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A growing body of security and privacy research focuses on at-risk populations -those who are marginalized, stigmatized, and/or criminalized -and who may face significant harm from research conducted about themselves and their communities. For example, recent research has studied family members of those in prison, survivors of domestic violence, undocumented immigrants, and sex workers. Atrisk communities have a heightened need for confidentiality, consideration for possible past trauma, and research justice given inherent power differentials. Here, we offer a set of ethical research practices we have deployed in research with multiple at-risk communities. We hope these practices will serve as guidance and a springboard for discussion about what it means to conduct ethical research, particularly with marginalized, stigmatized, and/or criminalized groups.

Workers from a variety of industries rapidly shifted to remote work at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. While existing work has examined the impact of this shift on office workers, little work has examined how shifting from in-person to online work affected workers in the informal labor sector. We examine the impact of shifting from in-person to online-only work on a particularly marginalized group of workers: sex workers. Through 34 qualitative interviews with sex workers from seven countries in the Global North, we examine how a shift to online-only sex work impacted: (1) working conditions, (2) risks and protective behaviors, and (3) labor rewards. We find that online work offers benefits to sex workers' financial and physical well-being. However, online-only work introduces new and greater digital and mental health risks as a result of the need to be publicly visible on more platforms and to share more explicit content. From our findings we propose design and platform governance suggestions for digital sex workers and for informal workers more broadly, particularly those who create and sell digital content.

Social media platforms are increasingly considering models to incentivize creators to publish high quality content on their platforms. As a result, social media content creation has transformed into a form of gig work for some creators. In order to better design social media platforms to support this labor, we need to understand professional creators' motivations. In this work, we present a qualitative interview study of the motivations of 22 U.S. OnlyFans creators. OnlyFans is a subscription-based social media platform that is unique in that it is primarily associated with sexual content (although it is not marketed as such) and thus creators are positioned at the intersection of professional content creation and sex work, exposing them to a unique set of potential challenges. Beyond the typical motivations for pursuing other forms of gig work (e.g., flexibility, autonomy) our findings highlight three key factors explaining the rapid growth of OnlyFans despite the potential stigma of sexual content creation: (1) societal visibility and mainstream acceptance of OnlyFans, created through a combination of celebrity hype and the design of the platform itself; (2) platform design: affordances for boundary setting with clients, privacy from the public, and content archives, which together create a labor environment participants viewed as better than other forms of gig work, a natural avenue for sexual expression, and enabling monetization of existing content, audiences, and skills; and (3) the pandemic, which led to both high demand for immediate income while waiting for-or after running out of-unemployment benefits, and increased free time, which increased general demand for pornographic content.

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