Scan the headlines and you’ll see a frightening wave of stories about cyberstalking. There even are draft laws hitting the books in some states (Illinois already has a law).
Especially unsettling is that cyberstalking lacks any borders. Example: When an Australian teen stalked a 14-year-old Wisconsin girl he met on Facebook, his jig was up only after he sent her a Domino’s pizza and the chain gave up his IP address to law enforcement officials.
And yet many security experts contend that it is usually very easy to shake off a cyberstalker. But the method that works best is paradoxical in the extreme.
First, a definition: What is cyberstalking? Bryan Tan of Keystone Law Corp. in Singapore defined it this way to ZDNet: "Generally, stalking behavior must be persistent, intentional and prolonged."
Cyberstalking also can involve perceived threats, harassment, and worse.
Usually, too, it includes not just direct communications (email, SMS) but also indirect -- attack blogs about the victim, third-party Tweets (so and so is an XYZ), brutal third-party Facebook posts, and so on.
There is a lot of blurring of cyberstalking with cyberbullying and cyberharassment; the distinctions among them are not that clear.
What is clear is that cyberstalking can add up to a lot of pain for the victims. Michael Roberts, a forensics investigator specializing in victims of Internet abuse, says that he has had one client who committed suicide because he could not deal with the attacks.
Who are the cyberstalkers? Brooklyn Law School professor Lisa Smith offers this taxonomy:
Stalking is generally an issue with three categories of defendants. First and most commonly the parties are known to each other; teenage girls in a dispute at school, ex-intimate partners, employees with a “beef” at work, etc. The second category involves those parties who are actual strangers or hardly known to each other and generally involves a mentally ill defendant with an obsession involving the victim – this is particularly dangerous. The last category is a hybrid – parties who get to know each other online, have never actually met, and the stalker insists on pursuing this online relationship.
That much is known. What is not known is the end game: "You never know where stalking will end," says Frank Ahearn, a onetime expert in what might be called "Internet black arts" (such as how to vanish) that can empower victims to dodge their bullies. Most cases seem to end with Internet abuse only -- but at least some morph into in-person encounters, and those, suggests Ahearn, are the really scary ones.
Back to dodging cyberstalkers: One strategy is to have little or no online life. No Facebook profile, no LinkedIn, no Twitter, and an email address that has very little distribution. A stalker can’t stalk when he cannot see the target, say the experts.
But this does not always work. "Disappearing online can help, but if the stalker is determined to make contact the Internet provides numerous opportunities to find the victim," says Smith.
Which leads to another, better strategy -- perhaps ideal for the techno savvy -- which is to do the opposite and hide in plain sight, thoroughly confusing both search engines and stalkers.
Say the goal is to make Frank M. Ahearn of Venice Beach, Calif., vanish from the eyes of cyberstalkers. Ahearn says he would start by creating Websites, blogs, and email addresses associated with Frank M. Ahearn of Marina del Rey, of Santa Monica, of West Los Angeles, of Mar Vista, Calif. Little bits of truth would be filtered in with falsehoods.
Put up a dozen sites -- and then a dozen more. Link one to another, pushing all higher in rankings.
“Create as many alter egos as you need to confuse Google,” agrees Roberts.
And suddenly the attacking blogs and posts start to disappear in a thick fog of falsehood and misidentification.
There’s the irony. The best way to hide from stalkers just may be to be too visible. When you are seen everywhere, they can no longer find the real you.
— Robert McGarvey has been online and writing about the Internet for nearly 25 years.
Having too much information posted about yourself on-line is the fuel for cyberstalkers. If you don't have the information on line they can't stalk you. Not saying that you can't be online, but be careful about what you post on there. I wouldn't have my facebook account open for everyone to see it or start tweeting about what I have for breakfast every morning.
Regarding some of the people search sites, I have a funny story about it. A few friends of mine thought it would be funny (and it was) to have my face photoshopped on a UFC fighters body. It was all good until I found out that these sites were using that as my picture. It turns out that he posted it to his flickr page and these sites somehow pulled it from that.
So if you look me up on the internet all these sites have a picture of me as huge muscle bound fighter, which I am of course ;)
wonder when we'll start seeing businesses crop up to offer creation of just such a bunch of fake personae. But didn't we read a few months back about creation of false personae by the government, who were then "posting" online to guide discussion?
I think, too, there's a difference between anonymity and pseudonimity. I agree that people who are anonymous can feel free to say some pretty awful things. On the other hand, we have a fine tradition in this country of anonymous commenters, back to "Publius." There's something to be said for having a regular pseudonym, though, so that at least we know that the person is always posting under a specific nickname, even if it isn't necessarily identifiable with a single person.
Notice that people ALWAYS say that about people arrested for violent crimes. Well, if you're plotting to send out bombs, it wouldn't be too smart to tell people about it would it? That's what always brings about the fall of the bad guys in thrillers: they just can't help boasting about their evil plot to take over the world. With that information, the hero figures out how it is possible to stop them.
But I do agree with Brian that most of us wouldn't draw enough interest for stalking.
Sure, a lot of weird behavior, probably 90 percent of it, can be simply ignored, online or off. It's that small percentage of folk who turn out to be more than strange who make this exercise so tricky.
I'm reminded of all those on-camera nterviews in which the neighbor invariably says, "He was a quiet guy. Kept to himself."
I agree with Nicole that if the goal is to be anonymous on the web, it's probably an unrealistic goal unless you simply never joined the Internet Age. There are people who function, at high levels, in society and don't have a computer or email. Our general counsel has a cell phone but never, ever uses it. I imagine only his wife has the number.
Still, most of this small subset still uses computers and emails at work. Others may write about them. It's akin to the hand model in the movie Zoolander who has attempted to protect his hand in a glass casing only to have the casing break and the years of inconvenience and protection shattered.
One thing could wipe out a virtual lifetime of being virtually invisible.
Creating false identities to throw stalkers off seems misguided, too. The sad reality (or good reality) is that most of us are simply too ordinary and boring to stalk, anyway. This seems to be a statistically small issue, and it seems the best approach is to simply be on constant alert for illegal behavior but just ignore the comments about fat ankles.
"jbailo, absolutely, if you truly want to take a stand, I believe, you should be willing to put yourself on the line -- with your real name -- to back it. But people argue that they are afraid of repercussions from their communities, workplaces, etc."
Agreed that it's a double-edged sword. Only the innocent and strong can really afford to do that; stalkers and cyberbullies can't because they know it'd make them a target.
Unfortunately, since it's not hard for a stalker to return with the ease one can create a new Internet identity, I don't think there's a single solution. Sometimes one can take advantage of the ADD of the Internet and just ignore the stalker, who will give up out of lack of attention. Other situations aren't so easy, and I think it's important that people realize that some of these stalkers really are mentally unbalanced and have to be taken care of appropriately. A lot of damage can be done with just information.
It's a problematic system. I remember one instructor was livid that a student wrote that he didn't like her because she has fat ankles, and he can't stand that in a woman. She thought that his whole review should have been thrown out for that.
Rating someone's professional performance on the basis of anonymous student comments is questionable. I'm not saying students shouldn't have a voice; but anonymously? Not sure.
I might go for anonymous reviews of a course by students for students; but using these reviews to determine whether someone gets a raise? I've never been sure on that one.
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