Swinging is a private decision. It should be your choice who knows that you enjoy the swinging lifestyle. Thankfully, the community appreciates privacy. We all work very hard to respect each other’s privacy. Here are some security tips to help keep your swinging life and vanilla life separate.
Your name
You will probably encounter people in the lifestyle who use fake swinger names. How will you know this? Because given enough time, they will slip up and use their real names. For most people, it is too hard to use totally different names all the time. To protect your name without going totally crazy, don’t give out your real last name and spell your first name differently. You can even have your credit card company print up a spare credit card with this different spelling of your first name and a fake last name. Fill out an online request for an authorized user on your main credit card. If you want to be extra safe, leave the credit cards at home and bring a Visa gift card and cash.
Your address
Most swinger websites ask for your city and state when building your online swinger profile. This is to help you connect with nearby swingers. Some towns are very small, which might make it too easy for people to trace your swinger profile back to your real-world life. You can pick a nearby town to help safeguard your privacy.
Your phone/email
If you like your privacy, don’t use your vanilla contact info. Set up a new phone number and email address just for swinging. There are plenty of free and paid options. You can buy a prepaid cell phone or get a virtual phone number. Our preferred email is Protonmail which is free, encrypted & not part of the Google or Facebook network. You can have your swinger phone calls and emails forwarded to your vanilla accounts, so you don’t need to monitor extra stuff. Once you have this setup, make sure to test it out with your partner, so you know you have it set up correctly to conceal your identity.
Your pictures
Keep your vanilla photos separate from your lifestyle photos. These pics should never overlap. Your lifestyle photos should not have anything identifying in the background. For extra safety, don’t show your face in your naked pictures. Take pictures in a hotel room and not in your living room, which someone might identify. The next time you attend a swinger costume party, you could take some pictures in your non-identifying sexy outfit. You can blur out identifying tattoos, jewelry, or other markings using a photo editor. For extra deniability, in case your swinger pictures ever leak out, you can put on a temporary tattoo or blur a body part where there is no tattoo. Once you take your lifestyle pictures, make sure to delete the secret EXIF data, which includes stuff like GPS coordinates and other potentially identifying data. You can google “EXIF data removers” for free online tools to handle it.
When you want to share pictures, you can upload them to the swinger websites and place them in password-protected galleries. No website is 100% safe; even billion-dollar websites get hacked. A safer option would be only to upload body pics with no faces. When someone wants to see your face pics, ask them to share their pics first. This way, you can avoid people you know in real life (which has happened). Then, send them G-rated face pics using private text messages or send them to a link to a G-rated gallery on a separate photo hosting site. Remember to delete the images afterward to cover your trail. Reverse image lookup is a real thing and becoming more powerful each year.
Don’t store swinging pictures on your phone. Many people like to swipe through other people’s photo galleries on their phones. You don’t want a vanilla friend who is over eager with photo swiping to accidentally browse into the swinging gallery on your phone or, god forbid, lose your phone if it has naked pictures of you.
Internet Usage
Always use incognito/private mode on your internet browser. This way, none of your websites, screen names, or passwords will be saved in your history. You never know when someone might ask to borrow your smartphone or laptop to look something up. It’s best to keep it clean, so there is nothing for your kids, in-laws, or friends to accidentally find. You should also Google “how to enable auto-closing of incognito windows.” This little trick will close your browser and get rid of the evidence after a set period of inactivity so you can be safe even if you forget to logout.
To add an extra layer of privacy, you can pay for a VPN. This can obfuscate your internet activity from your internet provider. Many internet providers will sell your internet history to others. VPNs can also hide your IP address from the websites you visit. So if you visit a swinger club website or post to an online forum, they won’t see your IP address which might help them track back to you. Not all VPNs have good privacy. To find a good VPN, check out the forums talking about movie piracy and how they hide their tracks with VPNs.
To be safe, assume every website you use is not protecting you, and eventually, a hacker will breach it. If you don’t post real-life information online, it can’t be exposed when a website is hacked.
Google is crazy good at tracking users across their many different products. They like to log every search term you enter, every map lookup, and so much more. Make sure you maximize your privacy settings and minimize using Google products for the lifestyle to improve your privacy.
For starters, never share your Facebook login if you want to protect your privacy best. If a swinger app asks for your Facebook login, and you want maximum discretion, don’t walk away – run! Some really good swinger apps require a Facebook login, but you risk a certain level of your privacy. If you want to be as discreet as possible, make sure you max out your privacy levels on your Facebook profile. Facebook has some super-advanced facial recognition methods for auto-tagging pictures and other creepy stuff that might put your identity at risk. Besides auto-tagging face pictures, Facebook can also connect you with a common phone number or email address. Protect yourself and max out those privacy settings! For the best privacy protection, never cross the streams of your swinging lifestyle with your vanilla Facebook life.
Pay to Play
Avoid free sites and free profiles. There are too many picture collectors, troublemakers, time-wasters, and drama queens. Thankfully, most of them are too cheap to pay. Sticking with paid profiles greatly reduces your risk level and reduces your frustration. Even if you find a good match using a free tool, these tend to be less reliable and more likely to turn into ghosts when it comes time to play in person. Free websites tend to have bad web security because proper security costs big money, which means they are usually easy targets for hackers. Other free services are selling your information. Remember, if you aren’t paying for something, you are not the customer – you are the product being sold.
Helpful Hesitation
We all want to make a sexy connection. Sometimes, when we’ve had a little too much alcohol, and the flirting gets a little too hot, mistakes are made. Remember that you can always share more later, so be hesitant when sharing specific personal details. Is there a real “need to know”? If not, change the conversation and think about it later when you aren’t horny, drunk, or both.
Happy Swinging!