In 2003, Playboy Magazine in the Netherlands screwed up.

It accidentally published the real name of one of its young models, who had been working as Ancilla Tilia. Her mother, who shared her real surname, started getting some uncomfortable calls. "At the time, I was fairly unknown, and I just let it slide," Tilia tells Wired.co.uk (it's now the name which appears on her passport -- she had it legally changed). "What else could I do, anyway?"

But fast forward a few years, and Tilia's career had skyrocketed. She was a public figure, one of Europe's best-known fetish and glamour models who had shot for FHM and


Maxim magazines. Someone discovered the old

Playboy shoots, and posted her real name online. People in the street began to call her out using it. She got stalkers. The Dutch Chamber of Commerce, she says, published her home address on

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Google Maps. Tilia was in the middle of a particularly nasty internet storm -- one she'd done nothing to create. (Playboy NL had not responded to requests for comment at the time of writing).

For a long time, she had been active in promoting internet privacy. She regularly tweeted about it to her 17,000 followers (her profile reads: "Cuz boobs are fun but rights are important") and had long cultivated connections with organisations who fought for it. A few months ago, she decided to do something drastic. She dropped nearly all of her modelling assignments and went to work a few days a week as an unpaid intern at Bits Of Freedom (BOF), a Dutch non-profit dedicated to online privacy. It's about as dramatic a career change as you can get -- and it's an important moment in the battle for privacy online. "I feel like I'm taking a stand as a person, not so much as a model," she says. "I think so far, it's going pretty well. I was a little nervous about it, but at the same time I felt it was very necessary both for BOF to get all the support that they needed, as well as for me personally, because I was always very interested in different privacy topics. I'm not as much concerned about the things that people consciously put online... but more the overall data, and massive amount of data that is -- often without your knowledge or consent collected about you. This is data that you haven't provided yourself, but that people you know have unconsciously provided about you."

Tilia has joined the cause at a good time. BOF is gearing up for the imminent European Commission vote on privacy laws. These were last set out in 1995, so the vote has become a very big deal indeed -- both for tech companies looking to lessen regulations as well as organisations like BOF that want to safeguard data online.


The porn industry has become one of the big battlegrounds, an area where privacy and data protection are absolutely crucial. Last year, a landmark obscenity trial in Britain, which revolved around DVDs picturing the sexual practice of fisting, threw up new questions about how much protection pornography's audience can expect from the law.

Tilia is one of the few models to take a stand. It would be wrong to suggest that she joined BOF because she just wanted to protect her rights as a model -- her concern goes deeper than that. But what her public persona arguably does do is bring glamour to internet privacy, making an often ponderous topic just a little bit more attractive. And she brings an audience: all of sudden, BOF's cause is being relayed to thousands of eager fans.

Janneke Slöetjes, BOF's in-house legal advisor, tells Wired.co.uk, "One the things that makes it interesting that Ancilla wants to work with us is that she has a very particular story that people can relate to. As far as I have come to know her, she does what is necessary, and I think that's a very good thing. She's really concerned about this issue and that's a great help. "What she recognises very clearly is that, not only for models but for every citizen, it is really important to have control about what you share and don't share."