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Tag: workers

  • The Billion-Dollar Adult Streaming Industry Is Fueled by Horrific Labor Abuses

    The Billion-Dollar Adult Streaming Industry Is Fueled by Horrific Labor Abuses

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    “When we were talking with workers, they just wanted to get back to the cockroaches, how the studio owner charges them for toilet paper or makes them work when they’re on their period. I couldn’t get people to talk to me about platforms, and that’s completely valid because of course you are mad at the guy you know,” Killbride tells WIRED. “But there’s a whole other layer that has been left completely invisible. This is a billion-dollar industry that has been able to excuse itself from rebuke.”

    WIRED attempted to contact BongaCams, Chaturbate, LiveJasmin, and Stripchat to request comment about the research findings. None responded.

    HRW’s report outlines crucial recommendations for improving conditions at both the studio and platform levels. This includes occupational safety standards for studios enforced with regular inspections. Models must be able to take breaks and receive a minimum wage for their work, studio management should not force models to perform specific sex acts or agree that they will perform any act on behalf of the models. Additionally, models should have access to a confidential reporting mechanism so they can notify law enforcement or other authorities about workplace violations.

    Developing recommendations for the platforms themselves is even more nuanced. Killbride says that most if not all of the popular adult streaming platforms have stringent authentication requirements for creating accounts and specifically prohibit studio owners or anyone from accepting terms of service on behalf of someone else. In practice, though, the companies are not doing enough, HRW researchers claim, to offer terms of service in a simple, understandable format in a variety of languages, including Spanish.

    Platforms also need to provide channels through which content creators can report violations and receive a timely response, the researchers say. And, crucially, platforms should establish policies that enable models to take ownership of and transfer their accounts from a studio. Researchers found that the current status quo on many platforms involves policy language that may confuse its users or technical complications that keep content creators say prevents them from being able to assert ownership of their accounts.

    On top of everything else, the stakes are particularly high for account ownership issues, because the researchers found that studios often use “recycled” accounts—those that were authenticated and established by one cammer and then retained by a studio—to circumvent minimum age requirements and stream child sexual abuse material.

    “We found that although the platforms are quite strict and have completely clear policies about not streaming kids, the studios do still manage to hire and stream children using fake IDs or, more commonly, recycled accounts,” Killbride says. “Our research was all with adults, but many people we talked to started streaming as kids when they were 13 to 17.”

    Killbride emphasizes that the situation reflects an important tenet of sex worker advocacy and labor reform in general: Listening to workers about their needs and the protections that would help them do their jobs most effectively and equitably also, simultaneously, protects other vulnerable populations. In this case, by allowing cammers to control and transfer their accounts and their followings, the adult streaming industry could also drastically reduce the prevalence of child sexual abuse material.

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  • Apple Store Employees Say Coworkers Were Disciplined for Supporting Palestinians

    Apple Store Employees Say Coworkers Were Disciplined for Supporting Palestinians

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    Nearly 300 current and former Apple employees have published an open letter alleging that several retail and corporate employees of the company have been disciplined or “wrongfully terminated” for expressing support for Palestinian people through pins, bracelets, or keffiyeh.

    The group, which calls itself Apples4Ceasefire, is planning a protest outside Apple’s retail store in Lincoln Park, Chicago, Saturday. In a podcast published last week with media outlet Palestine in America, the group alleges a Palestinian retail employee at that location was wrongly fired for wearing clothing and accessories showing support for Palestinian people. The podcast episode also elaborates on allegations made in the letter, making detailed claims about multiple Apple employees experiencing retaliation from managers.

    The group’s letter, also released last week, also calls on Apple CEO Tim Cook and other executives to acknowledge the many deaths in Gaza from Israel’s assault on the territory in response to the Hamas attacks of October 7. Cook sent an email to Apple employees two days after Hamas attacked expressing sympathy for those who died or were bereaved, the letter says. It adds that “after over 150 days of violence against innocent Palestinian lives, there has yet to be a message sent expressing the same kind of concern for them.”

    Apple did not respond for comment in time for publication.

    Some 1,200 people died in the October 7 attacks on Israel by Hamas, Israel’s government has estimated. The UN reported last week that more than 32,000 Palestinians have died since the conflict began, citing data from Gaza’s Ministry of Health.

    Tariq Ra’ouf, a technical expert at an Apple retail store in Seattle who helped organize the Apples4Ceasefire campaign, says that the vast majority of people who signed the letter are retail workers at Apple, with a few dozen signatories in corporate roles like product management or software development. Some 55 signatories identified themselves as former employees. The signatories hail from cities around the world, including Chicago; St. Petersburg; London; and Apple’s home base of Cupertino, California.

    “Apple says that they want to make the world a better place,” Ra’ouf says. “This is a rare opportunity, a historic one, to actually do the work to make the world a better place.”

    Corporate Dissent

    Apple is not the only tech giant where workers have demanded executives show more recognition or support for Palestinians since the latest Israel-Hamas conflict began.

    On March 4, more than 600 Google employees signed a petition demanding that the company withdraw its sponsorship funding for an Israeli tech conference in New York, with dozens of employees protesting outside the event. A Google Cloud software engineer interrupted a talk at the conference by Google’s managing director for Israel, calling for an end to Google’s work with the Israeli government under Project Nimbus.

    Employees have noted that Nimbus tools are capable of mass surveillance, but neither Google nor the Israeli government has publicly stated that Nimbus is used for that purpose. The employee was forcibly removed from the event and then fired by Google the same week.



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  • Glassdoor Wants to Know Your Real Name

    Glassdoor Wants to Know Your Real Name

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    Glassdoor has a history of working to keep its users’ identities private, but there are concerns about these identity changes. “Glassdoor has been second to none in defending their user’s First Amendment rights,” says Aaron Mackey, a senior staff attorney with the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation. He represented a Glassdoor user in a case initiated in 2019 when their former employer, cryptocurrency exchange Kraken, attempted to unmask the authors of reviews, alleging that former workers had violated severance agreements with their posts. (The parties settled and the subpoena was withdrawn in 2020).

    The current terms, Mackey says, are a big shift. “This is concerning, if the way in which they’re operating their business now creates potential for people to be identified, separate from whether or not they’re sued.”

    Glassdoor won name recognition by marketing itself as a place focused on protecting anonymity, but companies with smaller workforces have always had good odds at guessing who wrote a particular review. That might be even easier if managers can also see social channels on Glassdoor where people are posting with their real names, indicating which workers have accounts on the site. People unaccustomed to thinking about their online footprint could inadvertently leave big clues, for example, by posting anonymously and then less covertly at the same time.

    Glassdoor’s terms cite the risk. “You acknowledge that Glassdoor cannot guarantee your anonymity,” as a company or department’s size, the content posted, and the user’s location may allow employers’ to infer who left a review, the document says. “You should understand this risk before submitting Content to the services.”

    Social Pivot

    Glassdoor’s acquisition of Fishbowl in 2021 united two platforms that lured users by hosting relatively unfiltered discussions of work, a place to pick up the kind of gossip more often shared in person. Together they had offered a counterweight to LinkedIn, which relies on people using their full identities and often results in rose-tinted, overly congratulatory, and sometimes downright cringey posts about work.

    Glassdoor is owned by Recruit Holdings, which also owns Indeed. Indeed and Glassdoor profit from advertising open jobs. Some 55 million people visit Glassdoor every month, according to the company. Verifying profiles could help prevent trolls from posting fake information about companies and misleading those seeking an insider’s view—all of which erode trust with other users.

    Changing policies on names and verification can erode trust, too. If Glassdoor isn’t so anonymous, it may change how some of those users engage. The recent social media discussion inspired some people to try and delete their accounts.

    Tracking the evolution of Glassdoor’s terms of service shows how its commitments to users changed as it began to add new social features. The company consolidated its terms with Fishbowl between December 2022 and January 2023, months before the company announced the new discussion channels on Glassdoor.

    Some of the changes to the terms added information about how users are verified, as well as how they can be anonymous across services. Glassdoor’s terms of use state that the company may use information obtained from third parties to update profiles, along with personal data provided on résumés or elsewhere on its services. It may also attempt to verify employment history.

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