BIPOC Cybersecurity Forum Aids Performers on Protecting Their IDs

CYBERSPACE—“Being in the (adult) industry, we face a lot of intense weirdos,” said Daisy Ducati, co-moderator (with performer Rex Whamming) of a cybersecurity Zoom call Thursday evening for sex workers and allies sponsored by the BIPOC Adult Industry Collective (@bipoc_aic). “People are always trying to get a hold of our personal information and location.” The term BIPOC, which stands for Black/Indigenous/Persons of Color, was coined in the 2010s but began trending significantly following George Floyd’s murder this May. In tandem with racial equality protests around the United States and world, porn performers who identify as BIPOC began vocally questioning the industry’s promotion of racial stereotypes, resulting, for example, in the removal of the “interracial” categorization on the Internet Adult Film Database (IAFD.com) and in the AVN Awards. To that end, the BIPOC Adult Industry Collective hosts a number of events per month, free to BIPOC members and available via suggested donation to allies, ranging from yoga and wellness, to branding, to Thursday’s wide-ranging seminar, which showcased the ways social media, texting and location services could be leveraged to stalk and harass targets. But, as Ducati pointed out, adult performers are uniquely vulnerable to people wanting to know more about them than performers are comfortable sharing. “I’ve definitely encountered my fair share of weirdos and would-be stalkers,” Ducati told AVN, “but I try my best to stay ahead of the curve to protect myself from dangerous situations.” Ducati, who began her adult career in San Francisco and now mostly works in Las Vegas, began the webinar with several tips that hit adult performers directly in their second-most-important business tool: their phones. “Turn off location services in your phones,” she said, mentioning that SnapChat defaults to showing users’ locations on a map. “Wait until you leave a place to post photos, (and) screenshot them, because photos can be geotagged. Turn off proximity settings because someone else’s phone can be used to locate you.” After addressing several ways in which the convenience of social media can be turned into an effective stalking protocol—including the ubiquity of Amazon wishlists (“some people get them sent to their real names”)—Ducati handed over the chat to Rex Whamming who, along with being a performer, is a cybersecurity professional who regularly attends hacking conventions. Whamming got deeper into multi-hop protection processes and advised viewers to develop their own OpSec—operational security—to minimize threats online. He discussed sideline chats about the safest encrypted email programs (Protonmail got the highest recommendations from the group) and warned people to do their research. “It’s hard to know what companies are and are not selling your data,” he said. Not only that, but “some slick-talking MF can social-engineer you into giving away clues (to your identity).” While the seminar did not address cybersecurity threats specific to people who identify as BIPOC, Ducati told AVN that the goal of the Collective is to promote inclusion, and everyone is welcome at BIPOC-AIC events. “Segregation of our industry and the resources we are able to provide is never the goal,” she said. “Equality and inclusion is the goal. So I think it’s important to open our educational events to allies.” Pictured: Daisy Ducati