Reading Time: 2minutes Security and trust are topics that come up time and time again when dealing porn sites. If you're like most people, you watch the porn that's freely available most of the time.
Security and trust are topics that come up time and time again when dealing porn sites. If you’re like most people, you watch the porn that’s freely available most of the time. But then you run into a video that you really want to see in its full length.
It’s behind a paid members area on a premium paysite, and you have to enter your credit card number to get access. What do you do?
To answer that, let’s start with a little history. Paid porn sites appeared on the Internet shortly after its creation. Many were honest, but a bunch of them were greedy and started using shady tactics to make more money. They charged their customers more than expected, or made it very hard to cancel recurring memberships. There was a good reason that many people became afraid of the paid porn sites – this was a real thing, and it gave online pornography a bad rep.
After a while, credit card companies started to catch up too. They introduced new rules to protect the customers, and kicked out the bad actors. By now the rules are stricter than ever. Any online merchant that has too many complaints is risking to totally lose the ability to accept credit cards.
In the present, most paid porn sites are safe to sign up if you follow a few rules. The first one is to look at the payment page carefully. Many porn sites will offer additional products you can subscribe to. This is called cross-selling, and in the case of porn sites, it usually appears on the payment page as a checkbox with a tick, or dropdown box with a yes/no answer. Look for those, and select “no” if you don’t want those extra offers.
The other precaution is cancelling in time. Some sites require you to cancel your subscription 24 or 48 hours prior to the renewal date. Not all people know that cancelling your membership won’t disable your account, you’ll still have full access until the original renewal time. If you know that you don’t want to renew, the safest thing to do is to cancel your membership a lot earlier than the rebill date. You can keep enjoying the members area, and you don’t have to worry about the cancellation anymore.
If you want to be extra careful, there are more things you can look at. As in most online businesses, there are some big third-party payment providers that many websites use. Trust is very important to these companies, many of them have been around for 10-20 years by now. If the porn payment page is showing one of these merchant company names, you can be sure that your personal data will be in good hands, and it will be very simple to cancel your membership: CCBill, SegPay, Verotel, Epoch. In fact, Epoch has the unique ability to process Paypal payments for porn sites too, which is one of the safest ways to pay for porn when available.
In the future online credit card transactions are expected to get even safer. With 3-D Secure payment confirmations getting more widespread around the world, you won’t have to worry too much about giving out your credit card number anymore. Another thing that’s making online purchases safer already right now is the rise of the single-use virtual credit card numbers, such as the ones from Privacy.com. They are a very good option to keep your personal data and primary credit card numbers safe.
Coleen is a writer, photographer and film maker at Wasteland and Sssh.com.
Here at BDSMCafe.com, she is editor and curator of this comprehensive library of BDSM fiction, informational articles and other educational features that date back to the early days of the internet in 1996 when the site was first launched.
