If you want your personal identity to remain unknown, you should follow some basic guidelines.
A List of Do Not
Be aware of your surroundings when live streaming, recording videos, or taking pictures. What is included in the picture? Some common mistakes:
- license plates
- identifiable clothing with school names or logos
- house numbers
- addresses on packaging or mail
- local or specific locations i.e some states have specific kinds of stores or restaurants
- screenshots with phone numbers or names
Accepting payment outside of your host camsite and wishlists can identify you as well. Know what you are using and what information is given to the other party. When creating a wishlist, it is smart to only use email giftcards if you want to be completely anonymous. Amazon wishlists can show ALL of your real information, especially if an item from a third party seller is purchased.
If you decide to create a PO box, be careful when checking it. If you give out the address freely, make sure no one is following or waiting for you.
If you intend to mail out prizes to users, be aware that the city and state they are shipped from is postmarked on the package. You can avoid this by using a remail service. Remail services can sometimes be pricey for larger packages, but smaller ones are no problem.
When you are speaking on cam, it can be easy to give away a little too much information. Be careful of the things you say. Identifying how far you are from a specific location is a bad idea. Talking about your daily routine or routes from your favorite places is probably not a good idea. Just use your best judgement and stay safe.
Additional Basic Guidelines
- use an email service that does not include your IP address in the header i.e Gmail
- never give away your phone number. Use a third party service such as Google voice, Kik, or Snapchat
- never open links or files from users you don't trust
- the last thing you want is a keylogger program on your computer. Keylogging is a type of malware that monitors the keys you press and detects patterns. This malware is used to obtain passwords and login information to important sites you use.
- always make sure you are signing into the right site
- sometimes people will create look alike websites to get your information
Wow, camming sounds really dangerous. Will I be ok?
It all sounds really scary but it's not. It is extremely rare to find someone who will go to the lengths of physically showing up to harm you. We are susceptible to stalkers in every day life regardless of being a webcam model. However, camming does put us as greater risk since we are sexually exposed to a large audience.
The biggest issue with staying safe is making sure that no one tries to blackmail you. Sometimes people will threaten to send videos of you to your friends of family. Sometimes people will create fake profiles of you using your real information. In a severe situation, blackmail is illegal and you should take proper action with the authorities.
Most of the time though, alerting your host site of the problem and banning the user is the easiest solution. You can report the fake profiles and have them removed.
