Maintaining Anonymity As A Content Creator: Essential Privacy Tips

Maintaining anonymity as a content creator is absolutely crucial whether you are faceless or face forward. We do not need anyone being able to locate where we are, finding out who we are, and how to get to us. This is not a matter of paranoia, but rather a matter of safety. Stalkers, predators, and those who want to hurt you are out there and we need to be sure to not leave bread crumbs for them to follow. I listed out a few steps that can absolutely help in keeping yourself safe while still having a strong online presence.

Best Practices for Maintaining Anonymity Online

Have strong passwords

• All of your passwords for different sites should be different. Never re-use the same password twice.
• Make them hard to guess. Add in capitalization, symbols and numbers.
• Nothing in your passwords should be related to your personal information (such as your name, birth date, etc).
• Consider 2FA (two factor authentication) for more protection.
• Use a password manager app/software to keep track of all the different passwords. Or, even more secure, keep them physically written down.
• Change your passwords relatively often.

Have a completely anonymous work only email tied to your accounts

• This email account should only include your stage name and business information.
• Only use it for your content business.

Safeguard your location information

• Never share your location information with anyone.
• At most if needed to help with scheduling share only your country and time zone.

Use a VPN

VPNs are not infallible, but every single layer of protection we can put on ourselves is worth doing. I suggest Express VPN or Proton VPN. I have positive experiences with both.

Scrub all content of metadata

What is metadata? This source states that metadata “includes these details about the image files, like what an image file is, when it was taken, why it was taken, who took that picture, and where it was taken.” All images and videos have this metadata attached and that data can be pulled by anyone after the image is posted anywhere.

There are steps you can take to prevent anyone from gathering this information.

• Prevent your camera from accessing your location information by turning it off in your device permission settings.
• Use an app/software to wipe or manipulate the meta data
  • IOS, Windows, Linux
  • For Android

Separate personal and promotional media

If you post a piece of media on a promotional account, or any account tied to your content business, do not also post it to a personal account. It is extremely easy to reverse search an image and find everywhere it has been posted and by who.

Pay careful attention when editing

• Check the background in every frame to make sure there are no family images, local business information, local maps or signs, any of your school memorabilia, etc

Take advantage of GEO-blocking

• Onlyfans: in settings- privacy and safety you can block either a country or a specific IP address from seeing your account and content
• Fansly: in settings- privacy and safety you can block a country, state, even down to a city from blocking your account and content
• Note on this: VPNs can bypass any GEO-blocking

Hide your self identity when creating content

• Use heavy makeup, skin toned fashion tape/stickers, or garments to hide birth marks, identifiable scars, and tattoos
• Use software for blurring out those identifiable marks and your face. Consider Blur Video, Premier Pro, InShot, even CapCut has an option for it
• Use camera angles, lighting manipulation, or change the cameras focal blur to hide your face without using further software
• Use props or masks in your content to hide your face
• If you need the extra layer, angle your camera so your face is completely out of frame.

What other safeguards do you put in place to protect yourself online?