Digital Hygiene for Escorts

There will come a day when you decide to hang up your stockings and disappear out of the industry and off the internet altogether. That day may come suddenly – an intrusion, a threat to your anonymity, or you just wake up and decide you’ve had enough. That day may also be pre-planned and involve a slow wind down. You’ll delete all your ads, you’ll turn off your website, you’ll don your new uniform – comfy leggings – and you’ll breathe a peaceful sigh as you make yourself a cuppa.

But what if I told you that despite your meticulous deletions, you’re not yet gone from the internet. That there are a few websites that make it their mission to archive all websites out there, including those in the adult industry?

The main player, archive.org, is fundamentally a good project. It’s a nice thing to archive the internet, and in terms of websites for my personal projects or ‘straight’ businesses, I have no issues with them doing so. But when it comes to sex work related websites, or any other sensitive stuff that could be used for discriminatory purposes (websites involving indentifiable physical or mental health stuff, sexuality etc), then the case is different. There is no public interest there, just highly personal shit that someday you might want removed. Your right to be forgotten is important.

Getting your website removed from archive.org used to be easy – a quick change to the robots.txt and it would be gone. But a few years back, they revised their robots.txt policy, meaning they no longer pay proper attention to them. So as a sex worker, once you have ascertained that you website is on there, here are the steps you should take to get your content taken down:

• Head to archive.org and search for your website
• If you’re on there, add the following to your robots.txt file:
  
  User-agent: archive.org_bot
  Disallow: /

• Create a file called verify.txt with the content ‘please remove from archive.org’
• Upload it to the root of your website e.g. https://mywebsite.co.uk/verify.txt
• If your website hosting is no longer active BUT you still own the domain, you can instead add a TXT record to the domain’s DNS with the answer ‘please remove from archive.org’
  
• Send an email to info@archive.org, ideally from a domain linked email address e.g. info@yourwebsite.co.uk
• Subject = Domain Removal
• Here’s an idea of the text you should put in the email:

Hi Archive.org,

I am YOUR NAME owner of mywebsite.co.uk. I am requesting the removal of my site from all archive.org products. The “User-agent: archive.org_bot Disallow: /” code present in my robots.txt file and can be found at:

https://mywebsite.co.uk/robots.txt

I am requesting removal of mywebsite.co.uk (all snapshots, written content, files, images, everything) from https://web.archive.org from the date of my ownership of the domain (09-Jun-2021), and all days going forward. I have been the sole owner of this domain since 09-Jun-2021. I have sent this message from a domain linked email address.

I have also placed a confirmation message at the following link https://mywebsite.co.uk/verify.txt

or

I have added a txt record to the domain’s DNS record.

Thank you for your prompt attention.

DMCA Notice:

I am the site owner and copyright holder for the domain above. This communication is an official notification under Section 512(c) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (”DMCA”), and I request the removal of the aforementioned infringing material from your servers. Archive.org does not have any right or permission to reproduce or display my website in any form. I am providing this notice in good faith and with the reasonable belief that rights I own are being infringed. Under penalty of perjury I certify that the information contained in this notification is both true and accurate. I am the copyright owner and therefore have the authority to act for the copyright(s) involved. Thank you for your prompt assistance with this matter.

YOUR NAME
mywebsite.co.uk

I generally find archive.org responsive to the above, though they may take a week or two to get back to you. It’s hard to ever truly get erased from the internet, which is why workers should think so carefully about showing faces, especially with mounting discrimination at borders. But getting yourself off archive.org is a good step to take if you value your right to be forgotten. And it would be prudent to do it now rather than when you’re a rush to take things down (they’re a small, busy team), or after you have killed your website and lost the domain. At that point you can still ask them to remove your content, but you’ll need to send them invoices and other proofs rather than using the steps above – which will expose more personal data than is necessary.