Updated for 2026.
I’m writing this post from the position that a) you’re an escort and b) you don’t particularly want your family and friends knowing that you’re an escort. I’ve listed some tips below that I’ve picked up over the years on keeping your personal and professional lives as separate as possible in a world of smartphones and intrusive social media apps.
The important thing to remember is that social media companies are desperate to link you to other people. That’s their entire business model. And they go to great lengths to do it through clauses buried in terms and conditions you will undoubtedly never read. They track your calls, your messages, your contacts, the locations you visit, and the wifi networks you connect to. They notice when two phones are repeatedly in the same room. They pick out keywords from conversations happening near your phone — that chat with your mum over a cup of tea last week, with your handset face-down on the table, very much included. I’m not (yet) talking about the content of phone calls, though it wouldn’t entirely surprise me.
A lot has changed since I first wrote this piece, so it felt time for a proper refresh. The short version: things have got harder, not easier. Here’s the current state of play.
Facebook (and Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, Threads…)
Meta — who own Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Threads — remain the worst offenders when it comes to harvesting data from your phone and trying to link you to other people.
That client you rang from your personal phone (being careful to withhold your number first) to ask for directions on where to park? Yes, he’ll be coming up in your suggested friends some time soon. Or worse, you’ll be coming up in his. Maybe you chat to clients on WhatsApp from your business phone, and one time you logged into your personal Facebook or Instagram from the same handset? They’ve got you linked. The “People You May Know” algorithm cross-references mutual contacts, shared wifi networks, location overlap, the lot. It is genuinely uncanny, and it does not care that you’d rather it didn’t.
Because it’s near enough impossible not to get linked in this day and age, the best approach is to lock down your personal social media rather than try to out-smart the smartphones.
Go into every Facebook setting and secure your account like you’re a Russian spy on the run from Putin. Limit past posts to friends only. Set all future posts to friends only. Turn off contact syncing. Revoke Facebook’s access to your phone’s location whenever the app isn’t open. Disable face recognition if it’s offered in your region. Hide your friends list from public view. And then the most important thing you can do as a sex worker who values her anonymity:
Do not have an identifying profile photo or header photo on your personal Facebook account. Ever. Your face should not appear in either of these images. The aim is that when you pop up to a client as a suggested friend, he doesn’t recognise you and scrolls right on by. If he recognises you, he now knows your real name, where you live, where you work, and depending on how careful you’ve been with your settings, he can see your friends and family too — all because you rang him to ask for directions.
I would even go so far as to remove your surname from your personal Facebook and replace it with something rather more random. Yes, this technically breaches their terms and bewilders family, but it’s an extra layer of insulation and it works.
The same logic applies to Instagram, Threads, and any other Meta property. If you keep them at all, lock them down, no face in the profile picture, and don’t install the apps on the phone you use for business. Ever.
Twitter / X (or: what we lost)
It feels strange writing about Twitter in the past tense, but here we are. For years it was the one mainstream platform where sex workers could operate. We had an Elite Courtesans account from 2009 with around fifteen thousand followers — a decade and a half of conversations, photos, recommendations and community, all stitched together on a single profile. Then it was gone. Not retired, not paused. Removed, along with thousands of other escort and adult industry accounts.
It’s a useful object lesson and worth flagging if you’re reading this fresh: don’t build your business on rented land you can’t take with you. Whatever account you have now on a mainstream platform, treat it as borrowed. Keep your own client list on your own phone. Keep your website your priority. A platform you don’t control can disappear, with the followers you spent years earning, in a single afternoon.
For what it’s worth, X has continued tightening — there’s now a verified adult-content creator programme requiring identity verification, three-tier content classification, and various other hurdles that don’t suit the way most agencies and independent escorts actually work. I wouldn’t recommend building anything meaningful there.
Bluesky
Bluesky is, currently, the friendliest mainstream platform for adult creators, and the one we’ve migrated to. The privacy picture is genuinely better than Meta’s in a few important ways, and genuinely worse in one.
The good bits: Bluesky doesn’t run targeted advertising, doesn’t sell your data to third-party advertisers, and doesn’t use your posts to train AI models. It doesn’t do the aggressive contact-harvesting trick that Twitter and Meta pulled — you’re much less likely to have a notification fired off to your dad’s phone announcing you’ve joined.
The bad bit, and it’s a big one: Bluesky is structurally public by default. The protocol it runs on stores everything in open data repositories that anyone — even people without a Bluesky account — can read. Your posts are public. Your likes are public. Your follower and following lists are public. Your blocks are public. There’s no “locked” account in the way you might have had on old Twitter or Instagram. Anything you put on there should be treated like it’s sitting on the front page of a newspaper.
So the same broad rules apply: no face in your profile picture, no face in your header, no identifying photos or backgrounds anywhere. Create the account from a web browser in incognito mode, using your escort email and number, never personal. If you install the app, install it only on your work phone, with no personal contacts saved to that device. Police your timeline carefully — be mindful that a like or a repost is just as visible as a post. Don’t engage with personal-life accounts from your work account. Don’t engage with your work account from your personal one. The wall between the two needs to be brick, not paper.
I used to love Instagram. I miss what it was. But the honest 2026 advice for anyone working in this industry is: don’t bother with a work account. It will be removed.
Meta’s Sexual Solicitation policy bans anything that “implicitly or indirectly” offers a sexual encounter, which is interpreted broadly enough by their automated systems that fully-clothed photos, a suggestive emoji, or a “DM me” caption is enough to trip the wire. Sex educators, kink venues, plus-size models, drag performers, and any number of fully-compliant accounts have been deleted in mass sweeps, often with no warning and no meaningful route to appeal. Celebrities posting essentially the same content are, of course, fine. The double standard is the policy.
For a personal Instagram, the rules are the same as personal Facebook: lock the account, no face on your profile or header, link it to an email and phone number that have no connection to your escort identity, and do not install the app on your work phone. Be aware that Meta cross-references everything between Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads, so the “People You May Know” roulette wheel applies here too.
In conclusion
If you’re one of the many people out there who’s let their vanity run riot on social media (probably ninety-five per cent of us), and you also happen to work in the sex industry, and you would rather like to keep that a secret, it’s time to reassess your relationship with the whole thing. Yes, I know you want to show the world where you went on holiday or what wonderful clean-eating lunch you cooked yourself. But while your escort persona is alive and kicking, keep your personal circle small, your face off public profiles, and your business and personal devices entirely separate.
The impact of being outed can be devastating, and in some cases dangerous. Even if you’re not worried for yourself, the impact on your children, parents, or wider family can be brutal — and that knowledge alone has caused real harm to women I know. It shouldn’t be like that. But it is. So be careful.
And one closing thought, which has only become truer since I first wrote this: the only piece of digital real estate you actually own is your own website. Platforms come, platforms go, accounts get deleted, policies change overnight. Your site, your domain, your mailing list — those are yours. Build there first. Everything else is just a shop window someone else can take down whenever they fancy.
— Lisa
If you’ve got tips of your own, or there’s something I’ve missed, do get in touch — I’d love to hear them.
Further reading: For the receipts on advertising firms using device microphones to harvest “active listening” data for ad targeting — including a leaked pitch deck naming Meta, Google and Amazon as partners — see 404 Media’s reporting on Cox Media Group. Google removed CMG from its Partners Program after the leak.