Under the skin of OnlyFans
The overlap between small-time OnlyFans creators and people hypervigilant about their privacy feels small. Streamers and idols have faced this problem for some time - with cases of people finding out where a streamer lives based on minutiae like reflections - but add porn and inexperience to the equation and it&#x27;s not at all surprising that stalking behavior can get dangerously extreme.<p>Storytime - a girl at my uni mentioned in our school&#x27;s subreddit that she does OnlyFans. She made the comment from the same reddit account she used to advertise her profile and she also wrote many regular SFW comments and posts. So... she was pretty hot, and me being a horny and curious college dude, I tried to see if I could casually ID them.<p>Yes, kind of creepy, I know. Horniness aside, the point is, it took me like 10 minutes to find their real name and identity, based only on information they decided it would be safe to publicly associate with themselves. Rest assured, I didn&#x27;t do anything with that knowledge and I have no intention of ever doing so, obviously. Really big school, completely different majors that spend time in completely different parts of campus, I doubt I&#x27;d even notice if I ever crossed paths with them.<p>People who aren&#x27;t techies who always have privacy on the mind often drastically underestimate how little information is needed to uniquely ID them. In this case, a) she posted in a specific school sub, b) she posted about her grades in a major-specific class, c) she mentioned her ethnicity in a regular SFW post, and d) she shared plenty of pictures of her body sans face from a variety of angles.<p>Well now I can know that there&#x27;s an X-ethnicity person in Y grade of Z major at ABC university who has an identifying tattoo and a relatively uncommon hairstyle... Literally 2 or 3 Google searches later and I had a result. As I&#x27;m sure is often the case, she wasn&#x27;t particularly concerned about the privacy of her regular, real life identity, presumably with the assumption that it wouldn&#x27;t ever be connected to her OnlyFans. Name on school project websites, articles in the school newspaper, LinkedIns, public instagrams, things like that.<p>It doesn&#x27;t take long to scroll through google images and recognize a body. And that&#x27;s probably what&#x27;s unintuitive about this risk - someone might think &quot;well there are another 300 people who fit that description, so I&#x27;m good&quot;. But with computers, it&#x27;s trivial to look through 300 people. Someone crazy enough could easily sift through 3000 pictures searching for you. They know roughly what you look like. And if the number of people fitting your description is only around 30, it&#x27;s hard to even call that a search - a few seconds on a page or two is all it takes to ID you.<p>The good thing is that the vast majority of people are probably harmless. The occasional overly curious person like me might cross some boundaries and find out who you are, but it&#x27;s not likely they&#x27;ll have any desire to contact you in any way. The bad thing, of course, is that it only takes 1 nutcase to instill a lot of fear.<p>I don&#x27;t think there&#x27;s a solution other than more education - assuming this kind of content creation continues to exist without heavy regulation. Maybe OnlyFans could play a part. I&#x27;m sure most OF creators vaguely know the risks, but they may not be used to thinking carefully about sharing seemingly innocuous and vague details. Like, &quot;Did you know you might be stalked? Yes. Did you know you might be stalked and identified if you share a picture of your dog at the park? Uh, what!?&quot;.<p>A quick 15 minute video on protecting yourself from the crazies could probably prevent a lot of dangerous situations. &quot;Don&#x27;t share your school or major&quot;, &quot;Don&#x27;t take pictures near street signs or stores&quot;, &quot;Don&#x27;t wear jewelry you usually wear&quot;, etc.