Facebook Reportedly Outed Sex Workers through Friend Recommendations

April 15, 2017

The 'People You May Know' feature on Facebook has reportedly exposed sex workers by inappropriately recommending clients to their personal accounts or family members to their business accounts. This highlights the need for safe and secure AI practices and governance.

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Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.628, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
GOVERN 2.2 — similarity 0.616, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MEASURE 2.10 — similarity 0.614, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: facebook
Alleged developer: facebook
Alleged harmed parties: sex-workers-using-facebook

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/408

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

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