First the Meat List, Now the FetLife Creep List

Roughly a month ago, panic about something called the FetLife Meat List made the rounds among FetLife.com users. The list contained the usernames, ages, and cities of women under the age of 30, and implied that they are sexualized meat to be consumed. The data had been collected by Mircea Popescu using a quite bit of code that exported the ‘publicly’ viewable information on a user’s profile. People were outraged. There was an outcry for FetLife.com to fix the ‘security leak’ (which really wasn’t a leak at all, nor something they could really fix).

In time (April 24th), FetLife’s JohnBaku responded by saying they were taking steps to fight such crawling bots, and many users reported that they had been locked out of their accounts mistakenly by the system FetLife had implemented to crack down on automated server queries. Their system worked fairly well…for a few minutes at least. The reality is that ‘hackers’ (a term I use loosely), will always miles ahead of FetLife. FetLife just doesn’t have the ability to stop all such attempts. Neither does Facebook, a company thousands of times the size of FetLife.

Introducing…The FetLife Creep List

The end of April saw MayMay, who describes himself as the ‘helpful hacker’ (though many refer to him as a digital anarchist instead), publishing what he calls the FetLife Creep List.

The list compiles the user ID, name, age, location, and number of friends, of 3,730 people who have a paid FetLife.com account who have labelled themselves as a Dom, Master, or Top. If you’re a FetLife supporter, and one of those three options…there’s a good chance you’re named as a ‘creep’ on the FetLife Creep List.

MayMay references the previous ‘Meat List’ post, and with the FetLife Creep List infers that if you have paid money to support FetLife, and are a male who fits into the role of a Dom, Master, or Top…you are a creep. MayMay believes in the idea of ‘naming and shaming’, in this case by naming and shaming the users that support FetLife with money.

We’re not 100% sure when the data was compiled. Another spreadsheet that MayMay posts contains a breakdown of ALL of the paid subscribers by role, and that page mentions that it’s based on a dataset of 1.5 million accounts. It could be that MayMay only crawled a sample (1.5 million) of the 3.8 million current FetLife profiles, or it could be that the data crawl was done quite some time ago when there was only 1.5 million users. There’s a fair amount of discrepancy between the two sets of data, and MayMay doesn’t seem to clarify when the data was scraped. We’ll know once we start hearing from people based on when they subscribed or changed their username.

To read our article about the FetLife Meat List, click here.

For a few tips for privacy on FetLife, click here