Maggie Mayhem
Maggie Mayhem is a former sex worker, full spectrum birth worker, and death worker. She is an advisor with the Distributed Denial of Secrets board whose work as an activist has been profiled by The Atlantic and Huffington Post. She has spoken at the UN Digital Rights Forum, DefCon, HOPE, SxSW, Center For Democracy and Technology, and universities around the world. Her website is MaggieMayhem.Com
Session
Sex workers have always been at the vanguard of technology—in ways that protect and restrict their rights. Laws and policies that impact sex workers never stop at this population so it is imperative that these case studies reach general audiences concerned with human rights as a whole. This talk will include a history of surveillance mechanisms directed against sex workers and will focus on the ways and means that digital surveillance has been impacting sex worker rights of mobility and free expression in recent years. New laws enforcing the censorship of pornography and the collateral damages they levy on reproductive health and LGBTQ+ community building will be discussed as well as border crossing and payment processing. Information about how AI and facial recognition software target sex workers will be detailed as well as the tools, advocacy, social engineering strategies sex workers can use to fight back.