There is a key point continually getting glossed over in this whole FetLife disaster that I feel needs to be stated. It is the direct line that connects the dots between FetLife’s silencing of abuse survivors and FetLife’s dishonest communication about security and privacy. The following is cross-posted from Facebook, emphasis added:

There are a lot of issues embedded in this, John, but the one that matters most to me personally is the fact that failing to offer inter-user privacy controls creates a situation where individuals are subject to harassment from other individuals. These situations are worse (and, sadly, common) in cases where the harasser already has personal knowledge of the person they want to intimidate/threaten/bully/etc. and that due to the nature of FetLife.com, most of these situations are similar to or exactly mirror acquaintance rape, the single most common form of sexual coercion and assault and BY FAR the most prevalent in the BDSM community proper.

In other words, the most urgent issue here is not simply that “privacy controls are lacking,” but that there are real people (some of whom have contacted me privately) who are currently being harassed/bullied/threatened/etc. by people who they have already been assaulted by (some of whom have literal scars from hospitalizations they have suffered at the treatment of these assaulters, some of them on numerous occasions), and it is these same people who were totally unaware of how trivially easy it was for their harassers to stalk, spy on, and in some cases even out them simply because they had a FetLife account they thought was “safe.” And that is why I am so insistent on inter-user privacy controls being a priority for the FetLife dev team: offering such user-centric privacy options keeps individuals physically safer, not just “theoretically” safer. But no one seems to want to talk about that, much to my dismay.

That FetLife does nothing to address this speaks volumes about their priorities. Namely, that they are more interested in maintaining the site as-is for the reasons Anaiis outlines: there is a commercial investment in their users having a deliberately falsified sense of privacy so that their 1.5+ million users won’t think twice about posting amateur porn that FetLife charges other users to see.

Meanwhile, otherwise disadvantaged/marginalized individuals who have a clear and present need to protect themselves and the fundamental human right to sexual self-expression both online and in person are being told they should just shut up and deal. What kind of entity does that? I’ll give you a hint. It starts with “cor” and ends with “poration.”

Building a better FetLife won’t solve this particular problem. Screaming about what a “dick move” writing a 50-line PHP proxy was won’t solve this problem. Telling people who were abused to go the cops won’t solve this problem.

Forcing FetLife (and, indeed, other social networking services) to prioritize user-centric privacy options will help resolve this problem.

Every time I hear people say “privacy is dead,” or “you are a fucking moron and deserve whatever approbation, embarrassment or other difficulties caused by your revealing sensitive details on a fucking public site,” or when FetLife calls these “privacy concerns…unfounded”…

…I am reminded of the person who wrote to me terrified that the ex-lover who sent them to the emergency room with broken bones is able to read their posts—and that there’s very little they could do to prevent that. I am reminded of the person who suddenly realized all of the photos they uploaded are being collected by their stalker for who-knows-what purposes. I am reminded of the person who wrote me in urgent tones asking for any advice I could offer for maintaining their privacy online.

These are not exaggerations. These things happen. If you’re not aware of these people and their stories, perhaps it’s because your silence, dismissal, or victim-blaming attitude is sending survivors the message that you won’t believe them if they told you what their online experience was like and how it made them feel.

Yet I can’t find anyone to blame. After all, the BDSM community role models are the worst perpetrators. Its institutions and constituents are the enablers. That ”community” is filled with rapists, abusers, apologists, and commercial interests actively invested in the exploitation of its own members.¹

Having received permission to share one exchange, and as it contains practical tips, here’s an excerpt in which I responded to a request for advice in maintaining personal safety on FetLife when you are being individually targeted. It began like this:

I need help. I am being stalked and threatened by an ex-boyfriend, a “rock star” in certain communities, who wants to be sure that I shut up. He is threatening to send posts, pictures, whatever he wants to my employer.He garotted me and broke a bone in my neck and I ended up having major surgery removing a mass, bone and part of the back of my tongue as a result of the assault. 

Can you please “friend” me and advise me on this ?

Thank you,
Vicki

Later, as part of our correspondence, I wrote:

Hi Vicki,

First, again, I sympathize. Sadly, you find yourself in a situation that I’m familiar with and that I know others have, in the past, found themselves in, too. Far, far too many people, in fact.

This is one of the reasons I am so personally angered by FetLife’s evident disregard of its users privacy—that is, YOUR privacy. The fact of the matter is that FetLife.com is an extremely dangerous service to use, and I’m sorry to say that you’re finding out why first-hand.

I’ve written on this topic at my own website for several years. I have also been lobbying FetLife (again, for *years*) to offer users like you better controls to control and protect your own data. To date, they have been resolute in their stance to ignore these issues and sweep them under the rug. (Much to my frustration, I hasten to add!)

[…]

When it comes to what you can do to protect yourself while using FetLife, sadly, the answer is not much, because FetLife offers very few tools for you to do so.

However, at a minimum, you could take the following steps:

1. Remove other users you do not trust from your list of FetLife friends.
2. Set your photos and writings to “Friends only.”
3. Delete any photograph or other personally identifiable information from your profile, such as photos that include pictures of your face, any tattoos, piercings, or other body modifications you may have, or pictures that show identifiable backgrounds such as public venues, street signs, well-known landmarks, and so on. Also be certain to delete any photo that you may have also uploaded to a different website so that the only photos you have on your FetLife profile are photos you use ONLY on FetLife.
4. Remove yourself from any local-area groups you may have joined, or events you may have RSVP’ed to, and do not RSVP to events in the future.
5. Change your location, age, and other profile details so that they do not reflect your physical-world address.
6. Double-check that you are not using the same username on FetLife that you use on any other service. If you are re-using your username, change it to something unique.

Admittedly, doing many of the things in this list will make FetLife far less useful to you. This is an inherent tension in using FetLife as it exists today. (This is described in more detail in the articles I linked above.) Basically, FetLife staked its business investments on getting you to share as much information about yourself as possible *AND ALSO* in continuing to deny you the ability to control who, among its 1.5+ million other users, can see your information. They do this because you—and your sexual life—is their *product.* Until and unless FetLife.com prioritizes granular, easy-to-use and understand privacy controls for people like you, FetLife will continue to be an exceptionally dangerous website to use.

However, the likelihood of FetLife.com offering you an ability to more safely use their website is in direct opposition to their goals as a for-profit business. That’s why I feel it’s important to advocate for better privacy controls for users. This has been an ongoing issue for a long time now. See also:

• https://fetlife.com/improvements/14
• https://fetlife.com/improvements/21
• https://fetlife.com/improvements/46
• https://fetlife.com/improvements/89
• https://fetlife.com/improvements/91
• https://fetlife.com/improvements/95

Beyond your own personal situation, it would be helpful to all of us who are affected by FetLife’s lack of privacy options to pressure the company directly to provide them. You can do so by voting for one or more of the above “FetLife Improvement Suggestions,” or by sending an email to privacy@fetlife.com and demanding that they prioritize user privacy in their current and future development efforts.

I’ve written a template you are free to use and/or modify, accessible by clicking on the “Send FetLife an email by clicking here” link, available on the following page:

• http://maybemaimed.com/2012/08/13/guest-post-some-notes-about-fetlifes-insecurity/#take-action

Additionally, there is also information about these kinds of threatening online behaviors elsewhere on the Internet referenced under the term “cyber bullying.” A lot of this information is written for youth, but much of the advice and many of the Internet safety tips are relevant to adults as well. Some starting points for you to explore are as follows:

• http://www.cyberbullying.org/pdf/Cyberbullying_Information.pdf
• http://www.ncpc.org/newsroom/current-campaigns/internet-safety
• http://www.netsmartz.org/cyberbullying
• http://www.cyberbullying.us/resources.php
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberbullying

I hope the information herein is helpful to you. If there is more that you feel I can do to help, please don’t hesitate to ask. I can’t make any promises, but I do want to help make the Internet a safer place for sexual self-expression and I feel strongly that pressuring FetLife.com to provide privacy options for its large and growing user base is a fundamental part of that endeavor.

Thank you for reaching out to me and for giving me a heads up about this situation. My thoughts and best wishes are with you.

Cheers,
-maymay
http://maybemaimed.com/cv/

Vicki responded:

thank you for sending this.

I wish that they would just close [his] account for his almost daily violation of the farcical “FL Restraining Order.”

It seems he can write just about anything he wants, but I cannot.

[…]

I have a large physical scar on my neck and emotional scars that will be an even longer time healing from this.

I wrote back:

It does not seem to me that FetLife’s administrators actually take care to enforce their own TOU in a consistent way (they have banned me for pointing out the problems with their security and privacy model, but, as you note, apparently not at all concerned with blocking those who harass other users directly), and, moreover, it seems to me that it’s becoming ever more obvious that FetLife’s business interests are in direct opposition to the safety needs of its users. If you are willing, I would be interested in writing about this topic further and your messages to me are a very illustrative example of exactly this sort of thing. I would take care to anonymize your information if you are concerned about additional harassment[…].

And then Vicki bravely consented to let me share this exchange:

You don’t need to anonymize me.

He is posting my job, private sexual information […] and [is] essentially calling me a liar[…].

The “Caretakers” seem not to give a shit, as he is such a prolific author and brings in readers. 

[…]

I was going to ask YOU if I had permission to post some of the things you were saying.

Yes, feel free to say what you want about my situation. 

Vicki

(For the record, yes, all of you not only have permission to repost/reblog/republish what I’m writing, but are actively encouraged to do so.)

I’ll leave you with one final thought:

What are you doing to make things better?

As I type this, a weekend-long gathering of BDSM and fetish Scene’sters called FetFest is happening right now (just watch the #FetFest hashtag). Further, according to a press release by the National Coalition of Sexual Freedom (NCSF), FetLife founder John Baku will be participating in a series of face-to-face “Consent Counts” conversations with the participants there. If you’ll be participating, consider asking John why user privacy controls seem to be less important to his development team than features like instant chat.

And if you’re not participating, consider sharing this blog post with someone who is.

Other useful resources to share, many of which are recommended by people “on the front lines, as it were, working with both survivors and victims of sexual assault and intimate partner violence” are:

• National Coalition Against Domestic Violence
• RAINN: Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network
• A Long Walk Home: Non-profit that uses visual arts to end abuse against women and girls.
• The (National Domestic Violence) Hotline
• Without My Consent: Paths to justice for survivors of online harassment.

1. The act of BDSM is not inherently abusive but the social structure of the BDSM Scene is abusive. As my friend Shelly wrote to me recently, “Obviously there is a massive distinction between the activities of BDSM and the institutionalized and excused abuse that takes place in the community. I may easily bristle at the idea that the (ie.) bruises on my body are signs of abuse, and yet I am enraged when we excuse regressive, misogynistic or psychologically abusive behavior in the name of a fetish or kink.

   “As an example, I know more than one male dom who uses d/s as a way to basically enforce regressive gender roles and control and limit the lives of the women they are involved with. What a relief to stop making excuses for them (as the community encourages), and realize that they are just being assholes. You have to break through a lot of structure, and be willing to accept a lot of alienation though, just to be able to call an asshole an asshole in the BDSM community.”

EDITORIAL NOTE: This piece is long because it reiterates important information from prior posts published over the last several months. For those of you who haven’t the time or patience to read this in one sitting, you can use the following mini-Table Of Contents to jump to the subsections of this post:

1. FetLife is selling your sex life to the world
2. Robots with conscience: FetLife Warning Buoys share privacy tips
3. Did FetLife ask for the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA)’s consent before abusing it?
4. Important safety information and tips for protecting your privacy

Like all other social networks, what makes FetLife.com great is the personal connections you can make there. Sharing personal information about yourself on social networks, like your favorite books, your opinions on the interesting conversation you had at a dinner party, or the joke your boss shared over drinks, is what makes such networks valuable. After all, it’s what makes them social.

FetLife is selling your sex life to the world

Unlike many other social networks, however, the information on FetLife is mostly about sex. It’s not your favorite book, it’s your favorite sex position. It’s not an interesting dinner conversation, it’s a secret fantasy you had since you were little. It’s not a joke your boss shared over drinks, it’s the gossip between your past and current sexual partners.

This stuff is really personal. And it’s important to take that really seriously. If you don’t, it becomes far too easy for a fuming ex-partner, an obsessive fan, or any other individual with a grudge against you to learn more than you want them to know.

Before FetLife, it was easy for someone with even a modicum of Internet savvy to learn your home address, employment history, and favorite hobbies. After FetLife, it’s easy for that same tech-savvy person to learn how you like to orgasm, when you’ve done so, and with whom.

HOLY SOCIAL ENGINEERING GOLDMINE, BATMAN!

Unfortunately, assaults and harassment enabled by the easy availability of such information are not uncommon. Such crimes happen far too often, and my inbox alone contains numerous messages from frightened people who want to use FetLife but don’t know how to protect themselves from other users. These are messages from people who have been abused and, in some cases, physically and sexually assaulted.

The day I stop receiving anxious emails like that can not come too soon.

But sex-focused social networking giants like FetLife currently make no meaningful effort to offer ways to protect your personal information. In stark contrast to sites like Facebook and Google+, there are very few, largely ineffective options for sharing your postings only with people you choose, rather than the entire network. Infuriatingly, it’s become ever more apparent that this isn’t a mistake or an oversight. It’s the intentional design of their system.

FetLife doesn’t want you to think twice before you post a naked photo of yourself because, if you did, it’d be harder for the company to convince other users to pay a premium to see more of those naked photos. That, in and of itself, is merely callously corporate capitalism. But it gets worse.

Rather than offer privacy features that their own user base have been requesting for the better part of a year (and that I’ve been writing about the importance of for far longer than that), FetLife actively censors the web postings of its users who have experienced sexual assault from other users, apparently spends the majority of its development efforts on features that further degrade the privacy of its users, and considers privacy concerns “unfounded,” all while purporting to be a safe place to be sexually vocal online.

That’s exploitative.

Robots with conscience: FetLife Warning Buoys share privacy tips

Several weeks ago, I created a robot (a “friendly FetLife warning buoy”) lovingly named Tarchannen III, which sent messages to FetLife users containing privacy information that FetLife’s staff of volunteer “Greeters” fail to mention and routinely obscure. The robot was able to send messages to at least several hundred users before the FetLife staff found and banned the account. In response, I created dozens new FetLife sock puppet accounts and set the robot to use those. A fleet of warning buoys now sends invaluable privacy information to FetLife users, particularly new signups.

From FetLife’s point of view, however, that’s bad for business. “We take your safety seriously, but spamming is definitely not cool,” they say:

Of course, if FetLife actually took your safety seriously, they’d not obscure privacy issues, they’d stop protecting rapists by censoring assault survivors, and they’d stop exploiting technical ignorance for commercial gain.

So every couple of days, FetLife bans a new batch of warning buoy accounts. Every couple of days, a new batch of FetLife sock puppet accounts (“warning buoys”) is created and launched. The game is cat-and-mouse, and the goal is to get important safety and privacy information to FetLife’s users before FetLife shoots down the buoys. The buoys communicate with each other to ensure each FetLife user is sent one and only one message regardless of which buoy initially contacted them—a most unusual behavior for “spam.”

From the point of view of FetLife users the messages are largely welcomed. Here are some (anonymized) responses that the “Tarchannen III” FetLife warning buoy received before getting shot down.

Some users wrote of their familiarity with these very issues, causing them to disengage from the (toxic) mainstream BDSM Scene that FetLife serves:

Hey, thanks for that! Glad you’re doing this.

I no longer hang out on FL or have any interest in associating with the kink ‘community’ because doing so violates my rules for staying safe, for much the reasoning given in your message. But I do appreciate that you & whoever else are doing something about making the kink ‘community’ more what it says it is. Maybe I’ll come back some day if/when it stops being a covertly (but gigantic) abuse-enabling structure […]

But, again, big thanks to you for doing something. :D

Some responded noting they’ve had first-hand experience with FetLife’s corruption:

I am aware of all of this ( and more ) related to the insecurity of Fetlife.

I have […] witnessed firsthand theissues surrounding mis-handling of Fetlife members in violation of Fetlife policy.

With that said, thanks fo rthe message and I hope that you meet with more positive responses like mine instead of more “knee jerk” negative reactions from those less informed.

Ciao.

A few users neither seemed to understand (or possibly even read) the buoy’s message, nor did they seem to understand what the buoy actually was (an automated robot):

Thank you for your mail but I like fetlife just the way it is. Anyone suffering from rape or abuse should be taking it to the proper authorities not the fetlife forums. I still believe in innocent until PROVEN guilty

I really don’t appreciate this email promoting your agenda couched in some sort of “safety” message. I believe in the privacy of others. That’s why i’m on this site.

Please consider me OFF your mailing list

Quite a number of other users responded with extremely encouraging replies, such as these two:

Really well done. I hope you’re sending this to everyone, whoever you are.

I don’t know who you are, but I support this message. Fetlife is practically deceitful in the level of legal privity users are provided, and anyone talking out is doing a good thing.

And numerous users just sent a short thank you, such as the user who simply wrote:

Thank you for sending this.

But, to FetLife, the messages these folks are responding to and the information contained in them are “spam.” The privacy information is not worth including in FetLife Greeters’ welcome messages to new users—messages that are sent once to each new user who signs up, much like Tarchanenn III’s own behavior.

FetLife has once again made their intention clear: obscure privacy issues from you, silence sexual assault survivors, and make sure conversations about consent and safety do not rise to a level of awareness dangerous to the company’s public image, or its bottom line.

Did FetLife ask for the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA)’s consent before abusing it?

How seriously does FetLife take silencing dissenters and sexual assault survivors? How far are they willing to go to censor and stop these conversations? They’re willing to abuse United States law.

Over the past several weeks, I’ve been sent not one, not two, not three, not four, but at least five different DMCA takedown notices for videos I’ve made and posts I’ve written criticizing FetLife. Moreover, my counter-notices were allowed to proceed unchallenged, a tacit acknowledgement that FetLife is well aware their DMCA takedown notices were improper and that my material was all either non-infringing or fair use. The majority of my content is now back online.

But for as long as FetLife’s business model relies upon its users ignorance, they won’t stop trying to silence anyone speaking out against abuse or demanding increased security and privacy options. So I need your help to make sure FetLife won’t succeed.

I need your help to make sure people who want to use FetLife will one day be able to do so safely. I need your help spreading Tarchannen III’s message. Like a banned book, I hope you will republish it everywhere you think it might reach someone who can benefit, by publishing it as a post on your FetLife journal, or sending it around to your friends.

Important safety information and tips for protecting your privacy

So, here it is, the privacy information FetLife doesn’t want you to read:

Hi there,

I hope you’re having a great time on FetLife! :) (Can’t access FetLife? Read this message at: http://pastebin.com/uxYXtpR7 )

To make your experience here as safe and fun as possible, please familiarize yourself with the information in this message. It will equip you with the knowledge you need to protect yourself and your loved ones here and elsewhere!

This message contains information about:

• Official FetLife policies that put users at risk of sexual assault and rape
• Tips for protecting your privacy despite FetLife’s lack of user privacy controls
• Resources for survivors of sexual assault or online harrassment
• What you can do to help make things better

Any text that looks like this is a link; click it to learn more!

Official FetLife policies that endanger its users

Although it’s invisible to the mainstream, there’s a war on within the BDSM/fetish community about whether to face up to abuse from within. Violations of consent ranging from harassment to rape are sadly more common than people realize, and arguably even more common in sexually charged spaces, such as this. Unfortunately, many assailants hold positions of power within the community, which makes it extremely difficult to talk about without being ostracized from the community. One such prominent alleged assailant is none other than FetLife founder John Baku himself.

Worse, FetLife actively censors survivors who discuss these issues, preventing individuals from helping one another remain safe. For more information about this disturbing trend, please see the following articles:

• FetLife: Not Consent Counts, but Convictions Count, eh?
• FetLife Is Not Safe for Users
• A BDSM Blacklist
• There’s a War On Part 6: Anti-Sunshine League

Here on FetLife, you can learn more by participating in the discussions at the following pages:

• Hey Fetlife, you want my money? STOP PROTECTING RAPISTS.
• NYC Consent Working Group

Tips for protecting your privacy on FetLife and why you should care if you care about stopping sexual assault

When it comes to protecting your personal information, there are three main groups of people who want access to your information: other users, people with commercial interests, and the government:

Other users includ[e] everyone from your mom on Facebook to crazy stalker blog fans. They may want information for nice reasons (say to wish you a happy birthday on the right day), because of curiosity (or its dangerous older brother, obsession), or for malicious reasons. [...F]or most of us, other users are the biggest threat.

Unfortuantely, since FetLife intentionally provides no significantly effective tools for letting you control who, among its more than 1.5 million other users, can access your profile or other activity, this means users like you are vulnerable to the most statistically likely attacks you will face online. Consider what happened to Vicki:

I need help. I am being stalked and threatened by an ex-boyfriend, a “rock star” in certain communities, who wants to be sure that I shut up. He is threatening to send posts, pictures, whatever he wants to my employer.He garotted me and broke a bone in my neck and I ended up having major surgery removing a mass, bone and part of the back of my tongue as a result of the assault.

Can you please “friend” me and advise me on this ?

Thank you,
Vicki

Vicki discovered first-hand why FetLife is an extrmeley dangerous service to use. When it comes to what you can do to protect yourself while using FetLife, sadly, the answer is not much, because FetLife offers very few tools for you to do so. However, at a minimum, you could take the following steps:

• Remove other users you do not trust from your list of FetLife friends.
• Set your photos and writings to “Friends only.”
• Delete any photograph or other personally identifiable information from your profile, such as photos that include pictures of your face, any tattoos, piercings, or other body modifications you may have, or pictures that show identifiable backgrounds such as public venues, street signs, well-known landmarks, and so on. Also be certain to delete any photo that you may have also uploaded to a different website so that the only photos you have on your FetLife profile are photos you use ONLY on FetLife.
• Remove yourself from any local-area groups you may have joined, or events you may have RSVP’ed to, and do not RSVP to events in the future.
• Change your location, age, and other profile details so that they do not reflect your physical-world address.
• Double-check that you are not using the same username on FetLife that you use on any other service. If you are re-using your username, change it to something unique.

Admittedly, doing many of the things in this list will make FetLife far less useful to you. This is an inherent tension in using FetLife as it exists today. The bottom line is that if you cannot afford to be outed, you cannot afford to use FetLife.

Since FetLife is, fundamentally, a business, they have economic incentives to forfeit your privacy. In this way, FetLife is just like other social networks such as Facebook or Foursquare. The major difference is that unlike Facebook or Foursquare, FetLife’s product is your sex life, so they don’t want you to think twice about posting what amounts to amateur porn other users pay to access.

These facts fly in the face of the claims FetLife makes about its own security and privacy. In both areas, computer security experts and online privacy advocates widely agree that FetLife has had numerous ongoing issues and routinely communicate dishonestly to their users about them. For more information, please see the following articles:

• Some Notes About FetLife’s (In)Security
• fetlife.com – the privacy disaster, or: security through lying
• Lies, Damned Lies, and FetLife
• FetLife privacy or lack thereof

These privacy issues combined with the silencing of sexual assault survivors on FetLife create what some people have termed “a nightmare scenario” that makes FetLife uniquely attractive to sexual predators, since it offers structural cover for rapists, rather than survivors, to be safe online.

Resources for survivors of sexual assault or online harrassment

Although FetLife does not offer support for survivors of rape or harassment, there are resources available. If you or someone you know has been a target of cyberbullying, rape, or other assaults, please contact one or more of the following organizations:

• National Coalition Against Domestic Violence
• RAINN: Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network
• A Long Walk Home: Non-profit that uses visual arts to end abuse against women and girls.
• The (National Domestic Violence) Hotline
• Without My Consent: Paths to justice for survivors of online harassment.

What you can do to help make things better

Again, I hope you have fun on FetLife. However, please remember that not everyone has the good fortune of being able to use FetLife safely, and many people may not even be aware of the risks. For the benefit of yourself and others, consider sharing this information with your friends, partners, and other loved ones. Additionally, if you take some of the actions listed below, one day we may all share the benefits of a virtual safer space for our sexual self-expression!

Vote for one or more of the following FetLife improvement suggestions:

Vote for better privacy controls:

• https://fetlife.com/improvements/14
• https://fetlife.com/improvements/21
• https://fetlife.com/improvements/46
• https://fetlife.com/improvements/89
• https://fetlife.com/improvements/91
• https://fetlife.com/improvements/95

Vote to let survivors name their abusers:

• https://fetlife.com/improvements/429

Pressure FetLife directly

• Send an email to privacy@fetlife.com demanding that they address these issues in a constructive way.
• If you’re on Twitter, post a tweet to alert other people of the issues with and dangers of using FetLife. Here are some tweets you can copy-and-paste:

Rapists have cover on #FetLife: http://goo.gl/oBN5h http://wp.me/pmQrt-M0 http://tinyurl.com/c932e5c Important reads! Pass it on.

Stay safe on #FetLife! http://tinyurl.com/c932e5c http://is.gd/NgZ9NA http://tmblr.co/Z4w0ayRSgRhd #Consent & #privacy matter. Pass it on.

Be careful on #FetLife. Rape survivors are silenced there: http://ow.ly/dwJIi http://tmblr.co/Z4w0aySWGrEY http://wp.me/pQA3i-U6 Read & share!

As always, please also forward any of the information contained in this message to anyone and everyone you feel would benefit from it. You are also encouraged to re-post this message in part or in whole anywhere you wish, whether on FetLife or elsewhere. A copy-and-paste-able version of this message in FetLife formatting is available on Pastebin.com.

Thank you for taking the time to read this important safety information and for helping to keep other FetLife users like you safer. Knowledge is power and sharing is caring, so share your knowledge with the people you love.

Sincerely,
-A friendly FetLife warning buoy

Last week, the New York Observer published an article by Rachel R. White about the BDSM Scene’s endemic abuse problem. An excerpt:

While the [BDSM] scene’s mantra—“safe, sane and consensual”—is heard so often it might as well be translated into needlepoint, violations of these maxims are common. In the last year, hundreds of people have come forward to describe the abuse they’ve suffered within the scene. The victims are mostly women, and like 50 Shades’ fictional 22-year-old Anastasia Steele, many are also young, submissive and uncertain about their boundaries.

[…]

The BDSM scene can be violent by nature. Physical and psychological power, and the lack thereof, are at the heart of the erotic experience. As a result, sexual assault can be harder to define and harder to prove. But that’s not to say it doesn’t happen. Indeed, awareness of the problem seems to be growing, and controversies around the issue have been roiling the tight-knit fetish community all year.

Additionally, Rachel mentions the FetLife Alleged Abusers Database Engine (FAADE), and links to my home page, but not to the download page for the app:

Meanwhile, despite FetLife’s best efforts, alleged abusers are still being publicly identified. A tech-savvy member of the BDSM community named MayMay recently developed an app that puts a yellow square around the profile photo of anyone who has been accused of abuse, along with a description of their alleged misdeeds. The yellow square can only be seen within the app, a free download.

If you’re looking for the app, you can download it from my website here: http://maybemaimed.com/playground/fetlife-alleged-abusers-database-engine/

You can also download it from GitHub.com if you discover that my website is censored where you are.

Further reading that will offer additional context and information on this and related issues:

• The privacy information FetLife doesn’t want you to read
• FetLife is Not Safe for Users
• Help me desimplify: Rape and sex
• The BDSM Scene is an abusive social institution. Let their world burn.
• Never, ever assume you need permission from a dominant person to speak to a submissive person

The FetLife Alleged Abusers Database Engine (FAADE), a simple tool enabling any Internet user to report a profile on the fetish dating website FetLife.com as belonging to a person who allegedly violated boundaries in some way such as by perpetrating sexual assault or rape, is a completely open system without any vetting process or other safeguards. Most people’s criticisms of FAADE have focused on two main objections. First, that the system provides no way to verify that what was alleged to have occurred actually did, i.e., “but what about false accusations!” Second, that it will be spammed, overloading a user’s ability to meaningfully consume the reports filed in FAADE.

Then, FAADE got spammed. This is the story of why the spam is actually the most interesting data collected by the tool to date.

Accusations of abuse are not novel; responses to them can be

After FAADE’s launch in October 2012, responses to the tool were varied. When I pointed out the spam reports to a collaborator, they got excited about it. “I know, sounds strange to be excited about this,” they said, “but it’s actually really cool. While individual reports are unverified and therefore have limited utility, group interactions around this thing are fucking amazing.”

On November 7th, 2012 at 7:15 PM Pacific time, a report was filed in FAADE against a FetLife user going by the handle TheRigger, a 52 year old male dominant person living in Milton Keynes, United Kingdom, according to their FetLife profile. The report read:

Failed to discuss boundaries and limits before engaging in BDSM with a vulnerable individual who he knew was new to BDSM. Mislead the individual as to his intentions and encouraged them into a restrained position, then took the situation to a level that had not been agreed upon. Agreeing to one activity =/= blanket consent.

Later exploited the newness of another individual to get away with non-consensually acting upon the fantasies this individual had admitted to having. Expressing a fantasy =/= consent.

The next day, a second report was filed:

made a total newbie throw up at his munch ( that he openly states is for him to pick up new subs) when he tied her up and then non consentually put a hitachi on her pubic bone

Assessing the “truth” about what happened is explicitly outside the scope and design purpose of FAADE. In fact, arguably no tool that will ever exist and certainly no tool that currently exists, including the euphemistically named “criminal justice system,” can determine if these accusations are objectively true or not. Moreover, scaremongering discourse that hypes dangers of “false accusations” is a (possibly intentional) distraction from discussing things we actually can assess, such as group social dynamics intended to cover up information about possible abuses from spreading through social networks.

In other words, rape culture’s “social license to operate” can be mapped.

Approximately a month after the initial FAADE reports against TheRigger’s profile, a slew of what are obviously griefer reports were filed. The first of the set was filed on December 11, 2012 against a FetLife user named d_k_, a 42 year old male-identified person (who also seems to have an OkCupid profile with the same name). According to d_k_’s FetLife profile, he lives in Barnet, United Kingdom, a mere 44.7 miles from Milton Keynes, where TheRigger seems to live. The first FAADE report associated with d_k_ read as follows:

Thinking FAADE is a great example of the worst of the bdsm community

Over the course of the next several hours, many more reports obviously designed to “spam” the FAADE database were filed, including a third report against TheRigger:

For being too hairy……have a shave you scruffy bugger! lol

So, what’s going on? I went to FetLife to dive a bit deeper.

Listening where they think you cannot hear them

I started by browsing to the profile of the first person who seemed to have a griefer (spam) report against them, d_k_. Right at the top of their activity feed, the following threads were easy to find.

• https://fetlife.com/users/11258/pictures/15247388
• https://fetlife.com/users/37287/posts/1311799 (this seems to have since been removed, so I’ve made an archived copy available to you here)

High in the first thread (the picture one), d_k_ posted a comment that reads:

IN fact, I encourage everyone to download and install this script, and then to report everyone they know.

Report them for having cute tits

or a hairy ass

or being teetotal

or having farted in the car.

Trivialise it, make it useless.

Comment by d_k_ expressing intent to spam FAADE.

When you’ve been involved in a community as proud of being rape-y as the BDSM Scene as long as I have, you start to see some patterns. I had a hunch we’d seen this before. Pervocracy describes one relevant pattern, called “The Missing Stair,” like this:

When I posted about a rapist in a community I belonged to, although I gave almost no details about the guy except “he’s a rapist,” I immediately got several emails from other members of that community saying “oh, you must mean X.” Everyone knew who he was! Tons of people, including several in the leadership, instantly knew who I meant. The reaction wasn’t “there’s a rapist among us!?!” but “oh hey, I bet you’re talking about our local rapist.”

But even without “hunches,” we can glean some sense of culture by reading what d_k_ has to say about himself on his FetLife profile:

I am a predator. I like the smell of the vulnerable. To stalk them down, perhaps even toy with them. I am not the kind that will chase for sport or for any other reason. I am a trapper. I will happily bide my time, keep my distance, let the prey feel safe.

If your fancy is lots of intricate ropework, then being bent over my knee for a spanking, this is not a safe place for you to be, toying with me is out of your depth. If you accept restraint can be merely a means to an end, that dancing on the edge of the precipice is where life really happens, you are not safe, but most welcome to try a tango.

The next day, another FAADE report was filed on TheRigger’s profile. This time, it appears TheRigger himself authored it:

To who ever made the above abuse accusations, would be interested in see what evidence you have to prove your accusations. Looking at the date of the said accusations it seems you have something festering about something I seem to have done to you. I am prepared to offer you an opportunity to be an adult come discuss this with me face to face, rather than play the school playground game. Lets have a chat to put some closure on what ever is bugging you. The alternative is to allow this to continue festering in you and destroy your soul, on my part I am not going to give this “rent free” space in my head.

To all that know me if you wish to believe above accusations – hey ho

As one friend put it when I shared all this with them, “So TheRigger gets a FAADE report and his friends respond by closing ranks around an alleged abuser. […W]hat we’re dealing with now is not a single unique user whose behavior may or may not have been abusive, what we’re dealing with is an at-your-fingertips example of an entire community’s toxic response to the possibility of abuse. It’s the thing we’ve read about before but haven’t been able to witness, play by play, on screen.”

This isn’t news. Those of you who don’t have to be convinced of the very existence of rape culture already know that communities ranging from sexuality subcultures, to orthodox religious communities of all kinds, to atheist communities, non-profit organizations, even myriad conferences, and more all have an endemic problem of covering up for abusers in their midst. No community is exempt, and no one is innocent.

Further, TheRigger is not just some nobody in his local fetish community, but rather the organizer of a social event called MKFN. He leads the Milton Keynes MKFN group on FetLife, which, on its about page, describes itself as “a group for those who can attend events in Milton Keynes and surrounding area […] and is there so people attending can dress up in kinky gear and mix with other like minded people.” Along with the description, there are rules listed that include a dress code and a reminder not to bring your own alcohol because alcohol is served at a fully-stocked bar at the event venue. As per usual, people in positions of power (those “in good standing,” with a high reputation) are among the most suspect.

But, how do we know TheRigger and d_k_ are associates? Let’s go play-by-play.

Data analysis process

A collaborator and I took a closer look at all the data in FAADE. A copy of our process and results from start to finish is available for you to view or download, too. (Simple HTML scraping using libFetLife helped accomplish much of this.)

We downloaded the FAADE database as a comma-separated values document for importing into a spreadsheet. We read all the filed reports, manually sorting what felt like obvious griefing into a list of “spam,” choosing to err on the side of caution. For instance, we assumed reports of animal crushing (5 reports) were earnest and not spam. We also assumed any complaints against ourselves, the creators of FAADE (another 5 reports), were not spam. This sorting process resulted in a new spreadsheet we called “SpamALL”.

Next, we got a list of all user IDs of profiles who participated in either of the aforementioned threads and matched those user IDs to those who had an associated FAADE report. These user IDs are in the cells on the next spreadsheet called “Rigger+” highlighted in yellow.

We then zeroed in on the remainder of user IDs with apparently-spam-y FAADE reports and looked for connections to any of the 9 posters from the original threads. This turned out to be a little tedious but very easy; most user IDs matched profiles who were listed as being in some kind of “relationship” with one (or more) of the 9 original posters. (The remaining profiles had two or more mutual friends with one of the 9 commenters in the initial threads.)¹

It quickly became clear that the overwhelming majority of griefer reports were clustered on a single social group. Moreover, after noting that TheRigger’s profile owned the Milton Keynes MKFN group on FetLife, I created a new spreadsheet called “MKFN group” and looked for an intersection between the set of spam reports (from the “SpamALL” spreadsheet) and all members of TheRigger’s group. Unsurprisingly, some of the spam captured by December 16 were filed on profiles of people belonging to this group.

Some numbers:

• Of 60 user-identified spam FAADE reports captured by December 16th, 2012, there were 55 (about 92%) made about people participating in the FetLife thread aimed at discrediting FAADE, or self-reported sexual partners of these people.
• A total of 34 profiles were spammed; 29 of these belonged to the group associated with the above mentioned threads, and 9 participated in the threads directly.
• Of the set of 34 spammed profiles, 5 (14.7%) were also members of TheRigger’s FetLife group.

From December 16th, 2012 through December 20th, 2012 (the time of this writing), additional griefer reports filed in FAADE continue to match the above pattern. For example:

• another 5 of 10 total new reports match the criteria for user-identified spam,
• are members of the Milton Keynes MKFN group on FetLife,
• and are FetLife friends with at least two profiles who participated in the aforementioned initial threads.

Interestingly, one new FAADE report made against a user by the handle T5Tart captured during this time matches all the above criteria but does not appear to be spam, i.e., it seems a realistic-sounding report of consent violations reading, in part, “leaving an unconscious girl in the middle of a club.” I will be curious to observe whether the above pattern spreads to users closely associated with T5Tart as they have for TheRigger.

Implications and further exploration

At this point, we’re looking at a small test case with some really interesting implications. Specifically, as mentioned above, we are seeing something typically presented with anecdotal evidence (as in Pervocracy’s “Mising Stair” post linked above) play out in a traceable and extremely transparent fashion. Since FAADE has no facility for deletion, spam-like griefer reports functionally serve the same purpose as obfuscation. Bluntly, we can now observe, digitized in real time, what “a community closing ranks around an alleged abuser,” looks like. And more importantly, we can see how and through whom that behavior spreads.

In other words, to minimize the potential that a realistic-seeming FAADE report of abusive conduct will have a negative impact on the alleged abuser’s reputation, griefers file spam-y FAADE reports against people closely associated with the alleged abuser. They also try burying the report under additional “spam” reports that are also made against the alleged abuser. To the best of my knowledge, these are two signals offering data points that were previously untraceable (i.e., not digitally recorded) and unaccounted for (i.e., not considered in weighing the “truthiness” of an allegation of abuse).

Using tools like FAADE combined with the data analysis process described above, we no longer have to rely only on hunches, gut instincts, and stories to identify communities that band together around alleged abusers, nor do we have to trust or even know anything about the sources of the reports. We can watch it happen, cross check the data, wait for more instances, and find patterns ourselves.

That is news.

This doesn’t mean we can sort individual reports as being true or false and, again, I’d urge anyone who thinks that this can ever be done to rethink their approach to the problem. What it means is we may have the beginnings of a data-driven methodology to identify social groups that have toxic responses to the possibility of abuse occurring in their midst.

My hypothesis is that if we continue to track spam reports this way, assuming that the publication of this post doesn’t change griefers’ future behaviors, we will eventually see the pattern described above repeat. That is, we’ll see the friends of an alleged abuser start to spam FAADE by reporting themselves with griefer reports. If this hypothesis can be proven, it may provide a far more reliable red flag for identifying social groups where consent violations are likely to be covered up rather than addressed constructively.

Those social groups are, to put it politely, not places where I would want to spend much time.

As social networks and dating websites become a more common means for facilitating physical-world sexual interaction between people, predators are increasingly using the information available in such networks to target victims. Some high-profile social networking and dating websites like Match.com attempt to protect their users from consent violations using deeply flawed processes, screening against national sex offender registries. The exploratory analysis outlined in this post suggests that there are better signals than blacklists like the sex offender registry, which has an enormous number of its own problems, for identifying problematic behavior across large clusters of users.

FAADE currently has approximately 1,700 installations (although this is a conservative estimate). If we had let stop energy like “but it will be spammed!” and derails like “but what about false accusations!” keep us from trying stuff, we wouldn’t have been able to develop toolsets and processes that could lead to healthier communities that support survivors of sexual assault. FAADE will continue to spread, and we will always face stop energy, but there will also be novel ways to analyze this data that my collaborators and I haven’t thought of yet.

Imagine how much we can do to make our communities healthier if we keep on trying stuff, learning stuff, and working together. Will you help us?

1. For the sake of completeness, here’s an example of a PHP script I used to get a list of the user IDs from a FetLife user’s friends list, in this case d_k_’s friends:

   <?php
   require '../FetLife.php';
   
   $FL = new FetLifeUser(my_username, my_password);
   $FL->logIn();
   
   $x = $FL->getFriendsOf('11258'); // d_k_
   //$x = $FL->getMembersOfGroup('31851'); // Milton Keynes MKFN
   
   foreach ($x as $v) {
       // Find and print the IDs.
       $doc = new DOMDocument();
       $cloned = $v->cloneNode(TRUE);
       $doc->appendChild( $doc->importNode($cloned, TRUE) );
       $m = array();
       preg_match('/href="\/users\/(\d+)/', $doc->saveHTML(), $m);
       print "{$m[1]}\n";
   }
   ?>

Last October, I introduced the FetLife Alleged Abusers Database Engine (FAADE) at the 2012 Transcending Boundaries Conference. After the keynote, the conference organizers invited anyone attending to briefly address the entire conference audience in an open mic style. Standing in front of the several hundred person crowd, in a deliberately steady voice, I paraphrased a small flyer I’d made:

FetLife.com is the largest social network for kinky people, with over 1.6 million accounts. However, FetLife censors survivors of sexual assault and rape when they try to warn others of abuse they’ve experienced at the hands of other FetLife users. Silencing rape survivors must end. Such censorship enables a culture of abuse rather than providing support for survivors.

Today, I’ve released a tool called the FetLife Alleged Abusers Database Engine, or FAADE, a free browser add-on that empowers anyone to anonymously report a consent violation at the hands of a FetLife user, and automatically disseminate that information to other users of the tool. Download and installation instructions are available at http://tiny.cc/faade.

I went on to say:

The BDSM Scene is an abusive social institution. Its leadership is corrupt. I am here to ensure that the BDSM Scene’s powers that be days are numbered. Thank you.

With that, I walked off stage. The next day, in the final session of the conference, I facilitated a community forum about the tool I’d just announced and the issues it addresses more generally. What follows is a rush transcript and video recording of that session:

MAYMAY: I do want to let you all know that we’re recording this and if you have concerns about that and still want to participate then there are a stack of index cards here. And if you want to talk and not be recorded, come up, write something down, and someone else [bring them to me] so we’ll do it that way, so you don’t have to speak and be recorded.

There are a very few number of things I want to talk about first and then we can start brainstorming or talking more about this, or hearing concerns, and so on. The Internet might have, especially, concerns so if you’re watching that please let me know when that comes up.

Very briefly: how many of you use FetLife? Know of FetLife? Know other folks who use FetLife frequently? Hear about it often in your conversations? Okay, so basically everybody who’s here. Interent probably as well.

FetLife is an example of a website that currently has about 1.6 million user accounts on it of, y’know, supposedly kinky people all over the world. They have an ongoing “war” on, right now, although it’s invisible to the mainstream about whether or not to face up to abuse from within their own “community.” There are many situations in which people have tried to name alleged abusers from their personal interactions and have found that their posts are either edited or taken down from FetLife.com by the FetLife “care bears.” Kitty Stryker has been doing a lot of work about this at the ConsentCulture.com project. Along with Maggie Mayhem, she has collected something like 300 stories and it wasn’t even that difficult, which is frightening in and of itself. Personally, I’ve never had a relationship with a partner where that partner was not abused in some capacity in the past.

This is a pervasive issue in the world. If I have to convince any of you that rape culture exists, we have a very different conversation and I’m not interested in having that one right now.

[Audience laughter.]

I’m maymay, and you all know me. If you don’t know me, go to maybemaimed.com. I’ve been in the BDSM “Scene” for about ten years and I really hate it.

Next: why is this an issue?

Rape culture sucks and needs to change. We need to change the paradigm of how we talk about these abuses. Currently, as I mentioned, there are an enormous amount of silencing tactics and victim-blaming responses that come out of the woodwork whenever someone mentions a rape or assault. I don’t like that. I want it to change.

One very, very eloquent blogger about this is Thomas Millar over at “Yes Means Yes.” He writes about what’s called the Social License to Operate, or the SL-OP. What that means is essentially that there’s a social culture that enables these kinds of abuses, not just to happen, but then to go unsupported when they do happen. He has this very, very awesome diagram called “The Cycles of Silencing and Transparency.” It starts up here:

Thomas Millar’s flowchart showing how silo’ed information reifies cycles of silencing that predators use to repeatedly abuse survivors.

Each one of these columns is a consent violation, a rape or abuse, and he started out like this. Using Predator Theory, which is a term you can Google if you don’t already know much about it, [referencing] academic studies showing that the majority of rapes and consent violations are perpetrated by serial abusers, and a small number of them. We can call these people “predators.” Predators have an interaction with a survivor. (Ideally, that is, they will be a survivor.) When that abusive or coercive scenario plays out, the survivor has a choice to make, which is essentially to either speak out and talk about that issue or to remain silent and “deal with it.” See also: “Don’t get raped.”

The main decision point about whether or not to speak out comes from whether the community is able to support the survivor in actually discussing the issue and offering personal support, material support, emotional support, and actually provide a sense of safety for that person.

When that [support] happens, what we see is a situation where the predator is held accountable for their actions and is far, far less likely to be able to abuse someone in that same sphere again. If you don’t get community support around these issues, what happens is that the victim-blaming and silencing tactics start to come out—I’m assuming that you’re all very familiar with this, and again, ConsentCulture.com has a ton more information about this—that results in silence, which leads to absolutely nothing good happening.

When this happens in Case A, in either [situation], whether there’s support or silence, what happens is that the predator is still free to do the same thing over again to the next person that they target and the cycle repeats again, and again, and again. That is how predator theory works. That’s what supports these serial abuses.

Why in either case, when we have both support or silencing, do we have a situation repeating over, and over, and over again? The answer is because information from this encounter does not reach the next one. So, you have one situation where this experience has happened but knowledge about that experience does not, the knowledge about what transpired, is not shared. There’s a big hush-hush culture around these things. Y’know, “Don’t talk about the rape that you experienced.” “Don’t talk about the harassment or stalking that you feel subjected to because…” all sorts of things: “That’ll empower the abuser.” Y’know, “We don’t want to hear it.” “Are you sure it was real?” All that sort of stuff.

So [information] doesn’t make it out to the next column.

Thomas Millar is probably more succinct about this than I could ever be, so I’m just going to quote:

See how each incident exists in a vertical column, what’s sometimes called a silo? Siloed information keeps us from making informed choices about whether someone just made a mistake or is a bad actor. The thing that is necessary to have all the information on the table is to de-silo the information, to tear down those walls and allow the information to flow freely. What does that is support. If survivors get a supportive reception, they’ll say what happened. We need that. If they don’t, they won’t, and that allows predators to hide their history.

In the best case, the absolute best case, what you have is a situation where you have support AND the next survivor knows about that support. Basically, the line here. This is the best possible case: supportive community response, [so] next situation, same community (also in that social sphere), next survivors who know about this makes a choice to speak out about it.

This is limited to people who know each other or know how to get information from each other. And so it’s an extremely socially constrained good outcome. So we’re looking at a very bad situation overall.

Does this make sense so far? Are there any questions from the audience or the chat room? No? Cool.

How do you de-silo this information about break down those walls? I will propose, right now, that we talk about something that I’m calling the FetLife Alleged Abusers Database Engine. It is a client-side, browser-installable tool that allows you to easily report consent violations perpetrated by people with FetLife accounts and then have those reports displayed on that person’s FetLife profile in a way that is difficult for FetLife to censor or take down or to edit. Let me show you what that looks like in real time.

Here is an account that someone made pretending to be me. There are a lot of these, actually. It’s kind of fun cruise around FetLife and take a look at them. So, here’s one reports that pretends to be me.

Once you install the tool—I’m just gonna turn it on here—

AUDIENCE: What does it work in?

MAYMAY: It works in Firefox under Greasemonkey. That’s the prototype environment, but we can talk about how to make that more accessible later. [Editor's note: As of version 1.1 released on December 13^th, 2012, FAADE now also works in Google Chrome.]

So this is what FetLife looks like. You’re all very familiar with FetLife. If you have the tool installed and you’re looking at a person’s profile that has a consent violation reported against them, that consent violation will appear on their profile. It’ll say, right at the top here, “There are reports this user has violated others’ consent in these ways,” and there’s a list of reports that are there.

In addition, the FetLife Alleged Abusers Database Engine, or FAADE, will add—let’s go to Groups—will add links to any user on FetLife. That says, “Report a consent violation by username.” Every single avatar picture on FetLife, when this tool runs, has a “report a consent violation by username” link right next to them. When you click on that link, you’re given a form that looks like this: “Report abusive behavior by FetLife user.” You’re asked to fill out some very basic information. If you use the tool and you click on one of those links, some of that information is all already pre-filled, such as user ID and username, and all you need to do is fill out an abuse report in three fields: what happened; where did the abuse happen; when did it happen?

So you fill this out, and you hit submit. I am going to use dev data to show you what this looks like, ’cause I don’t actually want to file an abuse report. So I’m going to switch over to my development versions where I have some data I can just play with. And when you go to a group like this, and you’re browsing around FetLife, what you’ll see is that if you file a report against a particular user, as you’re browsing FetLife with no additional action on your part you’ll see that their avatar picture and their username, anywhere it exists on the site, will be highlighted in a very blocky, ugly, totally impossible to ignore yellow. When you click on that, again, you’ll be taken to a profile page and the profile page will have a consent violation report or many of them.

What this does is breaks down these lines [silos]. It is no longer necessary for person A in column A to know about person B. Now, regardless of whether or not there’s any personal connection or friendship or even local community knowledge between these two people—person in column A could be someone in New York and column B could be someone in Australia and they’ll know about it ’cause everyone’s using FetLife, more or less, or at least that’s what they like to talk about. If that’s the case, then great! Does that make sense?

Any questions from the audience or the Internet?

AUDIENCE: It sounds like right now it’s kind of in a developer state. How hard is it—let’s say I download Firefox right from here—how hard is it to get it running?

MAYMAY: You got three clicks to do it. If you have Firefox, you go to your “Tools → Extensions,” you install Greasemonkey—I can show you how to do that, and there’s also instructions on the http://tiny.cc/faade page—and then you go back to that page (tiny.cc/faade) and click on “Download and install.” That’s it.

But, yeah. I would love to see something like this ported to Google Chrome, to Android browsers. Just, everywhere.

AUDIENCE: So, right now it’s only in Firefox?

MAYMAY: Yeah, right now it’s only in Firefox. So, I did this in 6 hours. And here’s the thing: I did this in six hours, because I had an idea, and I figured it was probably a good idea, I thought. So, I built it. It’s a prototype. It’s not exactly the most optimized solution. It doesn’t do—it has a couple of design features we can talk about—but what I wanted to do was come to this conference, because I know that people came here from a very long distance in some cases, had been planning to be here for months and put a lot of effort into being here because this is the place where some of the most innovative and passionate people around this topic, I think, exist. So I want your help.

I want to work with you to showcase two things. Number one: Hey, we can do things. Number two: Fuck asking permission. Fuck asking for cooperation from the powers that be that have shown us that they’re not interested in doing anything other than continuing to silence and abuse their own institutional positions and powers to maintain a status quo that is actively dangerous, actively abusive, and only serves themselves. I’m over it. It’s done, and it needs to go away. And it can if we all cooperate on building tools like this, and promoting these tools to others. Because I’m already seeing—in fact, I posted this on Reddit just this morning and it’s already been taken down.

AUDIENCE: Really?

MAYMAY: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: On Reddit?

MAYMAY: Yeah. The BDSM community on Reddit. Like, there is—I am really sick and tired of the way that the BDSM community at large and the powers that be in that community are behaving to cover their own filthy asses, basically. It’s disgusting. I think this is the page here. Yup, there ya go. I posted this, “FetLife Alleged Abusers Database Engine empowers Internet users to alert others of reported consent violations perpetrated by FetLife users: content removed.”

AUDIENCE: Wow.

MAYMAY: Less than a day. I’m not going to be able to rely on anything other than PEOPLE to spread this. So I need a lot of help. I would love coding help, if you have knowledge of that. I’d love documentation help if you use it. I’d love beta testing help if you’re interested in trying out new things.

AUDIENCE: [Raises hand.]

MAYMAY: Thank you. And more than anything else, I’d love promotion help. I need help putting this into places where I can’t already reach. And I need help from other people who believe this is important who are not me because many people don’t want to listen to me already. And that’s fine. They won’t listen regardless of whether the idea is good or not. They won’t listen regardless of whether they support, personally, the project or not, BECAUSE it came from me. That shows you two things. Number one, where their real interests lie. And number two, how big of an issue this really is for them.

So, I need other voices. And that’s where you come in, if you’re willing. We have an ability to empower individual people as opposed to any social group or structure. This is a tool for people rather than organizations, institutions, systems, cliques, etcetera.

I know that there are probably a lot of concerns around this. And that’s what I wanted to open up the floor for here. You, particularly, may have less concerns, but I’m sure you can probably come up with some concerns that other people may have, you can anticipate some responses that other people will throw at you. I’ve got a couple in store. Lots of hands. Good, good.

So let’s talk about those first. And then, if we still have time and if you’re still willing, let’s talk about improvements. Let’s talk about where we can take this, and about what we can do wit this and how this can be better, or more compassionate, or more useful, or more specifically relevant to the case of the BDSM community at large, rape survivors, survivors of other assault or harassment, and how we can make their experience both using the tool and talking to others about it as easy as possible. Sound good? Okay.

So I saw a couple hands go up when I was talking about concerns and I saw a couple of people writing things down for that, so let’s start with those. I want to start with the hand that I saw go up.

AUDIENCE MEMBER [Elizabeth]: So, November 2nd through 4th I’m going to the Geeky Kinky Event in New York—or, uh….

MAYMAY: Wherever it is.

ELIZABETH: Somewhere, at which I expect I might need a lot more pieces of paper like the one that you gave me that have information on them about this tool. As you know I’m very interested in how to explain things to laypeople. How to genuinely empathize with their concerns, with their fears. I expect that if I talk about this tool the first thing that somebody’s gonna say is, “Oh no! What about my privacy! I want to keep hiding! How do I do that?” And the second thing they’re going to say is, “But, doesn’t this open the floor for people to make false accusations?” How would you respond, please?

MAYMAY: Let’s get all these listed out. And then let’s go through some of them.

AUDIENCE: Mine is also false accusations but, the example used, though I don’t think that this is going to necessarily be that relevant, someone clicks “abuse violation” ’cause they’re angry over a messy breakup and they post something to the effect of, “Bitch be crazy.” So, I guess mine’s not exactly false accusations, it’s more like data quality.

MAYMAY: Yeah, data integrity. One thing I’ve written down is, “What about false reports filed out of malicious intent?” So we now have three of those.

[Unintelligible.]

ELIZABETH: Whether people will stay on topic. Like, this is—you’re calling it the Alleged Abusers Database Engine but people can use it to report anything.

MAYMAY: Yes. True. So is that—how is that?

ELIZABETH: It’s sort of like data integrity, but how would you respond if people took this tool and there were very few allegations of abuse but people started using it to say, “I got an STD from this person” or something?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: That’s abuse.

ELIZABETH: What?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Uninformed.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Well, if that person is uninformed, it’s not really abuse.

MAYMAY: I’m gonna put that down as “misuse.” Use of the tool that’s not this intention. Does that make sense? Hold on a sec, can we move to—?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I have three very specific questions about topics that have already been raised. For my own privacy, I’d like to know whether or not your database gathers or lists any information about me when I make a report. For false accusations, I’d like to know what the legal context is for people who feel that there has been an instance of libel. And for data integrity, I’d like to know if there’s a way for us to sort or organize the reported data.

MAYMAY: Great. Good. Still concerns?

AUDIENCE: Concerns from the user’s side, not from the being reported side.

MAYMAY: Go ahead.

AUDIENCE: How is it shaped in a way to minimize re-trauma for abuse survivors? And also consent violations in general can be murky—that’s why we have terms like “date rape” instead of full-on saying “rape,” and it gets even murkier in BDSM—is there a prompting or any sort of clarification [needed]?

MAYMAY: Great. Good. Really good.

AUDIENCE MEMBER (REBECCA): I think the first thing that came to for me when I looked at, similar to [the previous speaker's] first point, which was that there’s this section where it says, “Report your abuse and please give as much data as possible, times, dates.” Something about the way that’s worded triggered in me this feeling of “I’m not doing what needs to be done here if I don’t give all the information that I have.” And that might be really problematic for me as a survivor, because I don’t want to out myself as being at this party, at this time.

MAYMAY: Right. So how do we balance the need to collect data with the—

REBECCA: The need for privacy.

MAYMAY: —not only the need for privacy but also the empathetic experience of what we’re asking people to do is write about a really traumatic experience that they’ve had. How do we make that experience as least painful and most supportive as possible, while still getting data we need to make better informed choices in the future. Does that make sense?

ELIZABETH: Rebecca did make a really good point about privacy. I’ve had it happen that I agreed to interview, anonymously, about a private topic, and then they’re like, “This is what this person looks like. This is the size of the backpack she carries.”

MAYMAY: Yeah.

[Unintelligible.]

MAYMAY: I am going to start another thing because these are all really, really good ideas that I want to capture. Or actually, hey, can we borrow some sticky notes?

AUDIENCE: Um, they’re not here.

MAYMAY: Oh, okay. In that case, let’s just use index cards. Can you, as you have ideas like that, can I ask you to write those down so that I can start to collect them in one place? Thank you. Good. Are there any more concerns like this that we can come up with now? If not, that’s okay. How about from the ‘net? Dear Internet, any concerns or ideas? […] Cool.

[…]

Okay. I wanna open something up here, and then we can start addressing these. ‘Cause, you’re right. I think, so, okay. We had, like, three around “privacy, anonymity, is my data being collected?” At least four on “What about false accusations?” And some concerns about, “This will be misused, this will be vandalized.” How to filter for that or deal with the fact that that’s likely to happen.

Okay. Let’s take it from the top. “My own privacy.” There are a couple things around the design of the tool itself, like the design thinking of the tool, that takes into account this concern. Number one is, as mentioned a little bit earlier, there’s not information ever being asked about who you are. This will never collect information about you or ask you to provide information that is specific like, what’s your user ID? What’s your username? There’s also a very open-ended, sort of, way that these questions are being asked—although I would like to hear about improvements to these—such as “Enter a geographic location. Please be as specific as you can but as vague as you are comfortable. For example, ‘New York’, ‘New York City’, or ‘Paddles, 250 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10011, United States’ area all acceptable entries.”

The point here is to provide a way, and an interface, to make it as easy as possible to use, but vague enough so that you still have the opportunity to complete a report with as little or as much information about the thing that you want to report as you feel comfortable doing. All of this information is granular to the degree you feel comfortable providing. Now, the more information you provide, the more likely an inference is going to be able to be made about who you are, where you were, what you’re doing, who you were with, etcetera.

I don’t have a good way to deal with that because the one is intrinsically tied to the other, and that is a really good question that I’d like some feedback on. But I want to do that during a feedback-y part of this. First I want to show how I’ve looked at these issues, first. Does that make sense? Is that okay?

Secondly, this is an 100% client-side tool that does not communicate with FetLife in any way. There is never a request sent to FetLife, or a ping that is from this tool to FetLife, that lets them know that you, when you’re browsing, are using this tool so that FetLife cannot know, by looking at their own logs and their own hits, who’s using this tool and who is not. It has to be completely and 100% independent of anything FetLife will do, for two reasons. Number one is ’cause we know they censor this. There’s no—you cannot trust that FetLife will in any support, cooperate, respect this information. And secondly, because they have shown themselves, in compliance with Proposition 429, they state that they will warn and then ban users who violate the terms of use, and one of the violations of the terms of use is apparently to name your alleged abuser. And so, one of the concerns that I heard that wasn’t raised here, specifically, but that I heard out there in the conference, was, “Well, if I use this tool, I’m afraid FetLife will ban me.”

Number one: well, shit, isn’t that kind of part of the problem? And number two: yes, that’s why we can’t trust FetLife and can’t communicate with them at all. Does that makes sense? Okay, I see nodding. Any questions about those two pieces?

False accusations: bring it the fuck on. And here’s why. In both situations, where the accusation is “objectively” true, whatever the fuck that means, and also in situations where it is not true, this tool will—and the use of this tool, and the reporting of these allegations, and the sharing of these allegations—forces a consent conversation to the surface and empowers people to actually deal with the issues rather than continue to sweep them under the rug, in several different ways.

If you have an allegation levied against you and you feel it’s inappropriate or unfair, what can you do? You can ignore it, such as we’ve been doing already. Or you can, when you see that you have a report such as this one showing up on your profile above orientation, looking for, etcetera, at the very top of your profile, and you also have this very lovely, provided by FetLife—thank you, FetLife!—editable box right here. It’s called “About Me.” I propose that you respond to the allegation in the About Me section. And what that does, is several things. Number one: gets information about consent violations and alleged assaults out of this tool and onto FetLife. Wonderful. Number two: it will offer us the ability to see how people actually respond to these allegations.

Now, currently, the state of affairs is that if you do not have an alleged accusation against you, you are perceived more or less to be safe. A safe player: “Don’t worry, this person’s fine.” The problem with this is, number one, you very well may have an accusation against you. There may very well be an accusation against this person that you don’t know about because this information is siloed. And that is what the whole ConsentCulture project, that’s what people have been reporting, that’s what people have been saying. In fact, in the live—where is it? Oh, here it is—in the data here, people are already saying here, “This person had a reputation for known BDSM-related consent violations,” etc. It would have been great to know that. But this person probably didn’t have any information about this. So, [FAADE] will surface that.

Thirdly, it offers a feedback mechanism. Now, this is how the Internet works. If you go on eBay, if you go on Yelp, if you go on Foursquare, if you go to a restaurant, if you ask it to see a movie, if you do anything in your life on the Internet you are looking at feedback mechanisms built into the process under which you are making informed choices about what you want to do with your day. Now this is not necessarily as important as, y’know, “Should I sleep with this person?” but let’s look at the paradigm here. You buy a book on eBay from a seller that has a higher—you buy a book on eBay and you look before you purchase that book, or whatever it is you’re buying, you look at their stars, you look at their reputation, you look at other users’ feedback about this person. If that feedback is bad, consistently, and over time, you probably don’t wanna buy that book. You may not trust that person to take your money and provide you with an exchange.

On FetLife, we’re talking about a situation where people are actually hooking up with folks. And I know FetLife likes to talk about itself as “not a dating site,” but let’s actually see—are those meta tags still there, actually? How does FetLife talk about itself? Yup, here we go.

FetLife likes to make a big fucking deal about how they are not a dating site. And yet right there, in their own meta tags on their page, they advertise to—thank you for that, by the way, for that tip—FetLife advertises to search engines what they say they do not do to their users. Dating site. This is a site for people to hook up, to meet, to fuck. Now, when you have a website designed for people to hook up, to meet, and to fuck, and you provide not only no feedback mechanisms for other folks but actively silence your own community from talking about that with one another, what you have is a corrupt organization.

It’s as simple as that. And so, the alleged “false accusations” that people are so worried about? When one person has—basically what I’m saying is, yes, let’s have false accusations. If you’re really that concerned about it, I think it’s going to be a wonderful, if possibly uncomfortable experience for you to find out that almost everybody has an accusation against them.

Why is that comforting? It’s comforting because you get to now be, A) in control of how you respond to those allegations, which changes the paradigm from the survivor is the one who needs to either prove things or make a good case, to the alleged abusers are the ones who need to respond to a constructive way to these things. And secondly, it provides a way for people to look for patterns in their own communities and their own decision making process. If I have, say, three reports of accusations of consent violations against me and they kind of look like, I don’t know, maybe the ones that I do have against me, like this, about me.

He has repeatedly gone out of his way to make a social environment hosile to me and mine by taking things that are or should be private, and dragging them nonconsensually into the greater public eye. He violates my consent, on a global basis, like the rapisr [sic] equivalent of a mass murderer.

Where did this happen? “On FetLife.” How often does this happen? “Repeatedly, comma, daily.”

All right, fine. Next one. This one is not about me, this is about someone else.

Bullied his way into joining the BDSM student group at his university, causing many female and FAAB members to drop out from discomfort; had a reputation for non-BDSM-related consent violations and for being a sexual predator on campus, including groping female students while they were intoxicated or unconscious and giving underage prospective students alcohol to get them drunk and then propositioning them for sex.

Now, regardless of the defense of either of these, if you see three reports like the first one on one profile and twenty reports like the second on a second profile, what are you gonna think? You now have information to make an informed choice about what this looks like to you, what your risk assessment could be for this person, and we are beginning to see patterns emerge about individual people’s behavior and, hopefully, group behavior from the BDSM Scene as a whole. In both cases, false allegations and “objectively” real allegations, putting this conversation up and front in the center of the FetLife world and the BDSM world at large completely changes the paradigm and puts, always, individual users in control of how they assess their risks and talk to others about it. Does that make sense? I see a couple hands as I’m saying that. About this?

ELIZABETH: Yeah, so, I went to this workshop earlier in which a couple who had been doing BDSM for a while were talking about how people say, “Aren’t you afraid if you do Total Power Exchange, if you give up all your power to your partner that he’s going to cut your arms and legs off?” And they were saying, “Nobody asks when you have a baby, nobody says, ‘Are you going to cut their arms and legs off?’” This seems analogous. Like, there are stories for certain things, there aren’t stories for publicly making rape accusations. So, if this happens, people’s immediate response will be, “Aren’t you afraid you’re going to cut their arms and legs off?” Like, “aren’t all of the reports going to be false? Isn’t it going to be totally useless? Anarchy will break out!”

MAYMAY: [Laughs.]

REBECCA: There’s a couple of things I want to bring up here. I think there are things that are valuable to be aware of that may not have a huge influence on how we’re going to put this together. Yeah, I mean, the false accusations is just an anti-feminist derail. Like, anytime rape comes up it’s just like, “We can’t talk about rape because of false accusations! And the worst thing in the world would be to be falsely accused of rape! Like, that’s worse than actually getting raped!”

[Laughter.]

But the other thing is, specifically because this is an abuse-oriented reporting site, abuse is very tricky. It evolves very quickly. The thing about abuse is that whatever you put in place to try to prevent it, abusers will then use, to abuse.

MAYMAY: Yes.

REBECCA: And one of the classic ways that abusers control their victims is by threatening to accuse their victims of being abusive. So the only kind of “false accusation” that comes up for me that I feel is a legitimate concern is this sort of like, it’s not uncommon, there are a lot of women who are in jail because their abusive partner called the cops on them and told the cops that they were being abusive. And I think that that’s only relevant if this tool is taken seriously by the community to work as an enforcement system. I don’t feel like that that’s the case right now. I think that it’d be great if that were something that was able to transition into, and that if the goal is to make it into something that can be a reliable source for people to say, “Oh, the FetLife Abuser Database has a report on this person, and I trust that database,” then, in that case, it’s important to have a failsafe for those situations where the accusation is coming from an abuser against the person they are abusing.

MAYMAY: I’m writing down, “Database: Who watches the watcher?” ‘Cause, yes, that makes a lot of sense. This is another situation, which is why I want to make this a community forum and an open discussion because in order for either of those things to work in our favor, we absolutely need other people to help out. And there’s a couple of concerns around the end of this that I want to share with you to show how I’m trying to enable that, but I need other people to actually—like, I cannot do that on my own. And I can’t do that on my own for two reasons. Number one, because I’m not a trustworthy individual, and no individual is. But secondly, because it is a task so large that I feasible cannot do that. Like, I alone can’t.

REBECCA: And there’s no way. I’m thinking about the way that people who’ve worked with survivors of domestic violence do it and it’s, even for people for whom that is their full-time job, it is very difficult in a situation where you’re dealing with, let’s say, a lesbian couple where one of them has been accused of abuse by the other one and one of them is in jail to figure out, like, okay, what’s quote-unquote “really going on here” and who’s “a real abuser,” and there’s a lot of intuition that plays into it. And sometimes it just boils down to, “this person called the hotline first.”

MAYMAY: Can someone tell me how I am on time, ’cause when you were talking, like, four hands went up.

AUDIENCE: It’s 2:40.

MAYMAY: And when do we end?

AUDIENCE: Uh, 2:45.

MAYMAY: Okay, so we have 5 minutes. So I wanna get through a lot of this. I saw four hands. Can we quickly go through one, and then I saw this one, and then this side?

AUDIENCE: I was going to point that there are people within our community who are good at analyzing data.

MAYMAY: Yes! Thank you.

AUDIENCE: And that if we start aggregating enough data, we can start possibly noticing patterns.

MAYMAY: Good. Thank you!

AUDIENCE: So, one worry I have is that often, for example, bloggers on the Internet will—especially on topics like feminism and sex—they face threats from people, including rape threats and things like that and often those are accompanied with posting their home address, posting their real name, and so a worry that I have—this might fall into the category of data integrity and misuse—but, what if someone uses someone as a way to attack someone. So, this way, I can make someone’s real name and their home address appear to anyone who visits their profile. And, is there going to be a way for dealing with that?

MAYMAY: There probably needs to be, and I would love input on how to perhaps filter for these things in a way that is technologically premised on having that process itself be not community-controlled, but transparent. We need to do several things, and this comes to the ideas that I was kind of hoping we’d get to, but I’ll just say it ’cause we’re really running out of time. In addition to providing this data, this data is also downloadable in multiple different formats: as a CSV file, as a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, etcetera, and my hope is to basically provide a fire hose of alleged reported consent violations, so that we can analyze this data and so that we can do something to come up with a way to address that concern. That is a real concern. It’s one I had and it’s one I did not consider to put into a prototype, because two things. A) Prototype. B) I am far more concerned with the process of showing people that it is not enough to demand change from FetLife or the BDSM powers that be.

They have given us an answer and the answer is no, and what we need to do is not take that answer, and to actually do something. Not ask them to do something, not request, and scream amongst ourselves that we should do something, but that we CAN. That we have the resources in 1.6 million fucking user accounts to actually do something about it. I see absolutely no sustained, reliable, or consistent effort from anyone in the BDSM Scene from the powers that be that is addressing anything other than maintaining a status quo. And those are the kinds of questions that I would love to see addressed front and center on BDSM meetings across the globe. In part, because I have no good answer for that, and I would love to develop a system that would allow us to transparently allow that information to be filtered from at least the FetLife profile parts of them so the information we need to share is still out there but is as minimal a threat as possible to the people who are already in the most marginalized positions on FetLife, such as youth, such as people of color, such as trans people, such as sex workers, such as all the people who can’t go to the police in any reliable way.

Does that make sense?

AUDIENCE: Mhm.

MAYMAY: Great, great point. Can someone write that down so I can actually record that for later?

AUDIENCE: Two things. The first being the “who watches the watcher” and community enforcement. I don’t actually think we need community enforcement because I don’t think we’re going to get community enforcement. The BDSM community has had, in its modern incarnation, at least two decades to develop some system of self-policing to keep abusers out and what it’s done instead is promote abusers to positions of power. What I want to see instead is more and more and more and more data, and more access for everyone who wants to see it to see it. It’s a Yelp problem, right? The more reports I have, the more I can determine who—or, when I read hotel reviews, some people really want a fluffy bed and are gonna rate it as zero if it’s not a fluffy bed, and some people want a free breakfast, and I can align myself with what is most my concern and read the reviews based on what my personal concerns are for this specific user and what sounds realistic. By having everyone have access to those points, it just creates enough wealth of information that it’s important.

MAYMAY: Yeah. This is, in that sense, this is a free speech issue. More speech is better. More data is better. With that caveat, that we need to find a way to mitigate the availability of that information once it becomes used for that. I think it will become used to do what you’re saying. Go ahead, make your last point.

AUDIENCE: The second and scary point for me is, if I was to go and file an abuse report, FetLife doesn’t know I did it. Maymay doesn’t know I did it. You might not know that I did it. But my abuser sure as hell knows I did it, because they know what they did and they can match those details. And if they did it to multiple people, they can probably tell which one of those multiple people reported that. And, as we learned in [maymay's] first privacy talk, an individual user is my biggest threat to my privacy.

MAYMAY: That’s right. So, part of the problem, and part of the reason this needs community backing to in any way be functional is to have the community be consistently one step ahead (at least) of the people who are likely to use this data to match that up with their targets. One of the key points I want to make about that, to the Internet especially, is that tools are neither moral, ethical, or in any way—technology is not in any way—able to make value judgements. A tool is a tool is a tool, and it will be used for good and evil. Every single one is. Every single one is. This is a tool. I am not gonna be—there’s no way to vet this technologically, it’s not a technical problem. It’s a social problem and this is a technology to assist social solutions. I want to make that clear.

Okay, you haven’t spoken, so can we go to you, and then….

AUDIENCE: Okay, so, in terms of one of the most important things is getting the word out to people, because of the way it exists in its current form and because of the kind of thing that it is and because the kind reporting is, using this tool requires a certain degree of being out about your experience. This is probably not, at least in the beginning, going to be something where the first time anybody ever tells anyone that they were abused by this person, they’re gonna tell the FAADE database. So, in terms of getting critical mass, the people we want to target are people who are already talking about their experiences.

MAYMAY: Yes.

AUDIENCE: It sounds like we need a forum on the Internet to continue this conversation and start aggregating solutions. Is there a place right now that exists or can we create one?

MAYMAY: There are several. There is this blog post that accepts comments and I’m happy to have that discussion happen there on my blog: http://tiny.cc/faade There is a Tumblr thread that is currently ongoing about this if you go to http://days.maybemaimed.com or just go to my Twitter [https://twitter.com/maymaym] and look at any of the links that go to FAADE. You’ll see that this was reblogged in less than a day something like 35 or 40 times, so people are already beginning to talk about it there. You can simply follow the reblogs of that and see that conversation there.

I would love to create more forums of this kind. One of the problems with that is that they are likely to be targeted and taken down. I’ve gotten at least seven different Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notices from FetLife about tools that I’ve written—not this one, though I’m expecting this one to be taken down as well—because FetLife does that.

I know, I’m out of time.

So, we need one, but the answer, actually, is we need it to be dispersed. This cannot happen in one place. It should not happen in one place. And we need simply to be talking to the other places where this is happening.

AUDIENCE: I feel like the best way for this to work is breaking FetLife in a way that FetLife realizes that it is not okay what they’re doing.

MAYMAY: Yes. Two things about that. Number one is that this database gets downloaded and disseminated by every FAADE user. So, if you install this tool, you have on your computer a copy of the entire database and it will always be on your computer.

Secondly, if you are willing to help out with this sort of stuff, make copies of the database. Save the page. It’s just an HTML page for right now. I know it’s a prototype, but it’s still information we can utilize later.

Number three, this is connectable to anything else. The idea here is—imagine what’s impossible and then believe that it’s not impossible because these techniques and tools—so, case in point, this thing here. One of the ideas that I had was, okay, how do we make this even more useful, without asking the survivor for more information about themselves? What about every time you submitted—and here’s just an idea, I haven’t finished it yet—what if every time you submitted a report, the form itself then went out to FetLife and took a screenshot or a snapshot of all the information about the alleged abuser? The number of friends they had, their avatar pictures, their fetish lists, this sort of stuff. Why? So that we can have a collection of this data and see how things begin to change and see how [alleged] abusers begin to respond. Maybe it’s interesting to know.

Maybe what we’ll find—we don’t know this—but maybe we’ll find that sixty-seventy percent of alleged abusers have a specific fetish listed in their fetish list. Well, gee. That’s useful information to know about. And we can start to collect more information about what the community looks like, and make better informed choices about how to respond and how to deal with this issue that is plaguing us.

AUDIENCE: Just to make it clear, you’re talking about taking a snapshot of the accused person’s website and not the person who’s making the accusation?

MAYMAY: We don’t know who’s making the accusation.

AUDIENCE: Okay.

MAYMAY: The tool does not know who’s making the accusation, and so we can’t do that. But we can snapshot the alleged abuser’s profile, yes.

AUDIENCE: Last thing and very quick, or, very quick thing regardless. Consider enabling survivor advocates and youth advocates to make reports on behalf of other people because I, as a survivor, don’t want to make a report, but I, as an advocate, want to make that report.

MAYMAY: Yes. Wonderful. Um, there’s a lot to get through. We are way over time. I saw many of you writing down little ideas that you had throughout this. Can I collect those so that we can look at them later on? I’d like to encourage everyone who has—all of these are going to go into an issue tracker. If you go to https://github.com/meitar (my name), you’ll see a list of tools that I’ve written. FetLife FAADE is one of them. There’s an issue tracker there where you can submit new ideas as feature requests. You can report bugs. You can ask for different kinds of improvements and talk about issues, and that’s another forum that’s useful for that, and I’ll be very active there. These are all basically feature requests. I’d love to work on them.

If you know of anyone who has skill in programming or other kinds of advocacy, or even just is interested in talking about this issue, I encourage everyone—did I give all of you these already?—there are pages like this on my website. Once you complete a report—let’s do this really quickly—you are presented, currently—and again, let’s talk about the wording of all these and let’s talk about how to change or improve some of these—when you make a report like so, I’m just gonna say user number 1, John Baku, severe, “random generic rape story,” cuz they’re just that many of them. Where? The Tardis. When? We’ll say 1776. Whatever. And the point is, once you submit this, you’re presented with a thank you that give you, currently, a link to the tool itself. There’s a link there also to the PDF [flyer], some background information, and a lot of these links also provide—some of these links, not all of them—provide links to places like RAINN, to places like A Long Walk Home. These are all organizations that support survivors of abuse and some in particular are cyber harassment and cyber stalking resources. The suggestion to make those a little more prominent is a good one, I think I should do that.

Any last words?

Great. Good. Thank you so much and thank you for thinking about this.

[APPLAUSE]

See also:

• Tracking rape culture’s social license to operate online

Today, FetLife.com announced they are looking to grow their team of administrators to deal with media issues. Since I’ve had a great many interactions around FetLife’s media policies, I thought I’d throw my hat into the ring with an application. My cover letter follows, followed by a copy of FetLife’s announcement:

Dear FetLife (aka BitLove, Inc.),

I am very excited to be applying for a position as a Media Caretaker (aka “Media Bitch”) for FetLife.com.

As I’m sure you know, I have dedicated a lot of time and energy to investigating FetLife.com’s media storage facilities. My inquiries have ranged from legalities to privacy issues affecting your users. I’ve even contributed several pictures to FetLife that, despite having been banned and having my account summarily “deleted” for the better part of a year, I note are still available on your website’s servers as of this writing. For example:

https://flpics0.a.ssl.fastly.net/1/1254/eileenmaymayfloatingworldportrait_20080927192829_720.jpg

Additionally, I am intimately familiar with your process for issuing Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notices because you sent me and my service providers numerous such takedowns over the course of calendar year 2012. Moreover, you effectively admitted improper invocation of the DMCA by refusing to respond to any of the legal counter-notices I sent and seem to have chosen to ignore the issues I have been raising for years after I sent you a Cease and Desist letter for your potentially illegal actions.

For example, when I released the FetLife Age/Sex/Location Search script that implements your users’ most requested feature enhancement, you sent numerous DMCA takedown notices to the various hosts of the script, even though people not as well-known for such work as I am have released similar scripts months before I ever did. To the best of my knowledge, they were never sent similar DMCA notices. I also happily note all of my content you tried to remove from the Internet has been entirely restored, as well as copied numerous times on various different services, effectively countering this censorship.

I have been able to do all this despite not having a reliable Internet connection and indeed having my IP address blocked by your technical team in an ineffective attempt to stop the spread of code I wrote to export FetLife profile data, a basic user-centered data function you have to date declined to provide or prioritize in your development efforts. By the way, I am still waiting on a response to the invoice I sent to you for these feature enhancements.

Since you state that being a Media Caretaker also requires searching for copyright holders’ and models’ contact info, I expect you to be pleased that I have a proven track record of discovering, though not making public, the legal identities of many people who use your service, particularly photographers. As an example, I was able to easily identify BDSM photographer Lew Rubens’ culturally appropriative photograph within minutes of seeing it. However, I have focused these efforts on the many rape apologists and alleged sexual predators who frequent FetLife.com as part of defending myself against physical and legal threats your user base have sent to me in response to the release of my tool designed to empower the many users whose postings you’ve censored, the FetLife Alleged Abusers Database Engine (FAADE).

While I am dismayed that you have recently hired Susan Wright, who has been loudly criticized as a prominent rape apologist by many members of your own community, to be your Community Manager, I have an unparalleled ability to support the work of people who are unsupportive of my work if I believe it to be in the common good. This is evidenced in part by my continued support of ConsentCulture.com, a project run by people who label me “an abuser,” and who have been instrumental in advocating for the end of your censorship of sexual assault survivors.

I am an ideal candidate for a position as a Media Caretaker. I believe you’ll find that my curriculum vitae provides sufficient validation to this claim. Thank you for taking the time to consider me.

I am available for an interview at your earliest possible convenience and can be reached via e-mail at bitetheappleback@gmail.com or via telephone at (323) 963-4827.

Sincerely,
-maymay
Website: http://maybemaimed.com/tag/fetlife
Another website: http://days.maybemaimed.com/tagged/fetlife

Here’s FetLife’s announcement in full:

Hey all! I’m suicide_by_sybian, a member of the FetLife family. I lead the Caretaker’s Media Team.

Here we grow again!!! :-)

I’m really excited to announce to you guys that we’re looking for more kinksters to join our Media Team.

Media Caretakers are lovingly referred to internally as “The Media Bitches”. Why you may ask? Well, it is very simple, all of our cases deal with Media in one form or another, and… well… you know! :-p

What is the Media team responsible for?

• We contact artists when copyright is in question to make sure permission was given.
• We handle all DMCA’s for pictures, videos and writing.
• We perv Kinky & Popular reporting questionable copyright and handling all that it entails.
• Found a fake profile? yup you guessed it, we handle them as well.
• and that’s just the very basics…

Do you LOVE perving Kinky & Popular? Do you want to help us make it even better, sexier? If you answered yes to both of those questions, then where have you been my whole life… or at least the last couple of months?! :-)

We are looking for volunteers who:

• Love perving K&P. And getting deep down in there!
• Love hunting and enjoying puzzle solving… (look for copyright holders and models contact info).
• Open minded and non-judgemental (kinky and otherwise).
• Team player who enjoys working closely with other kinksters.
• Have a minimum of 15 hours to spend with us a week, which is a couple hours everyday.
• You must have a reliable internet connection and computer that can handle multiple pages and applications at the same time.
• Be able to check on K&P several times a day.

You’ll start off by keeping an eye on K&P and if over time you want to learn how to handle things like DMCA takedowns, etc. then we will slowly train you in all aspects of the Media team. We certainly don’t want you to be bored… evil laugh, as if that could actually happen!

Our team needs to grow, the site is growing and we need to grow with it! So if you think you have what it takes to be a part of our team, then email me:

sbs@fetlife.com

In your email, provide your FetLife nickname and link to your profile, your availability, and please tell me about yourself and why you think you would make a great media caretaker. Please also answer each of the following questions below, explaining your thought process. (We like brainstorming, it turns us geeky kinksters on!)

1. You come across an image in a profile that the poster may not be the copyright holder of…What do you do?

2. Joe_Bob sees that his sub littleslave’s ex (Dumb_Dom) has a rather risque picture of her on his profile. He writes in, saying that Dumb_Dom doesn’t have permission to have littleslave’s picture up! What do you do? Would you handle it differently if littleslave wrote in? If so, how? If not, why?

3. Tell me what you believe to be acceptable for FetLifer’s to upload to their profile (pics, vids)?

Application deadline is January 31st, 2013.

I will respond to applicants after the deadline has closed and we have reviewed each application and made our decisions.

So send in those emails…We can’t wait to hear from you!

sbs

Hi folks!

I imagine that we would be likely to have a conversation that goes something like this:

ME: “FetLife is shit.”
YOU: “I know, I hate FetLife. But it’s where I learn about what’s going on in my community!”
ME: “You mean like for events and stuff?”
YOU: “Yeah.”
ME: *sigh.*

I get it. Like all social networks, the killer feature is the one that connects you to events in your *real, physical life*. Message boards and profiles and stuff, that’s all fun, but what really matters is not being the last to know about the party on Saturday night!

Well, if you really do hate FetLife, but you really do feel like you *need* to use it because it’s where everyone keeps posting events, allow me to offer you a more functional alternative: FetLife iCalendar is a simple FetLife Event to iCalendar exporter.

In literally 1 click, you can now import any city’s FetLife Events to your iCal, Google Calendar, Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Sunbird, Yahoo! Calendar, and so on. Yes, LITERALLY 1 click. Plus, you never have to give anyone your FetLife username or password.

Kink In Exile wrote a wonderful, but for obvious reasons rather short, how-to guide showing you (with screenshots!) which button to press for FetLife iCalendar depending on what kind of computer you have.

But the short version is:

1. Go to http://fetlife.maybemaimed.com/icalendar/
2. Click the “webcal” link next to the name of the city you want to subscribe to events from.

And, yup, I said “subscribe,” not “download.” Every so often, FetLife iCalendar can *automatically* check for new events posted to FetLife and then will *automatically update your calendar* with that event information. That literal 1-click you used to subscribe to events from FetLife? Yeah, that one click means you *never, ever, ever again* need to browse events by going to FetLife directly if you don’t want to.

In other words, remember when you told me you hate FetLife but feel like you need it to know what’s going on in your community? Yeah, well, now you don’t.

Given all the recent #FAIL that FetLife has had lately (and if you’re not familiar with the story of how John Baku bullied a 9 year old boy on YouTube, of how the caretakers are selectively enforcing their own Terms of Use agreement even in the face of some of their own members getting outed by to convicted murderers, and worse [I SHIT YOU NOT, just check out FetLifeFail.tumblr.com or the #FetLife hashtag on Twitter right now]), maybe it’s about time we all ditched FetLife—but not its usefulness in our lives.

Also, if you’ve got a website of your own, you can download and install FetLife iCalendar yourself. If you can do this, please do, as this will save my servers a lot of hardship! Otherwise, no worries.

Also, if you once used FetLife a bunch but want to keep a backup archive of all your content yourself, then you can also try out this free FetLife Exporter/Backup tool.

I’m putting this on Tumblr (and sending this an as email to certain folks) instead of tweeting about this issue because just yesterday, Twitter suspended my account. I suspect it has to do with FetLife sending possibly illegal DMCA takedown notices that meet the legal definition of frivolous. I’m very upset about being silenced like this.

That’s why, if you have a FetLife account or a Twitter account or anything of the sort, it’d mean a lot to me if you could please write a short post letting your friends know that this tool exists. Please spread the word! Forward this in email! Share the link! :)

(This post was cross-posted from my other blog.)

All right folks. FetLife’s founder, John Baku, unleashed a wave of pedophilic comments on an unsuspecting 9 year old boy. (Disgusting.) FetLife’s new community manager, Susan Wright, is telling a woman targeted by a convicted murderer that the other FetLife users who are sending her personally identifiable details to this felon are not in violation of the site’s Terms of Use. (Bizarre.) And the people who are continuing to post my full legal name and other information, despite many of my friends having sent me screenshots showing that they’ve repeatedly reported these violations, are continuing to do so.

And you’re on FetLife…why?

Because it’s the place where you find out about events? Check out FetLife iCalendar, an easy way to sync your Google Calendar, Apple iCal, Microsoft Outlook, or any other calendaring application with FetLife events. (Yup, I said “sync.”)

Because you don’t want to lose all your account history and FetLife offers no way for you to get it? Check out this free FetLife Export tool, which comes complete with a video walkthrough for making a full backup of your FetLife account.

Because your writings are on FetLife and it’d be a pain to move them to another blogging platform? Last night, I wrote a WordPress plugin that automagically imports your FetLife Writings from FetLife.com into your WordPres blog. It’s called the WP FetLife Importer and as soon as it gets now that it’s approved, you can download and install WP FetLife Importer directly from the WordPress Plugin Directory. Until then, you can download a copy from my staging server.

If your blog is on WordPress.com rather than your own server where you can install plugins, try the FetLife to WordPress eXtended RSS (WXR) Generator instead.

Recently, I got some email from folks who run a BDSM/fetish group concerned that FetLife isn’t the best place for them to be. (Y’think?) Moreover, although they had come to rely on the site for just about everything, they had no way to contact the over 2,000 members in their FetLife group informing them that they’d like to transition away from FetLife.

Turns out, I’m getting more and more requests from folks who are beginning to realize that FetLife is exploiting them and not letting them leave easily. When a company, or a service, or a person, tells you that you need them to survive, and at the same time they hinder your attempts to leave, what you’ve got is an abusive relationship.

And while I can continue to say “I told you so” until the cows come home, I’m taking a different approach this time.

• If you’re an individual person and you want some help escaping FetLife, leave a comment or make a request for some code and I might be able to make an exporter/importer/content migration tool for you.
• If you’re an organization or a group, check out my (still very new) Escape from FetLife page and ask me for a quote. I can make hours upon hours of labor-intensive work moving content out of FetLife as easy as…well, as easy as clicking a button. (Don’t believe me? Try any of the tools, above.)

I was a professional Web developer and free software programmer for almost a decade. If you (or anyone you know) wants help getting off of FetLife, let’s make it happen. (Because I can.)

See also: The FetLife Alleged Abusers Database Engine, and its accompanying analysis, “Tracking rape culture’s social license to operate online”.

In this video, I’ll show you how to move your FetLife Writings and Pictures to a WordPress blog with a few clicks of your mouse using the free FetLife to WordPress converter. If you found this tool useful, please consider making a donation.

All right folks. The founder of the fetish dating Website FetLife(.com), John Baku, unleashed a wave of pedophilic comments on an unsuspecting 9 year old boy. (Disgusting.)

And you’re on FetLife…why?

Because your writings are on FetLife and it’d be a pain to move them to another blogging platform?

In this video, I’ll show you how to move your FetLife Writings and Pictures to a WordPress blog with a few clicks of your mouse using the free FetLife to WordPress converter. For this demo, I’ll pretend that I’m John Baku, that I actually had moment of conscience, and that I realized I need to ditch FetLife. Okay, here we go:

“Oh my god! The website I made is a terrible privacy disaster! It’s full of security holes! I’m misleading people about their safety and privacy online! Individuals and community groups, they rely on me and my team at FetLife to keep them safe and in touch with their friends, but we’re doing horrible things like censoring rape survivors, selectively enforcing our own rules, dictatorially blocking criticism using outright censorship and bogus DMCA takedown notices, and generally exploiting people’s trust. WHAT HAVE I DONE? I need to get away from FetLife ASAP. But how am I going to take all my years’ worth of writings, and my hundreds of pictures and journal entries, and photos of myself making racist jokes elsewhere? SHIT! I’ve locked people into using FetLife like the corporate scum I now realize that I am! OHHHH, WHAT AM I TO DO?”

“What’s that? Maymay wrote a tool to convert a FetLife user account to WordPress? Thank goodness! I’ll make a free, private WordPress blog and keep making racist jokes there. That way, fewer 9 year olds will be subjected to my terrible, terrible judgement and mocking sexualization. Thanks, maymay!”

You’re welcome, John. I’m still waiting for a response to the invoice that I sent you, but what-evs.

Okay, so, moving your stuff out of FetLife is really pretty easy. Just go to http://FetLife.maybemaimed.com/fetlife2wxr Enter your connection details—I bet John Baku’s password is “I’m an idiot”—and click the “Connect to FetLife and make my WXR file” button. Be patient; if you’ve posted a lot of stuff (like you have, John) it may take a while. This might be a good time to reflect on the horrific fact that the BDSM and fetish community have a 50% higher incidence of consent violations than the general populace, as measured by a recent NCSF survey. That means you can significantly increase your likelihood of getting raped or assaulted and all you have to do is go to your local BDSM Munch a few times! “Safe, sane, and consensual” MY ASS.

Anyway, you’ll eventually be asked to download a file. Save that file to your computer; it’s got all your FetLife Writings and Pictures in it! (I’ve already downloaded a copy, here.)

Next, go to WordPress.com and sign up for a new free blog. You can make it private if you wish, which unlike on FetLife actually fucking means something here. Okay, then click “Sign up!”

From your new blog’s Dashboard, go to “Import” from the Tools menu. Then choose “WordPress.” You’ll be asked to upload the file you saved earlier, so go ahead and do that.

After the file uploads, you’ll be given the option to “Assign Authors” to the posts you’ll import, but you can leave all the settings at their defaults. Then, click “Submit.”

WordPress will tell you it’s “Processing…” the file and, again, now might be a good time to reflect on the systemically abusive nature of the BDSM Scene as a social institution. It’s basically a worldwide cult that brainwashes whole demographics of people into believing that they need to suck some other demographic’s metaphorical dick to feel fulfilled. That’s evil. And people like Susan Wright, NCSF’s Executive Director and recently-hired FetLife Community Manager, are complicit in it.

Once your import’s been processed, you can return to your WordPress Dashboard and happily note your posts and pictures and all their comments were imported successfully! Here’s a couple. You can browse around and note that all the comments on his posts, all the post content, it’s all there. In WordPress’s Media Library, even the pictures on your profile in FetLife were copied to your new blog on WordPress. The images are now on the WordPress blog!

So that’s it! In just a few clicks, you’re able to take back control over your own content, to move it around wherever you wish, and never again rely on FetLife for anything.

What’s that? Still using FetLife because it’s the place where you find out about the parties on Saturday night? Check out FetLife iCalendar, an easy way to sync your Google Calendar, Apple iCal, Microsoft Outlook, Yahoo! Calendar, and many other calendaring tools with FetLife events, without ever having to log in to FetLife ever again. (Yup, I said “sync.”)

My name is maymay, and I’m passionate about empowering people to own and control their own content. If you found this tool useful, please consider making a donation. Click the DONATE button, the link below the video.

And if you’d like to learn more, visit maybemaimed.com/escape-from-fetlife.

(Note: This post is a republication of my original post from January, 2013.)

Last October, I introduced the FetLife Alleged Abusers Database Engine (FAADE) at the 2012 Transcending Boundaries Conference. In the final session of the conference, I facilitated a community forum about the tool and the issues it addresses more generally. Watch the entire session, “Help FetLife’s Rape Culture FAADE Away,” online or read the full transcript.

FetLife.com, an online meeting place for fetish and BDSM enthusiasts, censors the postings of its users when they allege other users of the site have raped, assaulted, or otherwise violated their consent, giving rise to a new grassroots movement within a youth S&M subculture committed to supporting survivors of sexual assault.

In this community forum facilitated by Social Justice Technologist and veteran BDSM community muckraker maymay, participants discuss the endemic problem of abuse within the BDSM Scene and brainstorm ideas for how to combat a terrifying status-quo. Using academic sources such as David Lisak’s and Stephanie McWhorter’s research on Predator Theory as a springboard, maymay introduces a new tool called the FetLife Alleged Abusers Database Engine (FAADE) to assist the community in its search for strategies to fight the “hush-hush” mindset that keeps rape culture so prominent in formalized BDSM organizations.

“The BDSM community has had, in its modern incarnation, at least two decades to develop some system of self-policing to keep abusers out, and what it’s done instead is promote abusers to positions of power,” said one participant.

“Fuck asking permission,” maymay concurs. “Fuck asking for cooperation from the powers that be that have shown us that they’re not interested in doing anything other than continuing to silence and abuse their own institutional positions and powers to maintain a status quo that is actively dangerous, actively abusive, and only serves themselves. I’m over it. It’s done, and it needs to go away. And it can if we all cooperate on building tools like this, and promoting these tools to others.”

Learn more and spread the word about the FetLife Alleged Abusers Database Engine (FAADE) at http://tiny.cc/faade

Read a full transcript of this session at http://maybemaimed.com/?p=4531

An excerpt from the session:

[O]ne of the concerns that I heard that wasn’t raised here, specifically, but that I heard out there in the conference, was, “Well, if I use this tool, I’m afraid FetLife will ban me.”

Number one: well, shit, isn’t that kind of part of the problem? And number two: yes, that’s why we can’t trust FetLife and can’t communicate with them at all. Does that makes sense? Okay, I see nodding. Any questions about those two pieces?

False accusations: bring it the fuck on. And here’s why. In both situations, where the accusation is “objectively” true, whatever the fuck that means, and also in situations where it is not true, this tool will—and the use of this tool, and the reporting of these allegations, and the sharing of these allegations—forces a consent conversation to the surface and empowers people to actually deal with the issues rather than continue to sweep them under the rug, in several different ways.

If you have a allegation levied against you and you feel it’s inappropriate or unfair, what can you do? You can ignore it, such as we’ve been doing already. Or you can, when you see that you have a report such as this one showing up on your profile above orientation, looking for, etcetera, at the very top of your profile, and you also have this very lovely, provided by FetLife—thank you, FetLife!—editable box right here. It’s called “About Me.” I propose that you respond to the allegation in the About Me section. And what that does, is several things. Number one: gets information about consent violations and alleged assaults out of this tool and onto FetLife. Wonderful. Number two: it will offer us the ability to see how people actually respond to these allegations.

Now, currently, the state of affairs is that if you do not have an alleged accusation against you, you are perceived more or less to be safe. A safe player: “Don’t worry, this person’s fine.” The problem with this is, number one, you very well may have an accusation against you. There may very well be an accusation against this person that you don’t know about because this information is siloed. And that is what the whole ConsentCulture project, that’s what people have been reporting, that’s what people have been saying. In fact, in the live—where is it? Oh, here it is—in the data here, people are already saying here, “This person had a reputation for known BDSM-related consent violations,” etc. It would have been great to know that. But this person probably didn’t have any information about this. So, [FAADE] will surface that.

Read the full transcript….

See also:

• Tracking rape culture’s social license to operate online

Did you know? Premium content that you “have to” pay for to watch on FetLife can actually be viewed by anyone, even if they never log in to a FetLife account (because FetLife “privacy” and “security” is piss poor). This means people who paid for a FetLife subscription to watch videos can share those videos with others using free, direct links that never expire.

The FetLife Video Sharer script:

Lets you share videos on FetLife with anyone for free. Gives you a direct, free link to bookmark so you can watch FetLife videos even when you are not logged in to your account. Send the link to someone without a paid FetLife membership account to make it possible for them to watch the video for free, too.

Learn more at maybemaimed.com/fetlife-video-sharer.

The most recent report filed in the Predator Alert Tool for FetLife alleges abuse on the part of a FetLife Carebear:

It reads, in full:

Fetlife caretaker FAIL. This lady could see that I was being harassed and not only failed to help me, but suspended my fetlife account when I screencapped the abusive crap I was being messaged with to show people, and then issued fake copyright violation notices to get the evidence removed from being hosted. Fetlife do not care if you get abused, they do care to make sure no-one knows about it.

Anyone familiar with my work already knows that FetLife used numerous improper copyright violation notices (DMCA takedown notices) to try to wipe Predator Alert Tool for FetLife off the face of the Internet, and failed. I even sent FetLife an application to become a Caretaker touting how familiar I was with the process of DMCA notice and counter-notice (which I credit them for forcing my hand to educate myself about). For more than a year now, FetLife’s been smart enough to stop engaging with me.

But this report is interesting. Firstly, it’s a good idea. Report the site admins. I should’ve thought of that earlier.

More importantly, however, this showcases exactly why the Predator Alert Tool suite is what we actually really need: the “report abuse” button on websites shouldn’t go to the site admins, it should go to the rest of the user community.

Anaiis Flox has a new feature over on the Slantist today titled, “You Can Browse FetLife Profiles Without Logging In.” I’ll suggest an alternate title: “Everything maymay said about FetLife years ago is still true.”

The article also has a brief summary of some history only long-time readers of mine are likely to remember:

This is a replay of an incident that occurred two years ago when a FetLife user created a PHP proxy to illustrate the issues with FetLife’s insufficient concern for user privacy. The user, known online as maymay, had been a long-time critic of FetLife’s inconsistent approach to user safety, and was one of the loudest voices rallying for the use of cryptographic protocols at login (which FetLife finally adopted in 2011).

The proxy maymay created in the summer of 2012 accessed FetLife and made the profiles of public individuals in the BDSM community available to people outside the network. It took no time for this proxy to be coded, and even less for it to get to work, illustrating how false people’s sense of security really is on the kinky network. Because this was an activism project, maymay widely publicized what they were doing; unfortunately, FetLife refused to face the underlying issue, choosing instead to launch a campaign accusing maymay of hacking the site and endangering its users.

Since “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” and “any sufficiently technical expert is indistinguishable from a witch,” FetLife chose to address their piss-poor security by pointing at me and shouting, “WITCH! WITCH!” And since the BDSM community has the social and technological competence of a Monty Python movie, most people reflexively shouted “BURN HIM!”

By the way, the PHP proxy still works.

So then I created Predator Alert Tool for FetLife, and when I presented it at a conference, the typical response from these “feminist sex-positive consent activists” was to point at me and shout “RAPIST! RAPIST!”

This should be one of those “pay attention to what they do, not what they say moments.” You don’t even need to look that closely to notice that the kink/BDSM community isn’t trying to end rape culture; they’re trying to eroticize it.

See also:

• FetLife lies. Like, a LOT.
• Got Consent? FetLife Doesn’t Get It
• National BDSM public relations group admits to mishandling $60,000 worth of individual donations, and maymay called it.

One of the most contested features of the Predator Alert Tools is that the report forms are unmoderated. This means anyone can add any information they want to the databases without oversight. If you’re used to using Internet tools that are tightly controlled by corporations (and you are), Predator Alert Tool’s lack of admin oversight may intuitively make them feel incomplete. But the unmoderated nature of Predator Alert Tool databases is intentional, and definitely a feature, not a bug.

Letting the PAT databases get spammed is a feature? Yes. It’s not hard to understand why. You have to remember that the whole point of Predator Alert Tool is to support survivors of sexual violence. One of the best ways to support survivors and others who might be vulnerable is to identify people who are unsupportive of tools that help users report rape. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to deduce that if someone is trying to destroy a tool that supports rape survivors, that person probably doesn’t prioritize supporting rape survivors very much.

People who try to break tools designed to support rape survivors are extremely likely not to support those who have had their consent violated. And it just so happens that identifying people who are likely to be unsupportive of those who have had their consent violated is what Predator Alert Tool is designed to do. Letting people attack PAT and then identifying who launched those attacks turns out to be an exceptionally reliable indicator—undeniable, even—that those attackers should be included in the database itself.

If someone violates your consent, you can report it. Likewise, if someone writes hateful reports about you (like “this person is a whiny drama queen”), and you can guess who did it, report that too. If you see spam reports (like “violated my consent by being hot as hell”) in the database and you think you know who’s doing it, report that too. The more someone tries to misuse Predator Alert Tool, the more information about their misuse is available. In other words, Predator Alert Tool is antifragile; damage and chaos don’t break the system, they help it grow.

Since the Internet is fundamentally a record-keeping archive, the “attack spam” itself is conclusive evidence of an attack. When the source can be identified, the people behind the attack have effectively provided us with all the documentation we need to prove that, at a minimum, those people cannot be relied on to support others struggling with a consent violation. Identifying the source of attacks against Predator Alert Tool is relatively easy, as I will demonstrate below. And people who attack Predator Alert Tool effectively self-incriminate by providing extremely compelling evidence that they belong in Predator Alert Tool databases, themselves.

Predator Alert Tool has already been the target of several useful spam attacks. I wrote up a detailed analysis of one instance in a prior post titled “Tracking rape culture’s social license to operate online.” If you haven’t yet read it, I suggest that you do. It provides a step-by-step case study of how Predator Alert Tool can be used to smoke out people who are generally unsupportive of rape survivors’ needs, above and beyond its more straightforward use of warning others in your community about potentially dangerous people.

Predator Alert Tool has a cultural purpose beyond simple communication. It is designed to facilitate conversations between and among rape survivors, exposing rapists and rape apologists in the process. And, empirically speaking, Predator Alert Tool has been extremely good at that.

The remainder of this post provides details on this week’s denial-of-service attack against Predator Alert Tool for FetLife, a profile of the attackers in question, some information about mitigation strategies, and asks for input from you, the survivor support community, about how to best respond to such attacks in the future.

What a denial-of-service attack against Predator Alert Tool for FetLife looks like

Starting on July 16th, at 3:51 PM Pacific time and continuing until the following day at 11:57 PM, Predator Alert Tool for FetLife was subjected to a sustained denial-of-service attack that filled the database with large blobs of spam data. The attack ultimately prevented people from adding new reports of consent violations they experienced at the hands of FetLife users. Since PAT-FetLife regularly receives legitimate non-spam submissions on a daily-to-weekly basis, this means it is likely that multiple people who were brave enough to come forward with their stories of sexual violence were prevented from sharing them by FetLife’s cadre of rape apologists.

Instead, their attempts to post new information resulted in an error that looked like this:

When a Google Form is subjected to a denial-of-service attack that fills it with large blobs of spam data, the form can no longer be successfully submitted, as shown in this “Oops, something went wrong” error screenshot.

Currently, PAT-FetLife uses an “old style” Google Spreadsheet as its datastore. There are limits imposed by Google on the size of such spreadsheets, and by filling the spreadsheet with huge amounts of meaningless data, the attackers were able to forcibly prevent any other users from adding information to it. (These limits have been lifted in the “new” version of Google Spreadsheets, which Google says it will automatically migrate PAT-FetLife to sometime before the start of the year 2015. When this happens, attacks of this nature should be much more difficult to accomplish.)¹

Due to the way that the Predator Alert Tool for FetLife browser tool works, most if not all of this spam was never even visible to end users. This is because the client will display an entry in the database only if the person to whom that entry is linked has interacted with the page that the user is currently viewing. Therefore, the attack only prevented people from adding information to the database. It did not disrupt anyone already using the tool, nor did it block any information already provided in the tool from being viewed.

Earlier today, I was assisted in identifying the attackers as a group of FetLife users who were boasting about breaking the tool on their FetLife pages (more on that in just a bit). After doing so, I published an archive of the database’s spammed and inoperative state so that you can take a look at it in its entirety. I then restored the database from a prior revision, which also returned its functionality.

Update (July 20th, 2014, 1 PM Pacific): On July 20th, 2014 at 3:53 AM Pacific time, a renewed attack of the exact same type described above resumed. Once again, CarolyneTiler, whose legal name is Caroline Tyler and who currently works for EMIS, a medical software company, as an “IT Systems Support Consultant” in the United Kingdom according to her LinkedIn profile (public version), admitted to doing this on FetLife:

Screenshot of CarolyneTiler’s comments in a FetLife status thread reading: “I have done NOTHING more than use the public access available to all. I consider that this so called reporting tool is mainly used to harass and abuse other members of this site by those too cowardly to publicly state their issues.”

As of this writing, I’ve temporarily disabled the Predator Alert Tool for FetLife’s Google form submission (here’s an archive of that state) while I compose complaint letters to Caroline’s employer and Internet Service Provider. I am also looking for pro-bono legal representation from attorneys who have a record supporting sexual assault survivor’s rights. Please contact me directly if you know or can refer me to any such legal professionals.

I’ll re-enable the PAT-FetLife reporting mechanism after I’ve finished getting in touch with Caroline Tyler’s employer, etc., and I’ll post another update once I’ve done that. If I can get in touch with a lawyer, I’ll also do my best to contact England’s law enforcement agencies that oversee Internet crimes, so ideally this lawyer would also be at least familiar with “hacking” cases.

Thank you.

Just a brief update to show Caroline’s admission of guilt:

A screenshot from FetLife showing Caroline Tyler’s update: “Seems that MayMay is getting a bit ruffled about me filling his silly database with rubbish. shame!!!”

I will also note that I use gender neutral pronouns.

I’ve posted another update as a new blog post.

Profile of a FetLife rape apologist and Predator Alert Tool attacker

It’s illustrative to know more about who attacked Predator Alert Tool for FetLife.

As soon as the spam/DOS attack began, I suspected someone who was already listed in the PAT-FetLife database. So the simplest thing to do would have been to look at the recent activity of the users already reported. Sure enough, yet again, that’s all it took to find people bragging about having broken the tool:

A screenshot showing that a FetLife user named CarolynesRose (user ID 2940118) posted a status update about PAT-FetLife (formerly known as FAADE) being broken.

This user’s FetLife user ID is 2940118. That’s one of the FetLife users reported (numerous times) in the PAT-FetLife database. The first report about this person was filed on December 3rd, 2013, and the most recent one was July 15, 2014, the day before the spam attack happened. This user account is literally the second from the last report before the spam attack began; hatred for PAT-FetLife from kinkshit rape apologists is almost as reliable as clockwork.

This particular user is actually someone who’s interacted with me before, on Facebook. On April 16th, 2014, a Facebook user using the name Anna Dawn Brecht, born June 11, 1980 (and who listed her phone number as +44 7983 971104) messaged me:

Hello

I believe you are behind the FADDE application. I am nicely asking that you go to it and either remove the entry under MarmiteGirl…or at the very least remove my REAL name from it. A person in our area has beein using your data base not to report genuine threats..but to vent at people they have an issue with. Either way I am sure you do not want peoples real names being used on your database.

Anna

As you can imagine, I’ve gotten requests like these on occasion, and if I respond at all the answer is always the same. My response to Anna Brecht was similar to all others:

I have no problem with people’s legal names being used. I’m sorry that you have to deal with a person in your area abusing the system. If you do not already know who that person is, you may want to read the following articles that describe why I do not moderate nor will I ever edit, modify, or delete information that is posted to it: http://maybemaimed.com/2012/12/21/tracking-rape-cultures-social-license-to-operate-online/ and http://days.maybemaimed.com/post/62691251191/many-people-with-concerns-about-the-predator-alert Please do not contact me with this request again. If you do, I will block you. Take care.

After that, Anna Brecht blocked me on Facebook and I thought no more of it until I saw the following entry posted to PAT-FetLife on May 22nd, 2014:

This is the person behind the FADDE application.This claims to be there to protect people against abuse and non consensual activity..and name and shame people. The fact is this individual created this as hates the BDSM community and all we stand for. When nicely asked to remove names and leave comments his reply was

“I have no problem with people’s legal names being used. I’m sorry that you have to deal with a person in your area abusing the system. If you do not already know who that person is, you may want to read the following articles that describe why I do not moderate nor will I ever edit, modify, or delete information that is posted to it:Please do not contact me with this request again. If you do, I will block you. Take care.

Lets see how he feels having his personal name and details on his FADDE database. As he is the Abuser and the BDSM community is becoming the victim.People are using this site to vent grudges and make malicious statements with no accountability.Yes some arseholes may get mentioned but on the whole good people are having their real names and business posted on here and labelled abusers over personality clashes etc. Lets see if he sticks by his rule of not censoring posts when he is names a long with his facebook link.

https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=633290004

I think I might have literally laughed out loud but, again, thought no more of it. I am not exactly embarrassed about my position: I prioritize the ability of rape survivors to communicate over protecting people from having their reputations harmed by that communication. Period.

Anyway, it was a simple matter of following links from CarolyneRose’s (aka “MarmiteGirl”) profile to find the following gem posted by CarolyneTiler, CarolyneRose’s “Dominant,” according to their FetLife profiles:

A screenshot showing a FetLife user called CarolynesTiler boasting about being the person who “broke” the Predator Alert Tool for FetLife (formerly known as FAADE) consent violation reporting system.

As you can see, a user with FetLife ID number 13350 going by CarolyneTiler, boasts, Oh dear, I appear to have broken fadde a bit and then later, Well, it’s not dead but at least you can’t add any more :)

Chalk another one up for “Dear rape apologists, please try harder, it is far too easy for me to find you.”

What I find so telling about this example is that what appears at first to be a somewhat understandable request to be removed from the PAT database has obviously turned into a desire to shut the system down for everyone, regardless of its benefits for others. Anna Brecht and her cohort prioritize their reputations and, as the Streisand effect shows yet again, their attempts to remove information they don’t want publicized results in the publicizing of that very same information.

Only in this case, because of the cultural nature of Predator Alert Tool, it also tells a compelling story about how much (or little) they prioritize supporting people who experience sexual violence.

There’s plenty more dirt on these kinkshit rape apologists in FetLife, all easily exportable and then searchable. Here’s a thread on FetLife called “lowest form of scum” in which CarolyneRose and several others complain about being included in the Predator Alert Tool for FetLife database. There’s your usual flailing about “outing” kinksters (which is not even a thing) and the classic dose of grandiose language that you’d expect from BDSM’ers. It’s amusing to read, if you’re into that sort of thing.

A few simple reverse image searches also turned up a trove of identifying details outside of FetLife. For instance, on Twitter, CarolyneTiler goes by @CarolineT1961. Could the “1961” be a birthyear? According to CarolyneTiler’s FetLife profile she is 52 years old, so it does indeed appear to be so:

A screenshot of CarolyneTyler’s Fetlife profile showing the ease of correlating information provided, in this case an age, to other social media accounts.

Caroline Tiler’s Google Plus avatar is also a picture she shared on FetLife. From that profile, we also learn that Anna Brecht has a Google Plus account, and that Caroline Tyler attended Elmhurst Primary School in Newham, followed by the Stratford School (also in Newham), and finally the Redbridge Technical College in Essex.

If she wished her employment history to remain more private, then she should probably not also have made the same mistake of sharing her LinkedIn profile photo on FetLife, too. (Here’s the photo link directly, so you can view it without logging in to FetLife.) I wrote up a bunch of privacy tips for FetLife users some time ago, consider reading them if you’re concerned about the ease with which information about you on the Internet can be correlated by someone with access to a search engine (like, y’know, everyone on the Internet).

CarolyneTiler, or, more accurately, Caroline Tiler, was also active on message boards, including GingerBeer.co.uk as well as contributing a post to TransgenderZone.com:

While it may not always be obvious by listening to what they say, these people—like most BDSM’ers—don’t really care about consent. And by watching what they do, which we can now all do in an unprecedented way thanks to the Internet, it becomes very obvious that the BDSM community, dramatically more than other communities, hosts the absolute worst of the worst when it comes to people who will actually prioritize consent—that is, they don’t.

Even the attacker herself, CarolyneRose says on FetLife:

In my view it was a good idea ruined by poor implementation and no moderation. It is used as a tool of abuse now sadly.

Caroline Tyler chose to use her information technology education to launch a denial-of-service attack against a tool that gives voice to rape survivors on a website that actively censors and silences them. She didn’t choose to contribute to it, or to copy it and make her own better version or “forking” in the lingo of open source programmers—the Predator Alert Tool for FetLife is an open source project, as are all the other implementations. I rest my case.

This is not a surprise to anyone who understands that, despite all their bluster, the kink/BDSM community isn’t trying to end rape culture. They’re trying to eroticize it.

What to do about attackers

The obvious thing to do in a case like this is to document what happened and then write reports about the people responsible linking to said documentation in the very tools they attacked. I’ve already done that for CarolyneTiler and everyone who metaphorically high-fived her effort. You can view the reports in PAT-FetLife just as you would any other report. And I’ve taken the additional step of writing a statement in Predator Alert Tool for Facebook about Anna Brecht, as well, linking to this post, since she was kind enough to give me her Facebook account, too.

Of course, feel free to follow any of the links in this post to the attackers’ conversations and chime in, yourself. In fact, I’d strongly encourage that. Remind these attackers that trying to take down what is still the only warning tool for rape survivors on FetLife is a shitty way for supposed advocates of a “Safe, Sane, and Consensual” so-called “lifestyle” to behave.

Beyond this individual case, it seems obvious that, in the future, it should be possible for people who use Predator Alert Tool for Facebook to view reports filed in Predator Alert Tool for FetLife and vice versa. Predator Alert Tools already span the majority of mainstream social networks; it should be feasible to link them all up across social networks. This might sound scary, but it’s something that your government (the NSA, GCHQ, and the rest of the spooks) already do. Only they’re not using that capability for exposing rape culture and its apologists, because the military-intelligence-industrial complex’s entire operational motive is rooted in rape culture, obviously.

But there are other, not so obvious enhancements that could be made to the Predator Alert Tool suite. I have been very vocal in soliciting ideas and support for these tools ever since their inception. Since then, some folks have contributed publicly, and a slew more in private.

What the tools need more than anything else right now is more people who are willing to speak up publicly—pseudonymously or not—in support of them, and against people like Anna Brecht who would attack them. Predator Alert Tool is a code hacking project, yes, but it’s also a culture hacking project. Even if you don’t code, using Predator Alert Tool to change the conversation about rape in our culture is something everyone—namely you—can do.

1. Not impossible, just harder. There are other methods of mitigation that the new Google Spreadsheets backend supports that will raise the bar, too.

This post is a brief update in Q&A form to address the most common questions I’m getting about the Predator Alert Tool for FetLife service disruption.

Why can’t I share information about a sexual assault that a FetLife user committed?

Due to a deliberate and sustained denial-of-service attack by a FetLife user, the PAT-FetLife reporting mechanism is unavailable. Please see my prior post for more details about this attack.

Who is behind this attack?

The attacker is not shy. She boasts about her actions on the BDSM/leather/kink dating website FetLife.com, where she goes by the username CarolyneTiler. Her legal identity is Caroline Tyler, a resident of Bradford, West Yorkshire in the UK.

Caroline Tyler’s contact information is collated on Pastie.

Whom does this attack harm?

The people whom Caroline Tyler is harming with her denial-of-service attack against Predator Alert Tool for FetLife are the people relying on PAT-FetLife as a way of communicating about dangerous people inside the kink/BDSM community.

Caroline Tyler’s motivations to attack PAT-Fetlife seem, at least in part, to be personally directed at me. However, attacking PAT-FetLife doesn’t harm me in any way. (I don’t use FetLife.) It harms people who want to remain involved in FetLife but who also want to have access to uncensored information about potential play partners. This kind of peer-to-peer reputation system (like “Yelp for BDSMers”), is something FetLife users have been requesting for years and that FetLife still refuses to provide.

If you’re worried about these attacks against PAT-FetLife hurting someone, it’s not me; it’s ethical kinksters on FetLife you should be worried about.

What can we do to deal with this attack?

In response to this attack against Predator Alert Tool, a number of people have expressed interest in helping to support sexual violence survivors by assisting the Predator Alert Tool project in both the short and the long term, with respect to this specific attack and to attacks in general.

For the short term, with respect to this specific attack

As stated in my prior post, there are a number of things we have done and can still do:

The obvious thing to do in a case like this is to document what happened and then write reports about the people responsible linking to said documentation in the very tools they attacked. I’ve already done that for CarolyneTiler and everyone who metaphorically high-fived her effort. You can view the reports in PAT-FetLife just as you would any other report. And I’ve taken the additional step of writing a statement in Predator Alert Tool for Facebook about Anna Brecht, as well, linking to this post, since she was kind enough to give me her Facebook account, too.

Of course, feel free to follow any of the links in this post to the attackers’ conversations [and contact information] and chime in, yourself. In fact, I’d strongly encourage that. Remind these attackers that trying to take down what is still the only warning tool for rape survivors on FetLife is a shitty way for supposed advocates of a “Safe, Sane, and Consensual” so-called “lifestyle” to behave.

Additionally, as a user on Facebook said:

Hey, EMIS [Caroline Tyler’s employer] is a company that does stuff with computers related to health, and rape is a public health issue, so having an employee using their computer skills to attempt to destroy an anti-rape program is the exact opposite of what they say they stand for.

I responded:

That’s very true. Probably worth bringing up with their HR department. You can probably find out who their HR employees are by searching LinkedIn for that information.

For the long term, with respect to attacks in general

A technological response is needed, too. PAT-FetLife was a prototype I created in 6 hours one night a couple years ago. Since then, I’ve built numerous additional versions of Predator Alert Tool (for OkCupid, for Facebook, etc.) that work differently in order to try out new models and technologies. Ultimately, the goal is for it to function as an Internet-scale reputation system that resists rape culture. That’s a hard problem because rape culture can’t be solved with code alone; we need a sociocultural response (see above, “with respect to this specific attack”) and we need a sociotechnical response.

Thanks to this latest attack, several extremely capable technologists have contacted me expressing interest in Predator Alert Tool and have suggested several promising design alternatives built on decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO). You can follow the conversation on Twitter.

Since I am only one person (who lives in a car and whose primary income is donations), I do not have the financial, emotional, or social resources to do all of the above on my own. As I mentioned on Facebook:

I’ll follow up any leads I have, but my time is much better spent devising a more resilient technological response to this [general issue, rather than this specific attack], because empirically speaking that’s the one thing I have been doing that [most] other people describe being unable to do. However, I am still just one person. My time and energy is limited. Your participation and collaboration is appreciated and needed.

Again, a number of people have already begun collaborating on that work. I will be happy to put anyone who contacts me directly in touch with one another so that you can coordinate those tasks and work more effectively together.

When will the PAT-FetLife reporting mechanism be available again?

After Caroline Tyler’s first attack, I re-enabled PAT-FetLife. The next day, she again attacked the reporting form. This shows a deliberate intent to keep sexual violence survivors from accessing tools they use to communicate.

Unfortunately, also as discussed in my prior post, there is currently no technological way to prevent Caroline Tyler from continuing to make the PAT-FetLife reporting service unavailable. That’s why people are currently composing complaint letters to her employer and why I’ve asked for legal representation.

Adding new information to PAT-FetLife will therefore only be possible when at least one of the following happens:

• Google Forms updates the PAT-FetLife back-end to their “new” Google Spreadsheets system. The timeline they provided for this is “in 2014,” so that could be a few months yet.
• Caroline Tyler stops launching her denial-of-service attack on PAT-FetLife, either by her own choice or by being compelled to stop through social, legal, or other pressure.
• A new version of Predator Alert Tool for FetLife based on the DAO technology I am currently exploring (mentioned above) is ready.

There was a predictable outcry from pro-BDSM bloggers like Rebecca Hiles when the “FetLife Meat List,” a simple spreadsheet cataloging the FetLife usernames and basic profile info of 30,000 users who identified themselves as female and under 30 years old, was released. But as usual, all Social Justice Warrior rhetoric condemning the list was shortsighted at best, though most of it was downright moronic. They all seemed to condemn the construction of such lists rather than the fact that the list targets the most vulnerable demographic.

In response, I released the FetLife Creep List, Volume 1 a few weeks later, a similar list but including one of FetLife’s most privileged demographics (male dominants with money) rather than one of its most vulnerable demographics (young women). The point is to illustrate that it’s possible to highlight privacy problems with websites like FetLife which continues to be a privacy and security nightmare many years after I first publicized them in a way that is equally compelling and attention-getting (e.g., by calling them “Creeps”), but doesn’t also target the most vulnerable possible demographic. Unfortunately, since the Internet’s “Social Justice Warriors” are all talk and no walk, they missed making that obvious point, not to mention failing to actually take advantage of that point to further their own stated goals. That’s typical SJW for you, though.

Fact is, there’s a lot of actionable information about rape culture and the BDSM subculture’s reliance on rape culture’s perpetuation for its own survival that can be illustrated with a list of the most privileged demographics in this case. Once again, that’s something that sex-positive “feminists” consistently miss, the poor dears.

After compiling the Creep List, I did a bit of basic statistical analysis on FetLife customer demographics and found numerous discrepancies between what the BDSM Scene and FetLife in particular say about themselves and what they actually do. The two biggest take-aways from the preliminary analysis are as follows:

1. FetLife isn’t a social network. It’s a porn site, both in terms of its business model and its general usage. It simply cannot be classified as a social network with the likes of Facebook under any reasonable definition of the term. This directly contradicts FetLife’s own statements about how the site works and why the site exists.
2. Users who support FetLife financially (i.e., FetLife’s paying customers) are at least 13 times more likely to be perpetrators of sexual violence, rape, and consent violations than the average (non-paying) FetLife user. Moreover, the overwhelming majority of FetLife customers as well as the overwhelming majority of FetLife users reported to the Predator Alert Tool for FetLife consent-violation tracking system are male doms, further corroborating the claim that FetLife actively silences rape survivors for expressly self-interested financial motivations.

Let’s look at each of these points and the data behind them in turn.

FetLife is a porn site that pretends to be a social network.

The first thing that the data clearly shows is that FetLife’s is effectively the same kind of site as amateur porn sites like YouPorn or XTube. Here’s how unquietpirate described it in her post summarizing the statistics:

FetLife’s business model is, effectively, to be a porn site in “social network” clothing. Instead of hiring models and performers and charging for membership, the adult content is provided for free by some “community members” and consumed by others. (Ironically, because of FetLife’s shoddy security, the “premium” video content offered exclusively to paid members is actually available to anyone with the URL.)

It’s an oft-repeated truism in discussions of “free” social media: If you’re not the customer, you’re the product. We know who the “product” on FetLife is. Much has been written about how the “Kinky & Popular” feature primarily displays photos of young, conventionally attractive, scantily-clad, submissive women. Who is the customer? Clearly, those who support FetLife financially.

[…]

A few days ago, in response to the release of the FetLife “Meat List” (a database of female-identified FetLife users under 30), Maymay published the FetLife “Creep List” of 3,700+ male- and dominant-identified paid subscribers to FetLife, drawn from a dataset of 1.5 million FetLife user accounts. Further data analysis showed that “a total of 15,495 accounts were identified as having premium FetLife memberships” and that “Male doms make up far and away the largest proportion of FetLife’s [paying] customer base, accounting for 3,452 (22.28%) of the total customer accounts identified.” (Not to mention that 72.89% of FetLife’s total paying customer base identify themselves as male, further confirmation that FetLife is a porn site, not a social network — which research shows are almost universally dominated by women.)

Put another way, the data shows that nearly a full three-fourths of FetLife’s customers are male. That’s an even more pronounced gender split than typical online porn stats. Even more revealing, though, is that nearly a full quarter (22.28%) of FetLife’s customers are both male and dominant-identified. Here’s a simple heatmap showing these stats visually:

FetLife’s customers are 13 times more sexually predatory than non-paying members

Regular readers will remember that, in addition to the FetLife Creep List, I’ve also been working on a long-running project to build sexual violence prevention software into the architecture of the Internet. The most visible parts of this social impact project is a set of free software applications collectively called the Predator Alert Tools (PATs). One of the earliest PATs was designed for FetLife, and it’s been collecting data for well over two years. With the release of the FetLife Creep List, it’s now possible to cross-reference over 1.5 million FetLife user account’s basic profile data with the data collected by the Predator Alert Tool for FetLife to build a profile of FetLife users involved in situations with questionable consent practices.

And that’s what I’ve done. The results are sobering and unsurprising, confirming yet again that male doms (the same demographic as FetLife’s best customers), and certain male doms in particular, are far and away the most sexually predatory demographic on the porn site. In her post, “FetLife’s Best Customers,” unquietpirate summarizes the findings like this:

Analysis of this huge dataset, which comprises demographic information for nearly half the total member accounts on the site, is ongoing. There is great potential for cross-reference with demographic information drawn from the PAT-FetLife database. It’s unknown yet what kind of questions we might now be well-placed to answer about the FetLife userbase and BDSM Scene membership in general. (FetLife offers a functional microcosm for suggesting broader research, since makes a point of monopolizing online “social networking” space for the national and international “kink community.”)

One of the most striking early findings to come out of the data, however, is the correlation between FetLife users who pay for premium accounts and FetLife users who have been reported for violating a partner’s consent[.]

The way the correlation breaks down is like this:

In the Predator Alert Tool for FetLife database as of April 29th, 2015, there are 652 unique users reported as having violated someone’s consent. Out of those 652 users, 86 (13.19%) are paying FetLife customers. […]

Among paying FetLife customers, consent violations are overhwelmingly perpetrated by D-type roles, with Doms across all reported genders accounting for 19 accused users (22.1%), followed by sadists and switches, who each account for 10 accused users (11.63%). Notably, there are no male S-type FetLife customers who have been accused of consent violations so far.

From a dataset of over 1.5 million FetLife accounts (1,517,103, to be precise), a total of 15,495 customers were identified, showing that FetLife’s customer base is approximately 1.02% of its total user base. In contrast, out of 652 unique users reported to the Predator Alert Tool for FetLife, 86 of those users are paying customers, which is a whopping 13.19%.

This indicates that paying FetLife customers are 13 times more likely to be sexual predators than the average FetLife user. In other words, you may want to be especially cautious whenever you see the “I support FetLife” badge on someone’s profile. :\

So. That’s a thing.

Once again, a visual heatmap of the above stats:

Although FetLife insists that protecting their revenue stream isn’t why they censor rape survivors on their site, the fact of the matter is that the data shows a significant chunk of their revenue comes from people who materially and substantially benefit from FetLife’s continued censoring of rape survivors. There just isn’t any wiggle room anymore. Numerous bloggers, including myself, have questioned FetLife on this in the past. For example, M. Lunas was quite explicit on this point 2 years ago this month:

FetLife is a private For-Profit Canadian company. Among other sources, it receives funding from members who opt to pay a fee for added features–what is known in the tech world as a “freemium” model. What sort of features do these “supporters” get? Along with a number of pretty useless things, they get community status in the form of a badge on their profile, the ability to view over 5,000 of each day’s most popular pictures, videos, and writings, and the ability to upload and watch videos. There are over 80,000 such videos–mostly amateur porn–currently on the site. In other words, the benefit of paying is the ability to perv endlessly on other users’ amateur porn. And FetLife’s ability to provide the maximum amount of porn to paying members depends on other users not giving much thought to the security or privacy of what they’re uploading and sharing. And a rich database of amateur porn attracts more paying members. In other words, it is in FetLife’s direct financial interest not to provide security and privacy features.

He also voiced concern about the influence the vocal minority of FetLife customers—who, again, are primarily male doms and in many cases literally the same people accused of rape by other FetLife users who are not the site’s customers—might have on FetLife’s notorious policy of siding with “community members” who are accused of rape and against survivors of sexual violence:

[C]ould there be a profit motive here too? While disturbing, it makes sense. We know that predators (especially repeat abusers) are often community leaders, often older, and often male. Such people, I would hypothesize may be more likely than the average FetLife user to be a paying supporter of FetLife, either as a signifier of community status, or because they are better off financially (having had more time to rise in their careers and accumulate resources). […] In short, paying supporters are likely over-represented in the set of users who have allegations against them in [Predator Alert Tool for FetLife database]. Therefore, were FetLife to adopt a policy of removing members who were accused of consent violations, they would be targeting a group that disproportionately supports the site financially.

At the time of M. Lunas’s post, we could only make the educated guess that FetLife’s motivations for censoring rape survivors was indeed a policy designed to protect male doms, the demographic who is statistically most likely to pay them money to perv on your nude selfies as well as the most likely to actually physically assault you if they met you in person. Now, we no longer need to guess. Now, we know.

In an otherwise inane post about the FetLife Meat List issue, Rebecca Hiles writes:

the exposure of The List has raised the very important question of why Fetlife is the only popular option for kinksters looking to network and create a sense of community.

Given that FetLife’s customer records show it to be a porn site, not a social network, it’s definitely worth asking why the BDSM Scene continues to insist that it’s “not a meat market” when their primary social gathering spaces—both in-person and online—are commercial porn venues. But even more important than that, I think, is that given male doms are disproportionately more likely to be perpetrators of rape, why is it that the BDSM culture at large, not just FetLife in specific, continues to support rapists by glorifying dominance and sexual violation? And why do we continue to buy into a financial, economic, and legal system premised on the same sociopathic principles as justifying or excusing sadomasochistic rapes?

These and others are important questions. We’ve got a lot of tools at our disposal to attack rape culture. But don’t expect Hiles and the pro-BDSM contingent to focus on these latter questions or to do the work required to actually mitigate rape culture’s horrific impact. They’re far too busy enjoying their Social Justice Warrior circle jerk to think about it much, and besides, as BDSM’s cultural advocates, they rely on rape culture to get their jollies in the first place. When push comes to shove, they don’t want rape culture to actually diminish.

Last week, Mikandi, the third-party app store entirely devoted to porn apps, published a feature article titled “The FetLife Meatlist: How A Social Network Failed Its Users” detailing the continued regular releases of installments of Mircea Popescu’s infamous catalog of FetLife profiles of young women. This marks the third feature article in a mainstream online media outlet discussing how “FetLife failed its users” in as many months. The first two were the Atlantic’s piece titled “How Kink’s Largest Social-Networking Site Fails Its Users,” on March 3^rd, and the DailyDot’s article on April 28^th, with its Lifestyle section editor EJ Dickson tweeting:

We went deep inside FetLife, the Facebook for the BDSM community, and how it’s failing its users: http://t.co/Iwi3snSmS6 via @AlanaMassey

— EJ Dickson (@ejdickson) April 28, 2015

The latest feature was written by AV Flox, a far more rigorous writer than many others with a similar beat. As a result, her article is thorough, well-researched, and far less fluffy than the first two. She’s also the only one who addresses FetLife’s continued abuse of copyright law, the only one to put this issue into a meaningful historical context with regards to FetLife’s many prior failings, and the only author of the three to point out why and how the feminist blogosphere’s own shortsighted reaction contributes to the sexual commodification of young women—exactly the same thing as what the Meat List intentionally does and what these so-called “Social Justice” bloggers say they are trying to avoid.

Here’s a slightly edited excerpt from Flox’s feature:

Clearly there’s a difference between a person who shares a piece of media of their own free will with a site and a person who is exposed without their consent. But the difference begins to shrink as one enumerates the ways that FetLife has failed users: by creating a false sense of security, by using their media as a commercial incentive by default, and by failing to fully delete their media when users try to take it down.

We — the female-identified users, and especially those of us who are submission-oriented — are FetLife’s meat. We’ve always been FetLife’s meat.

The History

Hacking is like breaking and entering. What Popescu did wasn’t even trespassing. The truth is that users are so easy to enumerate on FetLife, it’s almost as though FetLife was designed for data mining.

And this isn’t the first time it’s happened, either.

In 2012, I covered a number of security and safety issues on FetLife, explicitly mentioning the ease with which the network could be mined. John Baku, the social network’s founder, responded to the piece, saying, “With respect to your technical concerns… I am not sure where you got your facts from but this is not the case. Though, if you can prove us wrong then we would for sure fix the problem.”

Baku had to deflect. Three weeks before my piece, a FetLife user and hacktivist by the name of maymay had, in fact, illustrated just how easily profile information could be mined and exposed outside the walls of FetLife with a simple bit of code that remains available.

FetLife refused to admit it had failed its users. Baku labeled that incident an “ill-intentioned attack” and spun it as a one-time situation — the work of a malicious hacker that FetLife bravely thwarted.

“Within an hour of being notified of this tool we blocked it,” Baku wrote in a post that announced the network’s response to the crisis.

It was a lie that it was an attack. It was a lie that the tool had been blocked — the single server that had been running the code was blocked, not the ability for this or any other bit of code to easily mine everything on FetLife. This has been illustrated twice since: last year, when a site called FetLifeSearcher made it possible for anyone to search through FetLife profiles, and again, with the release of the Meatlist.

It’s not lost on me that maymay’s illustration of this issue didn’t get the media attention that the Meatlist has generated: maymay’s code exposed the profile information of FetLife users in positions of power and overwhelmingly male, rather than focusing exclusively on potentially vulnerable women under the age of 30. If we, the female-identified users on Fetlife, are the meat, then we, the media, are actively contributing to the consumption of female-identified bodies, even as we set out to raise awareness about what this “blatant case of misogyny and predation,” as the Meatlist has been described, says about BDSM culture.

The Other List

By mid-April Popescu’s Meatlist had transcended discussions among users and begun to draw media attention. That’s around the time that an e-mail from maymay landed in my inbox: “[The data mined from FetLife] can be cross-referenced with the database [detailing reports of abuse among FetLife users] collected by Predator Alert Tool for FetLife, and can thus be used to answer questions like, ‘What is the most known dangerous city for submissive-identified women?’, ‘what is the average age of an accused male dom?’ and so on.”

The first thing maymay did with the mined data was release a collection of all dominant, male-identified users with paid accounts on FetLife under the name “The FetLife Creeplist.” The second thing maymay did was put the information to work.

Analyzing 15,495 premium FetLife accounts — that is, the network’s paying customers — maymay discovered that 73 percent are men. As has been pointed out, this stands in contrast to trends on social networks, where women tend to dominate, but is more in line with porn sites, where one third of users or less are women.

Of these male users, the majority (42 percent) identify with a dominant type of sexual role (daddy, dom, master, sadist, and top), compared to 11 percent who identify with submissive roles (babygirl, bottom, brat, kajira, pet, slave, sub). Only 18 percent of all paid users identify with a submissive type of sexual role.

Suddenly, it makes sense that Kinky & Popular would be dominated by imagery of sexualized, submissive women.

Next, maymay looked over data collected by the Predator Alert Tool for FetLife, an add-on independent of the social network that users can install to read and report consent violations while browsing FetLife. This add-on came into being following a 2012 campaign by FetLife to silence victims of sexual assault; it’s been available for almost three years and holds reports on 652 individual FetLife users.

Paid users make roughly over one percent of total users on FetLife, but they make up 13 percent of alleged abusers. Of these, over 60 percent were male-identified, with the most likely roles for abusers being “dom,” “sadist” and “switch” (someone who alternates roles between dominance and submission).

“If you ever wanted a clear idea of why FetLife.com [ … ] continues to insist on the protection of rapists time and time and time again ad nauseum, here’s a big clue,” maymay wrote, referring to FetLife’s policy of removing posts that accuse people — by username — of sexual assault or other types of consent violation.

[…]

The Nonsense[, The Abuse, and The Aftermath]

When it learned of the Meatlist, FetLife did the same thing it did when it became aware of FetLifeSearcher and maymay’s 2012 so-called “attack”: it issued a copyright takedown notice under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to Popescu’s host and other online service providers. […] FetLife uses the DMCA process in lieu of real security mechanisms because it’s very easy to abuse it. To avoid liability, the host of the content that receives a DMCA takedown notice may disrupt access to the content, pending a response from the person alleged to be infringing copyright. For users who are unfamiliar with the DMCA process, the disruption of service often intimidates them into backing down — even in cases where takedowns are fraudulent or the work said to be infringing is protected by fair use.

[…]

After BitLove issued its DMCA notice, Popescu took down the Meatlist and sent a counternotice. BitLove’s next move would have been to file a lawsuit against Popescu to keep the content offline, but the legally-mandated 14-day window in which BitLove could have brought legal action came and went and Popescu made the Meatlist available once again.

The lack of legal action on BitLove’s part is telling, as are the FetLife content guidelines that illustrate that BitLove’s officers have at least a basic understanding of how the DMCA process works. Nevertheless, almost two months after failing to file a suit against Popescu, BitLove issued a takedown notice to maymay’s host, which took the post down pending maymay’s counter-notice and the expiration of the 14-day window for BitLove to file a lawsuit.

Two days after Popescu published the eleventh installment of the Meatlist last week, FetLife’s founder John Baku [claimed] in a podcast interview […] to have no knowledge of the Creeplist or the Predator Alert Tool for Fetlife.

Today, Mircea Popescu published the twelfth installment of his list of FetLife women under 30. The Creeplist will be legally clear to return to maymay’s blog this week as well — but then, the Creeplist never left the internet. In a clear illustration of how inadequate the DMCA takedown process is as a security mechanism, someone captured the contents of the Creeplist with a internet archiving tool before the post was taken down. This capture was almost immediately indexed by Google, meaning everything on the list has remained only a search away despite BitLove’s legal maneuvers, and very well could remain available, even if maymay decided not to republish the post.

As Flox predicted, the FetLife Creep List is indeed back up on my blog following my own successful DMCA counter-notice against FetLife’s frivolous takedowns (something I’ve gotten quite practiced at over the years). Of course, the Creep List is also still up at the half dozen or so other archiving sites where it was copied. Moreover, I’ve written a summary of the preliminary data analysis I’ve done on the more than 1.5 million FetLife user account records that were mined, for those who want more hard numbers, whose key conclusions are that FetLife is a porn site, not a social network, and that FetLife customers are 13 times more sexually predatory than the porn site’s non-paying users.

So, this has been available for quite a while, but now that FetLife is actively removing links to it from venues they control (according to this tweet, which was part of this conversation, anyway), I figured it’s time to spread more links to it. :) Try it out:

1. Log out of your FetLife account (if you have one and are logged in).
2. Go to this page.
3. Do a search! (This GIF screencast shows a demo.)

To reiterate, you do not need a FetLife account to use this search tool, though you do need one to “Send username a message on FetLife” (obviously?). It’s like your very own FetLife Meatlist. :)

Notice that you can search and filter profiles by pretty much any field, including their website lists (to easily limit your search to users with Twitter or Facebook profiles, for example), their “About Me” bio description, and how many photos or friends they have. Excluding profiles with no friends makes it easy to weed out sock puppets. :)

This is just the tip of the iceberg, though. By clicking the “Find username on other social networks” button, you can do a search on Twitter, Facebook, Blogger, and about a dozen other sites for the same user profile. The “Find username‘s profile pic on other sites” button makes it easy to do a reverse-image search for a person’s profile photo across the entire Internet. Finally, the “Report username for predatory behavior” button makes it easy to file a statement about that person in the Predator Alert Tool for FetLife. Again, since you don’t need to have a FetLife account to perform a search or to file a statement about a FetLife user in the Predator Alert Tool for FetLife, this is a very handy way of finding people to report even if you’re not on the fetish dating site yourself.

If you do have an account on FetLife, though, you can just install this tool directly into the site. That way, you can access the search form with the click of a button, directly next to FetLife’s own search bar. Simply follow these instructions. :)

For those who are wondering, “Hey, I thought FetLife was private and secure!” this is probably a rude awakening. Turns out you’ve been bamboozled. I know, I know, you (and the FetLife “Carebears”) are probably “shocked, SHOCKED!” that this was even possible in the first place.

Fact is, this was all made possible because FetLife has a financial incentive to erode user privacy, to ensure that it is very poor. Everyone who’s bothered to do a Google search on the matter knows this, because it’s been written about many times for many years now. In plainer words: FetLife doesn’t want to enhance user privacy because doing so directly conflicts with FetLife’s business model. That’s why, despite saying they’re improving security, what FetLife is actually doing is, well, nothing at all, and sometimes making it much, much worse.

Thanks for the insecurity, FetLife. I’m looking forward to your next frivolous copyright takedown notice now. ;) Let me know if you’ll ever paying the $2,000+ invoice you owe me from 2012, eh?

Today, FetLife.com announced they are looking to grow their team of administrators to deal with media issues. Since I’ve had a great many interactions around FetLife’s media policies, I thought I’d throw my hat into the ring with an application. My cover letter follows, followed by a copy of FetLife’s announcement:

Dear FetLife (aka BitLove, Inc.),

I am very excited to be applying for a position as a Media Caretaker (aka “Media Bitch”) for FetLife.com.

As I’m sure you know, I have dedicated a lot of time and energy to investigating FetLife.com’s media storage facilities. My inquiries have ranged from legalities to privacy issues affecting your users. I’ve even contributed several pictures to FetLife that, despite having been banned and having my account summarily “deleted” for the better part of a year, I note are still available on your website’s servers as of this writing. For example:

https://flpics0.a.ssl.fastly.net/1/1254/eileenmaymayfloatingworldportrait_20080927192829_720.jpg

Additionally, I am intimately familiar with your process for issuing Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notices because you sent me and my service providers numerous such takedowns over the course of calendar year 2012. Moreover, you effectively admitted improper invocation of the DMCA by refusing to respond to any of the legal counter-notices I sent and seem to have chosen to ignore the issues I have been raising for years after I sent you a Cease and Desist letter for your potentially illegal actions.

For example, when I released the FetLife Age/Sex/Location Search script that implements your users’ most requested feature enhancement, you sent numerous DMCA takedown notices to the various hosts of the script, even though people not as well-known for such work as I am have released similar scripts months before I ever did. To the best of my knowledge, they were never sent similar DMCA notices. I also happily note all of my content you tried to remove from the Internet has been entirely restored, as well as copied numerous times on various different services, effectively countering this censorship.

I have been able to do all this despite not having a reliable Internet connection and indeed having my IP address blocked by your technical team in an ineffective attempt to stop the spread of code I wrote to export FetLife profile data, a basic user-centered data function you have to date declined to provide or prioritize in your development efforts. By the way, I am still waiting on a response to the invoice I sent to you for these feature enhancements.

Since you state that being a Media Caretaker also requires searching for copyright holders’ and models’ contact info, I expect you to be pleased that I have a proven track record of discovering, though not making public, the legal identities of many people who use your service, particularly photographers. As an example, I was able to easily identify BDSM photographer Lew Rubens’ culturally appropriative photograph within minutes of seeing it. However, I have focused these efforts on the many rape apologists and alleged sexual predators who frequent FetLife.com as part of defending myself against physical and legal threats your user base have sent to me in response to the release of my tool designed to empower the many users whose postings you’ve censored, the FetLife Alleged Abusers Database Engine (FAADE).

While I am dismayed that you have recently hired Susan Wright, who has been loudly criticized as a prominent rape apologist by many members of your own community, to be your Community Manager, I have an unparalleled ability to support the work of people who are unsupportive of my work if I believe it to be in the common good. This is evidenced in part by my continued support of ConsentCulture.com, a project run by people who label me “an abuser,” and who have been instrumental in advocating for the end of your censorship of sexual assault survivors.

I am an ideal candidate for a position as a Media Caretaker. I believe you’ll find that my curriculum vitae provides sufficient validation to this claim. Thank you for taking the time to consider me.

I am available for an interview at your earliest possible convenience and can be reached via e-mail at bitetheappleback@gmail.com or via telephone at (323) 963-4827.

Sincerely,
-maymay
Website: http://maybemaimed.com/tag/fetlife
Another website: http://days.maybemaimed.com/tagged/fetlife

Here’s FetLife’s announcement in full:

Hey all! I’m suicide_by_sybian, a member of the FetLife family. I lead the Caretaker’s Media Team.

Here we grow again!!! :-)

I’m really excited to announce to you guys that we’re looking for more kinksters to join our Media Team.

Media Caretakers are lovingly referred to internally as “The Media Bitches”. Why you may ask? Well, it is very simple, all of our cases deal with Media in one form or another, and… well… you know! :-p

What is the Media team responsible for?

• We contact artists when copyright is in question to make sure permission was given.
• We handle all DMCA’s for pictures, videos and writing.
• We perv Kinky & Popular reporting questionable copyright and handling all that it entails.
• Found a fake profile? yup you guessed it, we handle them as well.
• and that’s just the very basics…

Do you LOVE perving Kinky & Popular? Do you want to help us make it even better, sexier? If you answered yes to both of those questions, then where have you been my whole life… or at least the last couple of months?! :-)

We are looking for volunteers who:

• Love perving K&P. And getting deep down in there!
• Love hunting and enjoying puzzle solving… (look for copyright holders and models contact info).
• Open minded and non-judgemental (kinky and otherwise).
• Team player who enjoys working closely with other kinksters.
• Have a minimum of 15 hours to spend with us a week, which is a couple hours everyday.
• You must have a reliable internet connection and computer that can handle multiple pages and applications at the same time.
• Be able to check on K&P several times a day.

You’ll start off by keeping an eye on K&P and if over time you want to learn how to handle things like DMCA takedowns, etc. then we will slowly train you in all aspects of the Media team. We certainly don’t want you to be bored… evil laugh, as if that could actually happen!

Our team needs to grow, the site is growing and we need to grow with it! So if you think you have what it takes to be a part of our team, then email me:

sbs@fetlife.com

In your email, provide your FetLife nickname and link to your profile, your availability, and please tell me about yourself and why you think you would make a great media caretaker. Please also answer each of the following questions below, explaining your thought process. (We like brainstorming, it turns us geeky kinksters on!)

1. You come across an image in a profile that the poster may not be the copyright holder of…What do you do?

2. Joe_Bob sees that his sub littleslave’s ex (Dumb_Dom) has a rather risque picture of her on his profile. He writes in, saying that Dumb_Dom doesn’t have permission to have littleslave’s picture up! What do you do? Would you handle it differently if littleslave wrote in? If so, how? If not, why?

3. Tell me what you believe to be acceptable for FetLifer’s to upload to their profile (pics, vids)?

Application deadline is January 31st, 2013.

I will respond to applicants after the deadline has closed and we have reviewed each application and made our decisions.

So send in those emails…We can’t wait to hear from you!

sbs

Hi folks!

I imagine that we would be likely to have a conversation that goes something like this:

ME: “FetLife is shit.”
YOU: “I know, I hate FetLife. But it’s where I learn about what’s going on in my community!”
ME: “You mean like for events and stuff?”
YOU: “Yeah.”
ME: *sigh.*

I get it. Like all social networks, the killer feature is the one that connects you to events in your *real, physical life*. Message boards and profiles and stuff, that’s all fun, but what really matters is not being the last to know about the party on Saturday night!

Well, if you really do hate FetLife, but you really do feel like you *need* to use it because it’s where everyone keeps posting events, allow me to offer you a more functional alternative: FetLife iCalendar is a simple FetLife Event to iCalendar exporter.

In literally 1 click, you can now import any city’s FetLife Events to your iCal, Google Calendar, Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Sunbird, Yahoo! Calendar, and so on. Yes, LITERALLY 1 click. Plus, you never have to give anyone your FetLife username or password.

Kink In Exile wrote a wonderful, but for obvious reasons rather short, how-to guide showing you (with screenshots!) which button to press for FetLife iCalendar depending on what kind of computer you have.

But the short version is:

1. Go to http://fetlife.maybemaimed.com/icalendar/
2. Click the “webcal” link next to the name of the city you want to subscribe to events from.

And, yup, I said “subscribe,” not “download.” Every so often, FetLife iCalendar can *automatically* check for new events posted to FetLife and then will *automatically update your calendar* with that event information. That literal 1-click you used to subscribe to events from FetLife? Yeah, that one click means you *never, ever, ever again* need to browse events by going to FetLife directly if you don’t want to.

In other words, remember when you told me you hate FetLife but feel like you need it to know what’s going on in your community? Yeah, well, now you don’t.

Given all the recent #FAIL that FetLife has had lately (and if you’re not familiar with the story of how John Baku bullied a 9 year old boy on YouTube, of how the caretakers are selectively enforcing their own Terms of Use agreement even in the face of some of their own members getting outed by to convicted murderers, and worse [I SHIT YOU NOT, just check out FetLifeFail.tumblr.com or the #FetLife hashtag on Twitter right now]), maybe it’s about time we all ditched FetLife—but not its usefulness in our lives.

Also, if you’ve got a website of your own, you can download and install FetLife iCalendar yourself. If you can do this, please do, as this will save my servers a lot of hardship! Otherwise, no worries.

Also, if you once used FetLife a bunch but want to keep a backup archive of all your content yourself, then you can also try out this free FetLife Exporter/Backup tool.

I’m putting this on Tumblr (and sending this an as email to certain folks) instead of tweeting about this issue because just yesterday, Twitter suspended my account. I suspect it has to do with FetLife sending possibly illegal DMCA takedown notices that meet the legal definition of frivolous. I’m very upset about being silenced like this.

That’s why, if you have a FetLife account or a Twitter account or anything of the sort, it’d mean a lot to me if you could please write a short post letting your friends know that this tool exists. Please spread the word! Forward this in email! Share the link! :)

(This post was cross-posted from my other blog.)