When I was researching the privacy policies of sex worker directories, I sent an email to the contact email for each directory asking them a series of questions.

Here are the questions I asked:

• Do you require personally identifying information from sex workers for verification?
• Identity documents?
• Selfies?
• Can these be partially obscured or redacted?
• Do you sell our identities and/or personal details to third party advertisers?
• Do you take any steps to secure our identities from hackers or in case your servers were seized?
• Are our identity documents and selfies deleted after verification?
• Stored offline?
• Encrypted?
• If you were told you could protect yourself from prosecution by freely handing over the identities of sex workers to authorities, would you do so?
• Or would you put up a fight and demand that they get a subpoena?
• Do you honour deletion requests?
• In entirety?
• How long does this take?

At the time, I didn't get a reply from Megapersonals but more recently I was corresponding with /u/MegaPersonals_REAL on reddit via modmail for the /r/sexworkers subreddit of which I'm a moderator.

I mentioned my privacy policies blog posts and this time I was able to get answers.

We at Megapersonals use a third party verification service provider AgeSmart.eu who do the acquisition and storage of ID documents for the purposes of age verification on our behalf. This is AgeSmart.eu's response to these questions as it related to the terms of service with Megapersonals.

Accepts partially obscured or redacted identity documents YES. Age verification is what we're after. Obscuring private identity data is accepted. There is a feature to do this directly in the web app.

Refrains from selling personal details to third parties YES. Personal data is never sold to anyone, period.

Encryption used to secure our identities YES.

Identity documents and selfies are deleted after verification NO. For legal reasons we are prohibited from deleting proofs of age verification.

Withholds identities from authorities unless subpoena provided YES. We require subpoenas.

Honours deletion requests partially YES. Users can delete their entire posting history and media.

Deletion requests honoured entirely. NOT entirely. User can delete their entire posting history and media, however, age verification records are maintained - with allowance for partially obscuring private identity data.

Processing time for deletion requests: Immediate.
You are in control. The DELETE MY ACCOUNT button available to the users.

That's good! I suggested to Mega that all of the above would make excellent selling points for attracting new members to Megapersonals, and reassuring existing members, if it were spelled out loud and clear on the site.

My suggestion seemed well received so hopefully, it will be made more clear in their terms that they are committed to preventing our identities and personal details from falling into the wrong hands.

A lot of sex workers on reddit seem to be losing access to their Megapersonals accounts recently. It seems they have an overzealous algorithm detecting account access from new IP addresses that's in the habit of locking users out and then requiring that they wait for manual re-verification.

If this happens to you, I recommend using their contact page or sending an email. If you don't get a reply within their SLA of 24 hours, try making a post on /r/sexworkers and tagging /u/MegaPersonals_REAL. They'll get a notification from reddit for the username mention and they usually do respond on reddit within 24 hours.

I made a suggestion

"for sex workers, losing access to our Megapersonals account means we lose some, or all of our income. That's a big problem. Especially for survival workers. It's great that you're here to answer people's concerns and it will be even better if whatever is causing so many genuine providers to get locked out of mega accounts could get fixed."

Mega has assured me that they're rolling out changes over the next month that should prevent genuine sex workers getting locked out of their accounts.