Who exactly is Ashton Kutcher’s anti-sex-trafficking tech company helping? — The actor’s recent PR crisis has led to scrutiny around his advocacy work
by marketrent
Who exactly is Ashton Kutcher’s anti-sex-trafficking tech company helping? — The actor’s recent PR crisis has led to scrutiny around his advocacy work
by marketrent
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Vox/*New York*’s Angelina Chapin spoke to anti-sex-trafficking advocates, sex workers, and trafficking survivors who raised concerns about Ashton Kutcher’s startup Thorn (f.k.a. DNA).^1
>As a prolific tech investor, Kutcher leveraged his relationships with companies like Google, Twitter, and Amazon to help create a digital tool named Spotlight.
>The organization claimed the software would help save vulnerable children and, by the mid-2010s, gave Spotlight out to police departments around the country for free.
>Thorn’s flagship product acts like a search engine. If cops suspect someone is being trafficked, they can enter certain pieces of information, like a name, phone number, or photo, into the database, which then combs through millions of online escort ads to turn up results.
>It also has an algorithm that compiles ads with signs of trafficking — like sex workers calling themselves “young” or specifying race — so cops can look for potential victims in their area.
>Last year, the company spent almost $9 million on such “victim identification” efforts.
>
>Thorn says it has helped identify more than 17,000 child survivors over the past four years, one of the many impressive-sounding statistics the company often touts.
>Experts have pointed out, however, that based on similar government numbers, those metrics seem impossible.
>Though officers are only supposed to use Spotlight for child-abuse cases, they can easily surveil sex workers and set up stings to arrest them.
>Even the survivors I spoke with saw this tool as a potential threat, citing the high rates of sexual violence perpetrated by police.
>“Thorn builds products for police, not trafficking survivors,” says Sabra Boyd, a Seattle-based writer and consultant.
>Now that Spotlight is a firmly entrenched part of law enforcement’s arsenal, it doesn’t need a celebrity figurehead to spread even further.
>“If you create the technology, people tend to want to have the broadest access to it,” says Jared Trujillo, a former sex worker who teaches constitutional law at CUNY Law.
>“There’s really no sunlight on exactly how Spotlight operates, how its algorithms operate, and how people end up in their database,” says Trujillo. “‘Just trust Ashton Kutcher’ is terrible public policy.”
^1 https://www.thecut.com/article/ashton-kutcher-thorn-spotlight-rekognition-surveillance.html
When he was being criticized for the Masterson letter a lot people said that the letter shouldn’t undo the good he did