Comment on Would you do Onlyfans if needed the money?
ExtremeDullard@lemmy.sdf.org 1 week agoWell, I’m not a fan of any for-profit asking for my ID. But this is an outfit for sex workers and I’m a reasonable man, so I understand the legal need for them to ask me to provide strong proof of my identity, simply to comply with the law.
But why should they go any further than what the law requires them to do?
There are very valid reasons to have a private Facebook and keep it totally separate from your OnlyFans gig. You may have had your Facebook account for years or decades, you interact with your friends and family with it, you know your employers - or your next employer’s headhunter - will check it out. It needs to be squeaky clean and “normal”.
And on the side, you’re Mistress Jeanne queen of the dominatrix on OnlyFans: you absolutely DON’T want anybody to know you’re Mistress Jeanne for obvious reasons.
OnlyFans destroys this separation. They know who you are (by law) and they force you to tell them who you present yourself as on Facebook - in case you didn’t use quite the same name, which is very common with trans people for example - and they obviously know who you are and what you do on their platform.
Why do you think they require you to disclose your social media avatars? To aggregate the information and sell it of course. It’s completely obvious they’re building a database of fully deanonymized sex workers, and that has to be worth a pretty penny on the nauseating data broker market.
If you don’t care about privacy, you use your real name everywhere or you don’t care that Big Data knows everything about you, including your not-so-savory activities, this is of no concern to you. But most people do stuff they want to keep secret, or hidden, or at least compartmentalized away from their ordinary life and OnlyFan’s requirements are all shades of terrible for that basic right to privacy.
I agree I can’t think of any good reason to require Facebook account. But it seems pretty easy to just tell them you never had an account before and create a dummy one. That’s probably what a lot of people have to anyway since no one uses FB anymore.
If it turns you off, I get it. If you want to protect your privacy better, I get that too, though OF doesn’t seem like a vehicle for increasing one’s privacy under any circumstances. The whole “dystopian” thing was a bit much though.
But it seems pretty easy to just tell them you never had an account before and create a dummy one.
That doesn’t work. They don’t accept that. They tell you “Sorry but you need a solid social media presence, with an old account full of actual content.” No social media, no OnlyFans. They literally tell you that when you send them a support email asking why your application was rejected.
I find it hard to believe that all the GenZ ladies there have extensive Facebook accounts.
They accept other forms of social media presence of course - although only a select few types. But when I looked into this 2 or 3 years ago, they were absolutely biased towards you preferentially having a Facebook account. And they literally told me they actively worked with Facebook, hence the bias - and if you don’t find them outright admitting this alarming, I don’t know what does.
I’m just telling you what they told me.
scarabic@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Well, I did think of a reason and it’s not for selling your data. This was in the back of my mind but I didn’t know how to put it into words.
From your perspective, you’re a private individual who wants to display a little ass for coin, all on the up and up. And how dare they ask invasive questions.
But you do have to remember that ANY community driven site has abuse problems all the time, let alone one where sex workers are plying their trade. So in my mind, they are asking for FB so they can say “keep it real - we know who you are.”
On the one hand this is dumb and implies a threat. On other hand their site would immediately fly downhill and get shut down if everything there could be done with total anonymity.
ExtremeDullard@lemmy.sdf.org 1 week ago
Be that as it may, it’s still unacceptable.
To me anyway.
And it fully qualifies as dystopian in my opinion.
scarabic@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Okay. You have a rather low bar for dystopia.
ExtremeDullard@lemmy.sdf.org 1 week ago
Indeed I do. I’m Gen-X 🙂 This sort of shit was unheard of - and unthinkable - when I grew up. This is everybody’s normal today but it sure ain’t mine.