One of the biggest problems facing those in the fetish world is preserving their anonymity in the face of ever-increasing media coverage. Cameras are everywhere these days with even the lowliest of mobile phones having something halfway decent built-in and the internet certainly doesn’t put an impenetrable wall around your identity. So what can you do to protect yourself?

Well, first of all, be prepared for people to find out about you and your fetish. This can happen in the strangest ways - for instance one of our members was ‘found out’ when a family member typed the mobile number of our member into google and it showed contact details for a munch. Another had a fetish contact link to the wrong Myspace profile and all their friends suddenly saw a very... interesting extended network. A third was found out through their browser history and... well, you get the idea. There are however a few basic steps you can follow to minimise the risk of this happening and also limit the damage if it does.

Firstly, never put your real name to anything on a public forum. Even a first name can be enough to identify someone when you put it together with information they supply in their posts or profile. You also need to think about your e-mail address as many people have their name as part of that address. Consider carefully before revealing personal information and never, ever leave something that can be used to contact you directly, e.g. a phone number, on a public forum.

Next, always make sure you keep a tight control over the history in your web browser and on your computer. This is probably the number one way that people do get ‘found out’ and it’s fairly simple to manage. If your computer is shared with others then make sure you have your own profile for a start. Investigate one of the many options for removing your browser history automatically when you close the browser. Make sure that this includes the address bar history as the most recent web browsers actually search your past history to return sites that match what’s being typed in. So, for example, someone typing in www.ticketmaster.co.uk may see www.tickle-brits.co.uk in the address bar once they type the ‘t’ all the way through ‘tick’. Oh, and that search can run on web address, web page title or web page description as well so pages can crop up in all sorts of odd places.

Be very careful when viewing or downloading clips, especially when streaming them to your machine. Your computer will be making a local copy of the file for playback purposes and these don’t always get deleted. A great example of this is Mac OS X which has a tendency to use the desktop to store temp files such as video files that you’re running off the internet in Quicktime Player. The only problem is it doesn’t delete them afterwards. Great if you want to re-watch, not so great when you hand the laptop over to your mum / dad / brother / sister / son / daughter / child protection officer.

It should go without saying that you should pay extra care to any, well, porn that you have on your computer. Put it in a special, password-protected folder somewhere. Better yet, put it on an external hard-drive. They’re not expensive these days and can save you some serious embarrassment if you ever need to have a professional look at your system. It also means you can pull the drive and put it somewhere secure when you’re not actively using it.

When it comes to real world events never do anything in terms of pictures, video or audio that you would mind being made public, especially if the source material is not in your hands. Most fetish events ban the use of cameras for this very reason and it’s one of the main rules in the fetish scene - thy shall respect the privacy of others! Even if you just want to take photographs of yourself and your partner in a play party or other public event either resist the urge or check with the event organiser first. Most will refuse the request for fear of someone being accidentally caught in the background of the shot. It goes without saying that video cameras are even worse in this regard as voices can be very recognisable even if the person isn’t in the shot.

If you do take any wild and kinky pictures or video of yourself in a private session then treat the media like gold dust. Make an absolute minimum of copies and keep them in a safe and secure location. Password-protect the files and use a suitably evil password, something with lots of non-alphanumeric symbols would be favourite or just get a cat to walk over the keyboard while you hold down the shift key. Do not lend them out or send a digital copy to anyone because, as soon as it’s left your possession, you’ve effectively lost control over it. If your play partner wants a copy this should be discussed first and you should be happy with the measures they’ll take to keep that video private and secure.

Finally, and this is always very hard to say, if you’re heading into a profession where either being identified in fetish-related material or simply linked to a fetish website could potentially cause you problems think very carefully before committing yourself. Sod’s law says that this sort of thing WILL come up at the worst possible time and you may want to consider that the best way of minimising the risk is to not leave a trail in the first place. And yes, we don’t like that any more than you do but we have to try and offer the best advice we can and sometimes practical considerations have to win out.

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