PrivacyHigh
Facebook Reportedly Outed Sex Workers through Friend Recommendations
- Occurred
- Apr 15, 2017
- Published
- Oct 11, 2017
- Source
- AI Incident Database
Summary
Facebook's "People You May Know" feature reportedly outed sex workers by recommending clients to their personal accounts or family members to their business accounts with no option to opt out.
Developers
Deployers
Harmed parties
- sex workers using Facebook
- Facebook users
- Social media users
- Privacy
- Biometric data subjects
- sex workers
Classification
Category confidence: 90%
Severity confidence: 85%
Rationale: Facebook's algorithm exposed sensitive personal data, outing sex workers to clients and family without consent.
Classifier: Qwen/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-FP8