reports Timeline

How Facebook Outs Sex Workers
gizmodo.com · 2017

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 blowba…

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.

Similar Incidents

By textual similarity

Did our AI mess up? Flag the unrelated incidents