Surprisingly few people are comfortable admitting they watch porn, so it's understandable that you might want to hide your collection from prying eyes. Here are a few ways to go about it.
Note: Just to be clear, we're talking about your digital porn collection here. If you have a real-world collection you want to hide, you're on your own. You might find some of these hiding places useful, or you may be able to stash some of it in the same place you stash your weed. And just to be even clearer, we're also talking about legal porn. If you're keeping stuff that, for whatever reason, is against the law, you're even more on your own.
Ask Yourself Who You're Hiding it From
The first step in hiding anything is to stop and think about who you're hiding it from, and maybe whether you need to hide it in the first place. If you live alone or you're the only one who uses your computer, you may not really need a hiding place. You could just stick your files in your regular Documents folder and be done with it. But here are a few things to think about:
If your computer is stolen or, worse, confiscated, whoever took it is going to know about your collection. And obviously, this situation gets worse if any of those pictures and videos are homemade.
If you ever take your computer in for repairs, I guarantee your tech support person will find your porn. You may not care, and they'll probably never mention it to you, but it's something to think about.
If you ever let a friend or house guest use your computer, you may not remember until it's too late that there are things you'd rather them not see.
If you're hiding porn from your partner, ask yourself if you really need to. It's possible they'll be just as into it as you are or, at the very least, understand your fondness for it and not care nearly so much as you think they might.
If you're still convinced you need to hide your collection, then there are several ways to go about it.
Make Your Porn Difficult to Find
The easiest (and least secure) way of hiding porn is just by making it difficult to find. I've seen all kinds of tricks used and here are some in increasing order of effectiveness. The downside is that each additional layer of obfuscation you add makes it harder for you to find what you're looking for in your collection:
Bury the folder deep in your file system. Nobody really goes looking into the system folders unless they have a reason. This is even better if your operating system lets you hide system folders.
Give your folders a name nobody will think twice about. If you're burying it in system folders, give it a name like Schema-32 or TKLEMBKUP—anything that fits in with the other folders in that location but isn't so similar that you forget what you're looking for.
Rename your files. Sure, this makes it harder for you to know which file is which, but it also removes obviously-porn titles from view. We've shown you several ways in the past for quickly renaming batches of files.
Change file extensions. None of the things on this list so far will prevent people from finding your collection with a simple search for picture or video files. Changing file extensions can help with that. Of course, you won't be able to open the file yourself until you change the extension back to what it was. The best way to handle this is to separate files into different folders based on their extensions. You can rename a whole batch of ,jpg files to .ert (or whatever) and then just as quickly change them all back. You'll need to remember what they were before, of course, but you could bury that information into the name of the folder or the top file in the folder, or even just keep a private note somewhere else—like your password manager.
The problem with just making your collection difficult to find is that while you may keep the casual user from stumbling on it, you're not going to deter somebody who's actually looking for it. For that, you need to turn to something a bit stronger.
Encrypt Your Collection
If you're going to keep a collection of porn around, the best way to make sure nobody gets into it is to encrypt your collection. We've rounded up your five favorite encryption tools, but our favorite (and yours) is TrueCrypt. It's robust, cross-platform, and relatively easy to use.
In a nutshell, you're going to create a locked file that contains all folder and files that make up your collection. That locked file is extremely hard to break into and you can only open it with a password you create. The basic process goes like this:
Create your encrypted container. Choose a strong password. If you're using TrueCrypt, you'll have to give the file a size when you create it, so choose the maximum size you think your collection will need.
Mount your container as a drive.
Move your collection into the container. Or copy it, then delete the originals.
And you're done. Mount the container again whenever you want to access your stuff and just make sure to dismount the container when you're finished. Otherwise, it's open for anyone to browse. This method is nice because you don't have to obfuscate any file names or change any extensions—it's incredibly easy for you to access, and incredibly hard for others to access.
Quit Storing and Start Streaming
Really, with all the porn available online these days for free, I'm not sure why anybody actually bothers with storing porn on their computers (Pro Tip: Bing's image and video search is better than Google's for porn. You're welcome.). But, maybe you like to keep your favorites around or you have a personal collection you've scanned or ripped. Who are we to judge?
Fire up incognito mode, or private browsing, or whatever your browser calls it, and do your business online. When you're in incognito mode, your browser won't store your history or any cookies from sites you visit and it doesn't cache any content to your local drive.
The trick to browsing porn online is really just learning how to avoid sites that try to inflict malware on your poor computer. First and foremost, make sure you've got a good antivirus program installed, even if you browse safely and never bother with porn at all.
We're not really prepared to get into what porn sites are and aren't safe (at least not yet), but you should check out this Porn Privacy and Safety Guide by Violet Blue over at TinyNibbles for good information on what to watch out for.
Lead illustration by Tina Mailhot-Roberge. Photos by [Duncan] and DVIDSHUB.
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