Amazon Wishlists Won't Safeguard Addresses Anymore; Sex Workers are Paying the Price

Sex workers are abandoning their Amazon wishlists after the company began sending notices Wednesday that customer addresses may soon be exposed to buyers. As first covered by 404 Media, a change in Amazon policy means customers who use the site’s public wishlists may have their addresses exposed to customers via third-party sellers.

Currently, when Amazon users make a public wishlist, they can prevent gifters from purchasing list items through third-party sellers, but according to Amazon’s email to customers, on March 25th, they’ll no longer have a choice. These sellers, unlike Amazon, may opt to share users’ addresses with gift buyers for reasons like package tracking.

For many sex workers, who’ve long used Amazon’s wishlist to engage with fans, that means they have to leave the platform. “I can’t risk that because that’s me getting doxxed,” said a longtime Onlyfans content creator, Ghostie, who previously got several gifts a month from their Amazon wishlist, supplementing their income. Now, they’ve locked down their address and are taking their wishlist down.

As sex work has transformed into an online industry, doxxing and the subsequent risks for stalking, harassment, and other violence has become a significant threat to its workers. A 2025 survey of online sex workers reported that 34% of its respondents had been doxxed. It’s a pervasive enough problem that sex work advocacy groups have created resource guides to preventing and dealing with the fallout of doxxing, and one research paper found, among the camming community, doxxing was routinely treated as an “expected” hazard.

Some sex workers are being vocal online about leaving Amazon and moving to other wishlist platforms like Throne, but it’s not that simple.

Ghostie said, even though they have wishlists on other sites and try to incentivize their fans to use them, it hasn’t been successful. As opposed to the routine gifts from their Amazon wishlist they get each month, they’ve only ever gotten “a few” gifts via Throne. “A lot of my fans are low income, so it’s easier to get them to shop on Amazon,” they explained. “So I was pretty upset.”

This isn’t the first time sex workers and their content have been suddenly de-platformed online by corporations. In 2021, OnlyFans briefly banned sexual content, despite sex work’s role in building its platform in the first place. More recently, pressure from credit card companies including Visa and Mastercard, as well as credit-card processor Stripe, led to crackdowns on sexual content for gaming sites itch.io and Steam. Even ManyVids, a platform founded by a sex worker, seems to have fallen prey to anti-sex work rhetoric and has become increasingly hostile to its user base of sex workers.

However, according to Ghostie, people outside of the industry often don’t care about the rights of sex workers “until it affects them.”

“Because what happens to us,” they continued, “… eventually affects them. Say that we lose our platforms: They lose their access to entertainment.”

In other news: Earlier this week, I did reporting for The Objective, covering The Baltimore Sun’s recent AI usage and its ongoing union struggle. You should check it out.

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