The phone is face up on the pub table, between a half of Guinness and a bag of scampi fries, when it lights up. Six people are sitting round it, two of them colleagues, one of them his sister-in-law. The preview reads, in cheerful bold type, "last night was SO good, same time next week? x". Nobody says anything for about a second and a half, which in pub time is roughly a geological era. Then someone laughs, and the evening carries on, and he spends the rest of it explaining that it was a joke from a mate, which nobody believes.
I have seen versions of that moment more times than I can count, and almost none of them involved hackers, blackmailers or anything you would make a television drama about. They involved lock screens, shared iPads, family photo libraries and card statements that arrive in a household where somebody else opens the post. Privacy in casual dating is rarely lost to a villain. It leaks, slowly and stupidly, through the ordinary plumbing of modern life. Fixing that plumbing is mostly free and mostly boring, which is precisely why so few people bother.
Let me say plainly that wanting discretion is not a sign of anything shady. Single people are allowed to keep their sex lives away from their manager, their mum and the five-a-side WhatsApp group. Whether you meet people on Kommons, on an app, or the old-fashioned way at the end of a long night in a pub, the principles are the same: keep your identities separate, think hard about photos, tighten up your devices, know what the law now says about intimate images, and know exactly what to do if somebody tries to use any of it against you.
The email address that leads nowhere
Start with the cheapest and most effective habit there is: a separate email address used for nothing except dating and adult sites. Not a variation of your work address, not your old university account with your full name in it, and not the Gmail you use for your council tax. A fresh account, ideally on a provider that doesn't nag you for a phone number, with a name that means nothing to anyone. If a site you signed up to years ago suffers a data breach, and plenty of dating platforms have, what leaks is an address that leads to a dead end rather than to your LinkedIn.
The reason this matters is that email addresses are the glue of online identity. Paste one into a search engine, a breach-checking service or a social network's "find friends" feature and you can sometimes reconstruct an entire life. I once watched someone discover that their supposedly anonymous profile could be found simply because they had used the same address for their dating account and their fantasy football league, and the league page listed their full name and their employer. Nobody was hacked. They just made it easy.
Phone numbers are a bigger leak still, and most people hand them over far too early. Your mobile number is attached to your WhatsApp profile picture, often your Facebook account, sometimes your email signature, and it can be fed into caller ID apps that will cheerfully display the name a dozen of your contacts saved you under. My firm view is that chat should stay on the platform where you met for as long as it reasonably can. When you do move off it, a cheap pay-as-you-go SIM in an old handset or a dual-SIM phone costs a few quid and puts a moat between your dating life and everything else. It is a faff. It is considerably less of a faff than a stranger knowing where you work.
The same thinking applies to the profile photos themselves. A picture you have used on Instagram or a work bio can be matched by a reverse image search in seconds, so use photos that exist nowhere else. First name only until you have met and you trust someone, and be wary of the small details people volunteer without thinking: the name of the gym, the street the flat is on, the team you coach on Sundays. People can triangulate a surprising amount from three or four offhand facts. If you want the basics of writing a profile that still gets replies while giving little away, the older guide on a dating profile that actually gets replies is a decent place to start.
Finally, tidy up behind you. Kommons lets you delete your account whenever you like, and you should do exactly that when you are finished with it, rather than leaving a dormant profile floating about for years. The same goes for every site you signed up to in a fit of optimism and then forgot. If you want to know how the platform itself works before you join, there is a straightforward explainer on what Kommons is and who it is for.
What a photo knows about you
Here is my blunt opinion on intimate photos, and it is one I hold after many years of watching how things go wrong. Assume that anything explicit you send could one day be seen by somebody you never intended. The overwhelming majority of the time it won't be. But once an image leaves your phone, you control nothing about where it goes next, and the only decision you genuinely own is the one you make before pressing send.
If you do decide to share, the most important rule is that your face and anything explicit should never appear in the same frame. That extends to the things that identify you as surely as a face does: a distinctive tattoo, a birthmark, a wedding ring tan line, the watch you always wear. Then look past yourself to the background, which is where people really give themselves away. A letter on the side table with your address on it, a framed photo of your kids, a recognisable view of the Tyne from your window, a work lanyard hung over a chair. I have seen all of these in pictures people thought were anonymous.
Then there is what the photo carries invisibly. Most phone cameras can embed location data in the image file, and while many apps strip that out on upload, not all do, and files sent as documents or by email often keep it. Both iPhone and Android let you remove location before sharing or turn it off for the camera altogether; the settings move around with each software update, so check yours rather than trusting what a friend told you two years ago. It takes a minute and closes a door that most people don't know is open.
The real-world leak, though, is rarely metadata. It is the family cloud. Shared iCloud photo libraries, Google Photos accounts synced to a tablet the kids use, an old laptop still logged into your account in the spare room. I would guess more private pictures have been seen by the wrong person through a shared photo stream than through every hacker put together. If you keep anything explicit, keep it out of the main camera roll and away from any account somebody else can see. Better still, don't keep it.
And timing matters. Do not send anything to someone you have not at least spoken to on a call or met in person. A large share of the scams aimed at people on dating sites begin with a request for pictures, because pictures are leverage. A real person who is genuinely interested in you will survive the wait.
The other direction deserves equal attention. Never send explicit images to somebody who hasn't asked for them. Sending an unsolicited image of genitals intending to cause alarm, distress or humiliation, or for your own sexual gratification while reckless as to whether it causes those things, is the offence of cyberflashing under section 66A of the Sexual Offences Act 2003, in force since 31 January 2024. "I thought she'd like it" is not a line I would want to try in front of a magistrate, and it is not one that works on dating sites either.
The lock screen is the leakiest thing you own
Go back to the pub table. The cheapest fix in this entire article is turning off message previews, and it is astonishing how few people do it. Set dating apps, messaging apps and anything health-related to show only the app name, or nothing at all, on the lock screen. Notifications are designed to be seen at a glance, which is exactly the problem when somebody else is glancing.
Clinic texts deserve a special mention because they arrive at the worst possible moments. NHS sexual health services are confidential, and when you register they will usually ask how you would like to be contacted and whether it is all right to leave a message. Tell them honestly. Many will text a neutral message rather than anything that spells out what the test was for, and you can ask what theirs says. The practical side of testing, from walk-in clinics to postal kits, is covered in our UK sexual health guide.
Beyond the lock screen, think about the trail of ordinary services. Ride-hailing apps keep a tidy record of every pickup and drop-off and often email a receipt to the account holder. Google Maps can keep a detailed location timeline if it is switched on. Location sharing set up years ago with a partner or parent may still be running quietly in the background. Card statements will name the hotel, the bar and sometimes the restaurant. None of this is sinister, and for a single person with nobody looking over their shoulder it barely matters, but it is the stuff that turns a private evening into a public one, so know where your own data goes.
Use a proper passcode rather than your birthday, and don't let your face or fingerprint be the only thing standing between your phone and anyone holding it near you. Private or incognito browsing hides history from other people using the same device, which is useful on a shared laptop, but it hides nothing from your broadband provider, your employer's network or the site you are visiting. And never, under any circumstances, browse dating or adult sites on a work laptop or a work Wi-Fi network. IT departments see far more than people imagine, and HR departments tend to have very little sense of humour about it.
Discretion in the flesh
Privacy is partly a matter of geography. Your local, where the barman knows your order and your neighbour is usually propping up the end of the bar, is not where you meet someone from a hookup site for the first time, if discretion matters. A busy chain bar or hotel lobby a few stops away gives you anonymity and a public setting, which is what you want for safety reasons anyway. In London that might mean a couple of stops on the Overground rather than the pub at the end of your road; in Manchester or Leeds, the city centre rather than the suburb where you live. The bustle protects you.
Hotels are the classic discreet option, and they come with their own small rituals. You will book under your own name, because the hotel needs to know who is staying and will usually want ID and a card at check-in, so pay with a card whose statement you are comfortable seeing. Check the visitor policy before you go rather than finding out at reception. The detail on booking, guests and etiquette is in hotel hookups in the UK.
Discretion should never cost you your safety, though, and this is where I part company with the more cloak-and-dagger advice you see online. Somebody should always know where you are. You don't have to tell them why. "Meeting someone at the bar of the Malmaison, I'll text you by eleven" is enough, and a friend who has been told that much is far more useful than one who has been told nothing. The fuller routine is in the UK dating safety guide, and it is worth reading once even if you think you know it all.
And privacy runs both ways. The person you met is owed every bit of the discretion you want for yourself. Don't screenshot their profile for the group chat, don't post a coy story about your night, don't keep pictures they didn't explicitly agree you could keep. Recording someone during sex without their agreement is a serious matter in its own right, and agreeing to sex is not agreeing to be filmed. The reasons are set out properly in consent and UK law for hookups.
January 2024 and the end of the old "revenge porn" law
For most of the last decade, the law on intimate images in England and Wales was built around a narrow idea. The offence created in 2015 was aimed at what newspapers called revenge porn, and it required prosecutors to prove that the person who shared the image intended to cause distress. That sounds reasonable until you think about how images actually get shared: for laughs, for bragging, for money, or simply because someone didn't think. A man who passed round pictures of a former partner to impress his mates could argue he never meant to upset her, and that argument sometimes worked.
That changed on 31 January 2024. The Online Safety Act 2023 inserted a new section 66B into the Sexual Offences Act 2003, which makes it an offence to share an intimate image of someone without their consent, or to threaten to share one. The basic offence no longer depends on proving any intention to cause distress; there are more serious versions where the intent was to cause alarm, distress or humiliation, or to obtain sexual gratification. Crucially for our times, it covers images that have been altered or manufactured as well as genuine photographs, so deepfakes are caught.
The threat alone is an offence. Read that sentence again if anyone is holding photographs over you, because it changes the balance of power considerably. The person threatening you is committing a crime the moment they make the threat, whether or not they ever follow through.
The same Act also placed legal duties on platforms to deal with illegal content, including intimate image abuse, with Ofcom as the regulator. In practice that means the big sites have stronger obligations to take material down than they used to, and the specialist services have become remarkably good at getting them to do it. The Revenge Porn Helpline, on 0345 6000 459, supports adults across the UK whose images have been shared or threatened, and has a long track record of getting content removed. Despite the name, it helps with far more than the ex-partner scenario.
The cleverest tool in this whole area is StopNCII.org. It lets you create a digital fingerprint, called a hash, of an intimate image on your own device. The hash is shared with participating platforms so they can recognise and block the image if anyone tries to upload it, and the image itself never leaves your phone. If you have any reason to worry that a particular picture might surface, you can do this pre-emptively, which is a rare case of being able to shut the stable door before the horse has even thought about bolting.
The first hour of a sextortion attempt
Sextortion follows a script so consistent you could set your watch by it. Say you have been chatting to someone very attractive, very keen and slightly too perfect for a few days. They suggest moving to another app, then a video call or an exchange of photos. Within minutes of something explicit being shared, the tone flips. A screenshot arrives showing your Facebook friends list, or your followers, or your employer's page, with a demand for money and a deadline, and the promise that everything will be sent to everyone you know if you don't pay. Some of these are organised operations working through large numbers of targets at once. A version of the same trick turns up around escort adverts too, which is covered in escort scams in the UK.
The advice from police and support services is consistent, and I would follow it to the letter. Do not pay. Stop all contact immediately; don't argue, plead, negotiate or explain. Keep the evidence, which means screenshots of the conversation, the account names and profile links, any payment details they sent you, and the times things happened. Report the account to the platform it came from. Then report it to the police on 101, or 999 if you are in immediate danger. If you have lost money, tell the police that as well, because it changes what they can do.
Why not pay, when paying looks like the fastest way to make it go away? Because it almost never does. Paying tells the blackmailer two things: that you have money and that you will part with it under pressure. Demands tend to escalate. Many people who refuse never hear from the extortionist again, because the operation simply moves on to an easier target, though I can't honestly promise that will happen, and in some cases images are shared. If that happens, the helpline and StopNCII are exactly where to go next, and the law is on your side.
Lock down your social media while it is happening. Set accounts to private, hide your friends and followers lists, and think about whether your employer is visible from your public profiles. You are trying to make yourself a less useful target in the hours when the blackmailer is deciding whether you are worth the effort.
The hardest part is the shame, and shame is the entire engine of the scam. It runs on the belief that you will be so mortified at the idea of anyone finding out that you will hand over money rather than tell a soul. So tell someone. You have been the victim of a crime. Police officers deal with sextortion constantly, and in my experience the ones you speak to are far more interested in the person blackmailing you than in what you were doing on a Tuesday night.
How much paranoia is the right amount
There is a version of privacy advice that tips over into fantasy, all burner phones and false names and meeting in car parks. I think that is mostly nonsense, and some of it is actively unhelpful. Using a fake name with someone you are about to sleep with creates its own problems the moment you get on well, and meeting in deserted places for the sake of discretion makes you less safe, not more. The aim is not to live like a spy. The aim is to make sure that if one thing goes wrong, whether that is a leaked database, a nasty match or a phone left in the back of a taxi, it doesn't take the rest of your life down with it.
The right amount of caution also depends on who you are. A single man in his thirties with a forgiving family and a job that doesn't care has much less to lose than a teacher in a small town, a married couple exploring things together, or somebody who isn't out to everyone in their life. Be honest with yourself about your own stakes and calibrate accordingly. If being found out would cost you your job or your safety, the separate number and the faceless photos stop being optional extras and become the price of admission.
There is a quiet benefit to platforms built with this in mind. On Kommons it is free to join, browse and message, so chat can happen on the site rather than on your personal number from the start, and if somebody behaves badly there is a report button on every page. Region filtering means you can look for people in your own part of the country, whether that is England, Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, or, if you would rather not bump into your neighbours, a city or two away.
So go back one last time to the pub table, the scampi fries and the glowing screen. The fix for that whole excruciating moment would have taken about thirty seconds in a settings menu. Most of the privacy that matters is like that: dull, quick and done once. Set up the separate email, keep your face out of the explicit pictures, switch off the previews, hold back your surname until you trust someone, and know who to call if it goes wrong. Then browse Kommons, the UK hookup site, with your new address, and get on with enjoying yourself. The point of discretion was never to hide. It was to choose who knows.
This is general information about UK law, not legal advice.