Prof. Allison McDonald Explores Privacy and Safety Issues Related to Online Sexual Content
Since the internet’s earliest days, before “you’ve got mail” became part of our lexicon, people have used the web to share sexual content.
And yet, despite that long history, notes Allison McDonald, an assistant professor in the Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences (CDS) at Boston University, the tech policy space has been “largely unwilling to talk about sexual content,” including privacy and safety issues. She believes sexual expression of this type is inevitable, so people who understand privacy and security should study it.
“We need to build safe tools that actually let people do what they want, like send nudes,” says McDonald. “Maybe the safest thing would be never to take nudes or put anything online, but that’s not reasonable to expect. People want to sext, so we should help them figure out how to do it while minimizing risk.”
Most recently, she was part of a team studying the motivations of sexual content creators on OnlyFans, a subscription website many sex workers use. McDonald collaborated on a paper, led by Vaughn Hamilton that earned an honorable mention at the Association for Computing Machinery’s 2023 Human-Computer Interaction Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
We need to build safe tools that actually let people do what they want, like send nudes...People want to sext, so we should help them figure out how to do it while minimizing risk.
It noted gig-economy workers on OnlyFans, whether professional sex workers or amateurs trying to monetize sexual expression, are an important part of the digital economy and deserve a workspace that facilitates respect and dignity, just like all other gig-economy workers. The study also concluded that stigma is a significant source of harm for OnlyFans creators, and safety online depends on destigmatizing the sexual expression of adults online.
Roughly a quarter of the study’s participants said they already created sexual content recreationally before becoming OnlyFans creators, underscoring McDonald’s call to develop safe sexting methods. “I’m a security and privacy researcher primarily. I like to zero in on how people think about safety and make decisions online about whether to expose information or keep something private. So I was surprised how important self-expression was in the decision to be on OnlyFans,” McDonald said. “It was most frequently a financial decision. But also people like making this kind of content. They might have already been doing it for fun on the side, and they decided to try to monetize it.”
McDonald feels it’s critical to keep participants involved in the research process related to sensitive topics. In the OnlyFans study, for instance, the team worked with OnlyFans creators on the study design and employed sex workers as transcriptionists. “I always want to ensure the work supports the community and accomplishes their goals rather than studying them from the outside and deciding what they need,” McDonald says.
Learn more about Professor McDonald.
- Toni Fitzgerald, CDS Contributor