Cyberstalked

Nope, this isn’t an arti­cle about how to meet peo­ple online—I haven’t noticed any­one hav­ing a prob­lem with that. It is about what infor­ma­tion you make avail­able to peo­ple you meet online.

The inter­net gives us such incred­i­ble oppor­tu­ni­ties to meet oth­ers who share our inter­ests, no mat­ter how nar­row they may seem. I feel cer­tain that some­where out there is a mail­ing list out there for left-handed red­heads who love hag­gis, only read Vic­to­rian nov­els and want to meet oth­ers like them­selves. Most of us can quickly find peo­ple who share our inter­ests online, what­ever they are. And in over ten years of expe­ri­ence with online inter­ac­tion, I’ve found that peo­ple tend to get close very quickly in this kind of medium and tell each other things they wouldn’t tell their next door neigh­bors. It’s very easy to fall into a false sense of trust and inti­macy, because you’re talk­ing more than you would with some­one you just across the back fence every day or two or run into at church on Sun­days. To be hon­est, I don’t think it’s nec­es­sar­ily any more dan­ger­ous to meet peo­ple via the inter­net than to meet some­one in a bar.

Yes, you prob­a­bly find your­self feel­ing very close to some­one with whom you’ve chat­ted a lot very quickly in con­trast to how quickly things would move offline. The illu­sion of instant inti­macy is an illu­sion. You don’t know how this per­son dresses or smells, how he keeps house, how well she takes care of her chil­dren, how he or she treats oth­ers in “real life” as you would by observ­ing inter­ac­tions offline; you don’t know if he or she is nor­mally punc­tual or has good table man­ners or cuts peo­ple off in traf­fic. You don’t know if she flies into a rage because the fast food clerk got her order wrong, or if he takes a swing at some­body who is being too loud while he’s try­ing to watch a movie. You really don’t know this per­son that well at all.

It is much eas­ier for some­one to mis­rep­re­sent them­selves to you online. Yes, you might think you’ve seen a pic­ture of him or her—how do you know that it truly was his or her pic­ture, or that it’s cur­rent, or that it hasn’t been manip­u­lated in some way? It’s also very easy for some­one to lie about pro­fes­sion, mar­i­tal or eco­nomic sta­tus, etc. Yes, it’s pretty easy to do that in per­son, as well—but this text-based medium makes it a bit eas­ier to main­tain the facade for longer peri­ods of time. Remember—there are plenty of peo­ple on the net pre­tend­ing to be some­one of the oppo­site sex! Take every­thing with at least a grain of salt—and always remem­ber that there is absolutely no way to “take back” infor­ma­tion you’ve given to some­one or made avail­able online if you later find that you’ve been too open. The time to be cau­tious is before you have cause to regret what you’ve told someone—not after you have some wacko call­ing your home or office every few min­utes try­ing to get you to give him a job, marry her, or join his cult.

Is there an actual need for you to use your real name, or any­thing close to your real name, while online? Yes, you prob­a­bly need to use a real name when you’re inter­act­ing on a pro­fes­sional basis, or you won’t have any cred­i­bil­ity. And yes, I’m using my real name, because I started using my real name on the net so many years ago that it would be impos­si­ble for me to dis­ap­pear now. But if you’re online for purely per­sonal rea­sons, don’t use your real name. If you’re online for per­sonal and pro­fes­sional use, con­sider keep­ing it in totally sep­a­rate per­sonas. Do peo­ple who know that you do post-sales sup­port for Big Net­work­ing Com­pany really need to know that you col­lect radio-controlled cars and like to grow toma­toes in your spare time? Prob­a­bly not. So if you’re John Smith in your pro­fes­sional per­sona and Terry John­son in your per­sonal per­sona, it isn’t going to hurt any­one. Or you might want to use a name that’s obvi­ously a han­dle for the per­sonal stuff—maybe you’re RCJuicy­Toma­toes or some­thing like that. Because I promise you that if some­one knows your real name, they can find out some­thing else about you unless your name is as com­mon as John Smith and you live in a huge place like New York City.

Don’t use your work email address for per­sonal inter­ac­tions online. Period. Ever. It gives out too much infor­ma­tion about you. Don’t tell your online con­tacts where you work. Tell them what kind of work you do, let them know you work for a soft­ware com­pany in the tele­com field or in the dis­tri­b­u­tion ware­house of a major gro­cery store chain—but they don’t need to know where pre­cisely where and for whom you work. Trust me here.

Do not use your employer’s inter­net con­nec­tion to post or email any­thing from your per­sonal persona—it’s too easy to trace where you work, even if you think you’re anony­mous. 99.9% of the time, your IP address will show up in the head­ers of your mes­sages, and it will take about 37 sec­onds for any­body with a lick of sense to know that you work in the Atlanta office of Wid­gets R Us.

You do not need to tell online acquain­tances that you live in Podunk, Somestate—say you live in Somes­tate, or north­ern Somes­tate, or not far from the near­est met­ro­pol­i­tan area if you must.

You also don’t need to say that your lit­tle Suzy goes to school at Tiny Ele­men­tary School, or that Jeremy is in Tiger Scout Troop XXXX. Say your kids are in scout­ing or in the 2nd grade or whatever—that’s plenty of infor­ma­tion. You don’t need to say that you attend Third Mil­lenial­ist Apos­tolic Church or are a mem­ber of the Sacred Raven­Moon­Wolf Coven, either. You’re Wic­can or Asatru or Methodist—fine. That’s plenty for most peo­ple to know.

Don’t give out your home address. Don’t make it easy for any­one to find your home address. If you must give some­one an address in the real world, use a drop box at the post office or Mail­boxes Etc. or a sim­i­lar place.

I don’t care how mar­velous he or she seems—don’t give him or her your work, home, cell phone or pager num­ber for a while. There are plenty of places where you can get a free phone number—like EFax or OneBox are just two of them—to give to peo­ple with­out any real risk. Stick to that until you’ve known this per­son offline for a month or two, at least. When he calls the num­ber, he’ll get a voice mail greet­ing and can leave a mes­sage. You’ll be noti­fied that you have a mes­sage and can lis­ten to it, then call him back. I’d sug­gest call­ing back with caller ID block in place so that he can­not get your phone num­ber from caller ID (that would ruin the whole point of the other phone num­ber, wouldn’t it?). (I’m assum­ing you have an unlisted, unpub­lished phone num­ber any­way, right? Hmm—maybe you should go think about pri­vacy in gen­eral then. Another day, another article.)

Do not put your home or work address or phone num­bers into your pro­file infor­ma­tion at sites like EBay—you do know that any­one with an EBay account can request that infor­ma­tion from their sys­tem and get it, whether you’ve entered into a trans­ac­tion with that per­son or not, right? That bit of infor­ma­tion was sup­pos­edly in the fine print of the agree­ment you made when you signed up for their service.

Next—what you need to con­sider before meet­ing some­one offline.

Orig­i­nally pub­lished Decem­ber 12, 2000