About
We believe that consensual service providers and clients should be able to operate safely, privately and independently—and still benefit from reliable community standards, legal protections and non-exploitative digital solutions.
We know that the vast majority of individuals are law-abiding, yet everyone suffers from outdated stigmatizing stereotypes and a punitive culture that falsely claims that all participants are criminals or victims.
We also know that the marginalization of sex work and lack of protections for sex workers creates opportunity for abusive and exploitative bad actors. Non-consensual individuals are trafficked, and consensual workers find themselves in coercive or abusive working conditions because they’re unsupported in independent work or unable or afraid to work independently.
With horizontl, we’re upending the current system. The consenting majority gain technology and policy, under a socially responsible business model, that support safety, trust and inclusion—and combat the dangers of working in vulnerable isolation. Bad actors are pushed to the margins and more easily targeted by law enforcement, and interventions and resources can focus on helping victims.
Our team is committed to reimagining how business and technology can work better to serve people and communities.
Together we have years of hands-on business, technical, product and community experience and knowledge that we’re applying horizontl's new approaches to mission-driven business, community-led policy, cryptographic data protection, and decentralized system architecture.
FOUNDER
Kate spent more than a decade helping launch and scale adtech and other big-data startups.
There she saw firsthand the ascent of business and technology designed to monetize and extract value from everything and everyone—and indifferent, and often actively hostile, to norms of democracy, community, and individual rights. Through anti-human trafficking work she came to see that sex workers are at the fore of suffering the consequences of this system and its unaccountable, authoritarian approach to data surveillance, use, and governance.
Following the passage FOSTA/SESTA in the US, she developed the idea for horizontl out of research into how technology, business and governance could converge in a purpose-built solution to protect consensual sex workers and take on exploitation and trafficking—and introduce a non-extractive, community-first tech model.
COMMUNITY LEAD
Marin is a sex worker rights activist currently working for violence prevention charity National Ugly Mugs and regional association European Sex Workers Rights Alliance. With ten years of industry experience, she brings a deep network of trusted relationships with sex workers and the sex worker advocacy community.
She also specializes in community advocacy and outreach, writing about and educating audiences on the effects of proposed policy and interventions on the lived experiences of sex workers.
TECHNOLOGY LEAD
Mark has over 25 years’ experience in delivering socio-technical systems. He worked at AKQA, BBC, Accenture, as well as delivering projects for Conde Nast, SRF and the National Funding Scheme. He is currently working on projects in the Open Banking, Digital Identity and Tokenization spaces. He worked closely with Lily Cole in developing her Impossible social network and with Imogen Heap on her Mycelia and Creative Passport projects to recenter the music industry around artists. He has been an RA with the Info Security Group at Royal Holloway University and is both a Visiting Researcher at Design Against Crime and Associate Lecturer in Industrial Design at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London.
SEX WORKER DIGITAL RIGHTS
Yigit is a human rights activist who has been involved in grassroots groups and civil society organizations in various capacities over the years, particularly in Turkey and in the United Kingdom, advocating for sex workers' rights. He has also been involved in several research projects and holds a Master's Degree in Communications Sciences. Currently, he is working as the Digital Rights Programme Officer for the European Sex Workers' Rights Alliance (ESWA).
CRYPTOGRAPHY & PAYMENTS
Gabe is a Research Assistant Professor in Computer Science and Research Development Fellow at Boston University’s Hariri Institute for Computing. He earned his PhD in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University, under the supervision of his advisors Avi Rubin and Matt Green. Gabe has worked in industry, at Intel Labs, and in the policy sphere, working in the United States Senate in the personal office of Sen. Ron Wyden. He has broad research interests within cryptographic systems and is passionate about the spread of provably secure systems beyond the laboratory setting.
ANTI-HUMAN TRAFFICKING
Emily is an author, PhD scholar and policy adviser. She has spent over a decade working on social justice issues with a focus on trafficking and workplace exploitation, including as a policy advisor to the UK's first Anti-Slavery Commissioner. Her first book, The Truth about Modern Slavery, was called a 'powerful treatise' by The Guardian and argued for a rights-based approach to reducing trafficking in the sex industry. She sits on the boards of the Public Interest Research Centre and the Common Wealth think tank, and is currently completing a PhD at the University of Edinburgh alongside other engagements.
CRYPTOGRAPHY & SECURITY
Sarah is a Professor in Cryptography and Security at University College London (UCL) and a Staff Research Scientist at Google. At UCL, she is affiliated with the Information Security Group in the Computer Science department. At Google, she is a member of the Certificate Transparency / TrustFabric team. She is also an Associate Director of the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts (IC3).
USABILITY & VULNERABLE POPULATIONS
Simply Secure is a non-profit that works with organizations to improve the user-experience design and usability of privacy-preserving software. They facilitate communication and collaboration within communities that include users, developers, user-experience researchers, and designers.
Identity is a bind for sex workers and clients.
Everyone wants real identity data privacy. But everyone also wants the trust that can only come with knowing someone else’s real identity-based history of professional, non-abusive behavior.
Service providers and clients with resources and experience often develop their own ways to build trust in some degree of privacy, but it's inefficient and based on limited relevant information. And those without the resources or experience for careful vetting can find it nearly impossible to establish any degree of trust before making a booking.
At horizontl, we’re building the balance between private identity and accountable behavior.
Safe, trusted connection shouldn’t be a luxury.
Get verified & authorized (consenting, independent, no history of abuse) to be a part of horizontl’s privacy-protecting ecosystem.
Take control of your data with your own personal in-horizontl identity wallet. Only you hold the keys to unlock your essential data for participation.
Connect in user-to-user anonymity. Confirm someone else’s verified identity and contract-compliance history.
Negotiate and confirm booking contracts under community-developed universal standards and individual booking terms.
Accept deposits with conformation of booking contracts and process payment at the close of bookings with privacy-protecting payments.
Verify compliance (or flag non-compliance) with contract terms at the close of a booking.
Stay authorized & gain community standing with a history of ongoing contractual compliance.
Sex workers have always been used by other people to make lots of money. Middlemen charge exorbitant fees for the most basic (and often unreliable) services, and the wealth of a community of individuals is siphoned off and away rather than reinvested in products and services that improve working conditions for everyone.
With horizontl, we're creating a self-sustaining business (that isn't dependent on charity or handouts) with a mission and mandate to reinvest in solutions and services that benefit sex workers.
We plan to make money by charging a modest fee for identity and booking contracts services. With the introduction of privacy-protecting payments, we'll charge a small commission to handle those financial services. [A note on payments: Because of the complexity and limitations of existing regulation in conjunction with our proposed new approach to privacy-protecting payments, payment processing will be introduced in the future but won’t be part of the earliest horizontl product.]
With a business structure that locks in purpose, horizontl must develop new solutions and improve existing ones to serve our mission of "increasing workplace safety, improving financial security, and normalizing rights and protections for independent, consensual sex workers in order to reduce opportunities for exploitation and trafficking".
Once profitable, horizontl plans to create a fund for allocation by the sex worker community to external organizations and projects they support.