Facebook Reportedly Outed Sex Workers through Friend Recommendations

Laws that address this harm

Policy angle: Classified under Privacy & Security (Compromise of privacy by obtaining, leaking or correctly inferring sensitive information) in the MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy; 5 recorded instruments address this use case.

• Colorado AI Act Colorado (United States) · Repealed · binding
• India DPDP Act India · Partially applicable · binding
• Law No. 132/2025 on artificial intelligence Italy · In force · binding
• EU AI Act European Union · Partially applicable · binding
• Texas Responsible AI Governance Act (TRAIGA) Texas (United States) · In force · binding

Matched from the record's risk domain and country to the instruments recorded here. A reviewer can correct the match in the repository (data/external/incident_overrides.yaml).

News reports (1)

Titles link to the original publisher; report text is not reproduced here.

1. 11 Oct 2017
   How Facebook Outs Sex Workers

   gizmodo.com · Kashmir Hill

Who was involved

Alleged deployer

Facebook

Alleged developer

Facebook

Alleged harmed party

Social media users sex workers using Facebook sex workers Privacy Facebook users Biometric data subjects

AI systems implicated

Social recommendation systemsSocial media platformsFacebook People You May KnowFacebook

Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)

Risk domain

Privacy & Security

Risk subdomain

2.1 Compromise of privacy by obtaining, leaking or correctly inferring sensitive information

Causal entity

AI

Intent

Unintentional

Timing

Post-deployment

Harm level

—

Sectors

—

Countries

—

Risk entries describing this failure mode

Entries from the MIT AI Risk Repository coded to subdomain 2.1.

• Risks to privacy

  "General- purpose AI models or systems can ‘leak’ information about individuals whose data was used in training. For future models trained on sensitive personal data like health or financial data, this may lead to partic...

  International Scientific Report on the Safety of Advanced AI (Bengio2024)

• Risks to privacy

  "General- purpose AI systems can cause or contribute to violations of user privacy. Violations can occur inadvertently during the training or usage of AI systems, for example through unauthorised processing of personal d...

  International AI Safety Report 2025 (Bengio2025)

• Private Training Data

  "As recent LLMs continue to incorporate licensed, created, and publicly available data sources in their corpora, the potential to mix private data in the training corpora is significantly increased. The misused private d...

  Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

• Association in LLMs

  "Association in LLMs refers to the capability to associate various pieces of information related to a person. According to [68], [86], given a pair of PII entities (xi , xj ), which is associated by a model F. Using a pr...

  Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

• Privacy Leakage

  "Privacy Leakage means the generated content includes sensitive personal information"

  Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

• Memorization in LLMs

  "Memorization in LLMs refers to the capability to recover the training data with contextual prefixes. According to [88]–[90], given a PII entity x, which is memorized by a model F. Using a prompt p could force the model...

  Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

• Privacy Leakage

  "The model is trained with personal data in the corpus and unintentionally exposing them during the conversation."

  Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

• Privacy and regulation violations

  "Some of the broken systems discussed above are also very invasive of people’s privacy, controlling, for instance, the length of someone’s last romantic relationship [51]. More recently, ChatGPT was banned in Italy over...

  Navigating the Landscape of AI Ethics and Responsibility (Cunha2023)

Related incidents

Linked by editors or by text similarity in the source dataset.

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• 23 Jan 2013Sexist and Racist Google Adsense Advertisements

Incidents in the same risk subdomain

• 19 Feb 2026Grok Reportedly Disclosed Adult Performer Siri Dahl's Legal Name and Birthdate, Allegedly Contributing to Doxxing and Harassment
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• 4 Dec 2025Perplexity AI Reportedly Accused in Federal Lawsuit of Purported Copyright Infringement and False Attribution of Chicago Tribune Content
• 19 Nov 2025Secret Desires AI Platform Reportedly Exposed Nearly Two Million Sensitive Images in Cloud Storage Leak
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