  The sex industry exists on a continuum based on the degree of work autonomy
present in labor conditions: a high degree exists on one side of the continuum
where independent sex workers have a great deal of agency, while much less
autonomy exists on the other side, where sex is traded under conditions of
human trafficking. Organizations across North America perform outreach to sex
industry workers to offer assistance in the form of services (e.g., healthcare,
financial assistance, housing), prayer, and intervention. Increasingly,
technology is used to look for trafficking victims or facilitate the provision
of assistance or services, for example through scraping and parsing sex
industry workers' advertisements into a database of contact information that
can be used by outreach organizations. However, little is known about the
efficacy of anti-trafficking outreach technology, nor the potential risks of
using it to identify and contact the highly stigmatized and marginalized
population of those working in the sex industry.
  In this work, we investigate the use, context, benefits, and harms of an
anti-trafficking technology platform via qualitative interviews with multiple
stakeholders: the technology developers (n=6), organizations that use the
technology (n=17), and sex industry workers who have been contacted or wish to
be contacted (n=24). Our findings illustrate misalignment between developers,
users of the platform, and sex industry workers they are attempting to assist.
In their current state, anti-trafficking outreach tools such as the one we
investigate are ineffective and, at best, serve as a mechanism for spam and, at
worst, scale and exacerbate harm against the population they aim to serve. We
conclude with a discussion of best practices for technology-facilitated
outreach efforts to minimize risk or harm to sex industry workers while
efficiently providing needed services.

Computers and Society