I recently read an article published on YNOT titled “Shielding Your Real World Identity.” It was a very good article on how to shield your real identity when operating an adult business. The techniques mentioned in the article spoke mainly of shielding your identity in the offline world. There is another world out there that the offline world interacts with, and that is the online world.With the advent of technology, much information is freely available and one can easily discover offline information about an online business (or even personal data). This article will speak of different techniques you can use, in addition to the offline techniques, to help shield your identity.

Any online business will have two parts, a domain and a host. When you register your domain at what is known as a registrar (such as GoDaddy or Network Solutions), your information is publicly available. People can use a tool/program called a WHOIS query. You can do one at GoDaddy or download a program such as SamSpade. By doing so, it will list the name, address, phone/fax number, and email address you used when you registered that domain name. Therefore, your offline information is available.

Now, what can you do to protect that? Most registrars have a feature called WHOIS privacy guard, or something similar (sometimes there is a small yearly fee for this service). What this does is replace your personal information with the name, address, phone/fax number, and email address of your registrar. The only way a person or business can legally obtain your personal information is (usually) submiting a request for the information to your registrar along with the reason why they want the information. Registrars value your privacy and will usually not just release the protected information of an individual or business just because someone wants it.

The exact procedure for requesting protected information varies from registrar to registrar. I do caution the use of this, though. If your site uses nothing more than affiliates, then I personally feel it is OK to use this service. However, if people are actually purchasing a product or service from you, then using this service may look suspicious to your customers. Some may get the feeling or impression that you are trying to hide your company’s information so that it would be harder for them to get a hold of you if you ripped them off.

Next is hosting. When you send out an email, your IP address is logged. For those familiar with what an IP address is, some might think that the IP address of their website is sent out. Well, that is true. The IP address of your website is sent out in the headers of the email, however, your personal IP address (the one you get from your ISP/Internet Service Provider) is also sent out. How can that give out any information to your offline location? Usually your IP address can be traced to the city of your ISP. In turn, this can give out your geographical location (i.e. city, state, and country).

There are some ISPs that do not trace to a particular city such as AOL. In order to protect against this, there are services such as anonymizer.com that charge a monthly or yearly fee to have your email or surfing routed through their servers. When using a service such as anonymizer.com, when you send out an email, instead of your personal IP address being sent in the email, it will be that of one of the anonymizer.com servers.

Another matter to think about is payment. There are two main categories involving payment: either you will receive payment online (PayPal, direct ACH deposit, or other method) or offline (check or money order).

It seems that more adult companies that pay out to their affiliates are using nonadult business names. This is a plus because people can sign up to be an affiliate and not have to worry about receiving a bank deposit or a check from an adult-named company. If the company does have an adult-related business name on their checks or deposits, see if they have a PayPal deposit option or something similar. You could have your funds deposited in to your PayPal account and then electronically transfer the funds from your PayPal account to your bank account. This way, your bank account will only show a deposit from PayPal with no reference to the adult-related company.

These methods are not foolproof, however, they do add an extra level of anomnity for those that are concerned about anyone (especially locals) knowing that they operate an adult business.