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Decriminalization or Privatization? Cambridge Has One Week. Use It.
Before Massachusetts decides who may legally sell sex, it must decide who may legally own the data that sex generates.
“When money speaks the truth is silent”
Sponsors of the policy order: Councillor Patty Nolan, Councillor Burhan Azeem Al-Zubi, and Councillor Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler
City councils frequently use policy orders instead of drafting full laws for several strategic and practical reasons:
Speed and Efficiency: Passing a law is a slow, multi-week process involving multiple public readings, legal reviews, and mandatory publication periods. A policy order can often be introduced and voted on in a single meeting.
A Request for Homework: Councils often don't have the technical expertise to write a complex law from scratch. They will pass a policy order to instruct the City Manager or City Solicitor to research the issue, study the feasibility, and draft the actual legal language for them.
Setting Priorities: It allows the council to officially tell the city's administration what projects or issues they want prioritized without micromanaging the exact legal details.
Making a Statement: Sometimes, a council wants to take a stance on a state or national issue (such as supporting a state bill). Since they cannot pass a law altering state rules, they use a policy order to formally express their collective opinion.
A policy order is not a law, and it does not have the legally binding power of an ordinance or statute. Instead, it is a formal administrative tool used by a city council to manage city business and direct the city's executive branch (such as the City Manager or city departments).
A week is not much time
Cambridge's policy orders on decriminalizing sex work and on the Huron Street bike lanes were both charter righted, delaying a vote by a week. That sounds like a procedure, and it is. But the pause gives residents a chance to ask a question the debate has mostly skipped.
The order calls on the state legislature to support full decriminalization of sex work, says arrests of sex workers should stay among the city's lowest law enforcement priorities, and asks the Middlesex DA's office to stop prosecuting consensual adult sex work and the people who provide support services to sex workers. It lands at a charged moment. The city's brothel case has been in the news for years, and Councilor Paul Toner was charged with sexual conduct for a fee after police reports showed he had engaged with the brothel network at least 13 times in 2023.
Supporters call the order a measure for worker safety. I want to ask what else it opens the door to. The question is not only whether sex work should be a crime. It is who profits once it isn't.
Consent does not exist outside the market
Decriminalization advocates make a serious case, and I'll answer it below. But consent is never judged in isolation. It is judged against the conditions people choose under: their finances, their alternatives, their bargaining power, and who else is in the room.
A legal market is not a neutral space. Legal markets are built by capital, and capital builds platforms. Once an industry is legal, the next move is to organize it: aggregate supply, match it to demand, take a cut. When the marketplace around human behavior is bought and sold like cans of tuna, "free choice" is a thin phrase. My fear is that the real shift is not from criminal to free but from criminal to privatized.
Data is property
Most of us would not accept a stranger walking into our home and taking it. Yet we are asked to accept something similar with personal data, which is private property with real economic value. Over a lifetime, one person's data can be worth as much as a house.
A platform-driven sex market would try to claim ownership of three kinds of data:
Mating and courtship behavior: who is sought, who is chosen, at what price, how often.
Worker business data: each sex worker's clients, schedules, earnings, and pricing, held by a platform that would then know more about her small business than she does.
Client behavioral data: intimate preferences and patterns, much of it collected outside the client's awareness.
Data brokers already sell location and health data on the open market, so this is not far-fetched. The incentive is to sort, score, and analyze all of it to maximize profit. In practice that means pricing workers against each other, steering clients, and extracting fees from both sides. This is how a toxic middleman works.
Sequence matters here. Privacy rules are far easier to write before an industry exists than after it has lobbyists. No one in the current debate is demanding binding data protections before decriminalization. I predict they will be demanded afterward, and chiefly to conceal who profits.
"Uber for sex" is not a joke
We have seen this model before. Tech platforms entered the taxi business, subsidized low fares, and drove down what the work paid. In New York, medallion values that once stood in the seven figures collapsed, and drivers who had mortgaged their lives to own them were ruined. In 2018 a driver took his own life outside City Hall because he could no longer make a living.
The pattern is to recruit, undercut, consolidate, then set the terms. A platform that set prices and controlled access to clients in the sex trade would hold power over workers who, by the nature of the work, have less recourse than almost any other workforce. They cannot easily go public, organize openly, or sue. The result would also erode the collective bargaining power of ordinary Massachusetts residents, who would be shut out of deciding how this market works.
Who speaks for sex workers?
This is the hardest part to say, and I want to say it fairly. Many sex workers and sex worker-led groups support decriminalization out of lived experience, and their voices matter. At Cambridge hearings, workers have described the agency and flexibility the work gives them and objected to being assumed to be victims.
My point is narrower. Advocacy funded, staffed, or directed by those who stand to profit is not the same as advocacy by those who bear the risk. When investors finance brothel owners and tech entrepreneurs, and those people then present themselves as sex workers and lead advocacy organizations, the public cannot tell whose interests are being voiced. The remedy is simple: disclose who funds the groups and platforms involved, and center workers who have no financial stake in the platform.
What happens inside the brothel
There is a difference between an independent adult selling her own services and a worker inside someone else's operation. The bills before Beacon Hill reflect this: one would fully decriminalize independent adult sex workers and modernize Massachusetts antitrafficking laws. That is narrower than the platform scenario I fear, which is exactly why the statutory language matters.
Coverage of the Cambridge case has often leaned toward the owners' side and left out troubling details. It was reported that women had unprotected sex with as many as sixteen men in a single day, and that they had no way to negotiate privately with clients. Workers who cannot negotiate are not exercising choice, and neither are workers whose schedules and prices are set by an operator or an algorithm.
Voices in the debate disagree about how far coercion extends. One advocate said she had seen no indication in the evidence of force, fraud, or coercion. Another, from the Safe Exit Initiative, insisted prostitution is not a victimless crime and that recovering from the sex trade's abuse takes years. Both claims deserve a hearing before any vote.
I also worry about where the logic leads: segregated work, sorted by race and price, and labor outsourced to the most vulnerable. That is not a prediction of what any one proponent wants. It is what unregulated markets in intimate labor have tended to produce, and the people of the Boston area should ask whether it is what they want.
The federal question
Timing deserves scrutiny. Councilors will vote on this order while one of their own is a defendant in a case at the center of the debate. I make no accusation. But a public official under prosecution, and colleagues who know it, cannot be assumed to deliberate freely. Residents are entitled to know who is investigating, on what authority, and whether any outside pressure, real or perceived, is bearing on how councilors vote. A vote taken under a cloud of intimidation is not a free vote.
Power and money
Those who hold the most money tend to write the rules, and the companies and billionaires with the biggest platforms enjoy the loudest speech. Would you hand Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, or Jeff Bezos the keys to your sex life? Few would. Yet that is the direction of travel when investors choose and elevate the spokespeople and the public never gets a vote.
What Cambridge and Massachusetts should do
Privacy before reform. Pass binding protections first: no sale of sex-market data, strict minimization and retention limits, bans on client or worker databases held by third parties, and warrants required for law enforcement access.
Put workers first in the statute. Write the law around independent workers' control of their own work, and limit third-party commercial control, including platform fees and pricing power.
Real worker voice. Elevate current and former sex workers who have no financial stake in the platforms.
Transparency. Require disclosure of who funds the advocacy groups, brothel operators, and technology companies in this debate.
Independent scrutiny. Insist on clear public answers about the Toner investigation and any outside role in it.
Local decision-making. Boston and Massachusetts can decide this for themselves, free of pressure from Washington or Silicon Valley.
We call ourselves Boston Strong, and this is where it has to mean something. Let's make sure no one, whether government or billionaire, controls our bodies and minds before we have decided what we want. Let's protect women, their clients, and our young people. This affects all of us.