Privacy violations are nothing new or newsworthy. As long humans have been attempting to interact with one another, there have been humans ignoring boundaries that are in place to protect one person’s secrets from the rest of the village. That has always seemed to go double for humans of the womanly persuasion, who openly acknowledge that sex is a thing.
Enter Sophie Rain. The OnlyFans content creator was recently the subject of an MMS video that was leaked online without her consent. If you’ve been living under a rock without WiFi, OnlyFans is a social media platform that is known primarily for its adults only content, though there’s ample content hosted there that is perfectly safe for work, should your boss happen to peek over your shoulder— granted, why are you on OnlyFans during company time? For shame.
Anyhow, the video leak has raised concerns yet again about digital privacy in an age where more and more people are earning a living simply by showing up online. OnlyFans content creators largely make their living via subscription fees, but their video content is a titch pricier, and it’s only intended for the eyes of the person handing over the money for the video in the first place. So what does that mean when their video content is leaked online?
Well, aside from potentially explicit content making its way off its intended platform; when content like that is shared without the consent of the creator, that’s a serious breach of the understood social contract. No one is more fierce about boundaries and consent than sex workers. If the work that they’ve charged for is being leaked to the wider world, that’s the equivalent of sharing a pirated copy of an artist’s hard work to the general public. Not cool.
Content creators rely on discretion from their clients— IE: the people who create the demand for the work they’re doing in the first place— in order to be able to safely go about their business. If the terms set forth surrounding privacy aren’t honored, due to society being society, the psychological and reputational ramifications can seriously hinder their careers. When the work you do is creative— and yes. Content creators are creatives, it’s literally IN THE NAME— then psychological disruptions frequently mean that you can’t work while you get your head sorted out. And reputational damage? When your entire business model is built around popularity on social media, that’s a very real danger to your bottom line.
OnlyFans likes to pride itself on aggressively protecting the models that generate the platform’s revenue, but that doesn’t make it immune to privacy violations. Since 2022, the platform has seen multiple leaks, despite efforts to ensure that content is protected. More than that, in 2022 OnlyFans was accused of selling images that were taken without consent. OnlyFans wound up being legally protected in that instance, but that doesn’t change the fact that even a platform with as many protections in place as OnlyFans has still manages to have bad actors slip through the cracks.
Ultimately, whenever you put an image out online, it’s not going to disappear. Once published, even with the most iron-clad firewalls in place there is no guarantee that you’ll be able to keep your content locked down. For most people, a paywall is enough to make them navigate elsewhere in the digital streets. But for bad actors? If they’re on a mission, they’ll eventually find a way.
So how do platforms like OnlyFans protect the asset that is their content creators?
We don’t have the answers, but we hope to see continued efforts at boosting protections for content creators, and stricter punishments for those who are caught leaking content that belongs behind paywalls. And we hope that change begins with Sophie Rain seeing better security than she’s been given in recent weeks.
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