Thanks to the Internet, we now have a host of new ways to offend, enrage, misinterpret, creep out, or alienate people. In Tangled Web, we field your questions about how to be a decent human online. Have a question? Ask jess@dailydot.com.
I recently (really belatedly) discovered a brilliant use of my smartphone: immediately accessible porn (including in the middle of the night when my laptop is in another room and I don’t want to get up), using Google image searches that include the search time “gif,” in the phone’s browser. The biggest problem I have run into is that clearing the history/cache on the phone browser is a pain in the neck; doing it directly from the search window takes many steps and doesn’t seem to work completely, and from the phone settings control it wipes everything all at once, including all my passwords, etc. I expect this applies to Androids and iPhones alike! Do you have any clever suggestions where I could keep using this super easy and relatively safe way to access porn, that is not so easily potentially embarrassing? (Beyond never letting anyone else see my phone screen if I want to search for something in my browser?)
Tumblr! Next question.
Seriously, if you didn’t know, now you do: Tumblr is not just a containment area for teenage Tom Hiddleston fans, it’s also an excellent repository for porn. (Some of the porn undoubtedly features drawings of Tom Hiddleston, but we’ll pass lightly over that.) There are Tumblrs to suit essentially every taste, and it’s easier—and less damning in your search history—than doing the research yourself.
Spend some time with a non-mobile browser that has an incognito mode, and seek out a few Tumblrs that reliably have the kind of content you want. You can start by searching on keywords, but it’s also useful to click through to see where a Tumblr you like gets its images, because you might like the source even more. Then, instead of cluttering your phone’s search history, you can just hit up your favorite Tumblrs, where porn will be curated for you.
You’ll have that URL in the browser history, of course, which might be awkward if, like, someone starts to type in in C-U for Cute Overload and the browser autofills “cumsocks.tumblr.com” (I made that up, I hope. Not checking). But your search will be free and clear.
Another possibility is downloading a separate browser app for pervy searches, leaving your main browser utterly virginal. This feels a little work-intensive, I guess, but honestly, if downloading a free browser app is the furthest you put yourself out for the sake of porn, you’re still ahead of most of the population. If you have an Android phone, there’s even an incognito browser app called InBrowser, though I can’t speak for how good it is. It seems to nuke all your information, including passwords, when you close it, but if it’s purely your porn browser this won’t matter.
If you need information about how to keep your phone from getting sticky, though, you’re on your own.
Jess Zimmerman has been making social blunders on the Internet since 1994. Most of her current interpersonal drama takes place on Twitter (@j_zimms).
Photo by Jon Fingas/Flickr
