by Erik M. Dell

Created on: May 08, 2011

Cyberstalking is a real phenomenon that is becoming increasingly easy to accomplish.  The Internet is a great tool that can offer countless hours of learning, browsing, or entertainment.  But as the saying goes, nothing is free.

Information about you is being gathered with every click of the mouse.  Every time you view a site or every time you join a website more and more information is required from you.  For the unaware person this can leave tracks all over cyberspace and allow anyone with an Internet connection to find information about you and your family.

To get a good idea what kind of information is out there go ahead and Google your name.  There may be a few things there or perhaps not on the first page, depending on how common your name is.  Don’t forget to check images and videos along with your webpage search.

You might be surprised by what is available.  And you might want to take steps to try and reduce the amount of information people can access about you.  A few simple steps can go a long way in preventing cyberstalking.

1)  Facebook.  Simply put this is the number one offender.  People treat Facebook like their own personal diaries.  I’ve seen some crazy stuff about my friends on Facebook.  The problem lies in the belief that it is only your friends that will see the stuff you post.  Not true.  Every friend of all your friends has access to that post, pic, etc…

Next time you are logged into Facebook click on the account tab in the upper right hand corner.  Then click on privacy settings.  This will show you exactly who has access to your information that you post.  Change the settings to what you find acceptable.

2)  OK, now that we got that done, we’ll move on to more general things that can protect you from cyber stalking.  Like free sites.  Nothing is free on the Internet, nothing.  Your information is regularly being collected.  You can minimize this by not giving information out for free access to websites.

3)  Change your privacy settings on other social media websites.

4)  Do not give your passwords out to anyone and make sure you use strong passwords.  Seems simple enough but I can’t tell you the number of times I have found someone’s password as simply password or 12345 or something silly like that.  The truth is that most stalkers know basic information about you and can usually take an educated guess about your passwords.

So what can you do about this?  I suggest making a password that is a short sentence that has numbers, capital letters, and special characters thrown into it.

Ex.  M@ryHadaL!ttl3L@mb

5)  Put a number lock on your smart phone.  If you ever lose your phone or it is stolen then the amount of information that can be comprised is usually immense.  Putting a pass code on the phone can alleviate future headaches.

Cyberstalking is a reality and is happening all the time.  Today’s society has an obsession with one click access to everything and your information is usually just sitting around in cyberspace waiting for one of these clicks.  So do yourself a favor and log in to Facebook and change your settings.  That is the number one thing you can do to help protect your information.

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