Blogging, cyberstalking, and paranoia

Posted on August 29th, 2006 by Cyn

As I read an arti­cle this morn­ing, Blog­ging can be a dan­ger­ous game, I was reminded that one rea­son I began this blog is that I hoped to be a more mod­er­ate voice than some of those who are already speak­ing. While I respect many of those peo­ple, I can’t agree with some of their abso­lutist pre­scrip­tions (and pro­scrip­tions) intended to help you be safer on the internet.

While the arti­cle I was read­ing wasn’t by any one I’ve encoun­tered before, the advice given reflects that of many safety author­i­ties. For instance, women in par­tic­u­lar are advised:

Man­age your blog anony­mously or adopt an alias for all online post­ing. This will help pro­tect you in the event that you draw unwanted attention.

Obvi­ously, by my own exam­ple I do not agree that one must stay anony­mous or avoid all per­sonal inter­ac­tion in order to achieve a rea­son­able degree of safety. Despite being tar­geted, I am not anony­mous in any of my blogs or other online inter­ac­tions. I am not in any more dan­ger due to blog­ging than I was before I began blog­ging, despite the fact that my fam­ily has already been tar­geted by a stalker.

I and the rest of the fam­ily do con­tinue to be care­ful about what we do say online, but anonymity isn’t nec­es­sary as long as we fol­low basic guide­lines such as not refer­ring specif­i­cally to our schools, work­places, or places of wor­ship. When we men­tion that we will be at a par­tic­u­lar event, it is a cal­cu­lated risk.

Restrict­ing all online inter­ac­tions to care­fully dis­tanced, pseu­do­ny­mous or anony­mous post­ings rejects the deeper pos­si­bil­i­ties of inter­ac­tiv­ity. Be care­ful, but don’t fall prey to paranoia.

Filed under: General

2 Responses to “Blogging, cyberstalking, and paranoia”

  1. S.M.E., on November 1st, 2006 at 8:22 am Said:

    Thanks so much for putting this coura­geous story online. For sev­eral weeks now, my mother and I have been harassed and threat­ened by an elderly man and his buddy who got upset after my mom started delet­ing their lewder com­ments on her blog. Soon they start­ing ver­bally attack­ing her blogfriends, and recently hijacked my mother’s online email account (and that of a friend)and sent viruses to every­one in her address book. They have threat­ened to have friends come to our coun­tries and kill us. This man started out as a good “friend”, a kindly old gen­tle­man (nearly 80, a WWII vet­eran with mem­oirs avail­able at Amazon.com). When he began post­ing anony­mous off-color com­ments, my mom noticed the ISP was his and called him on it. From that time on, he became com­bat­ive and furi­ous. It’s really a shame. We have both made so many real, won­der­ful friends through blog­ging, but one psy­chotic old man can ruin everything.

  2. cyn, on November 1st, 2006 at 12:02 pm Said:

    How dread­ful! Please don’t let him “ruin every­thing” for you. You and your mother can find help at http://www.haltabuse.org/ . Tighten up your secu­rity, warn your friends, and ban him from your blogs. Thank good­ness he isn’t local to you!

    Thank you for writ­ing. I’ll be think­ing about you and your mother.

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