Stalkers: How they Use the Information WE Give Them

Stalkers: How they Use the Information WE Give Them
Natalie Gaudette and Keshauna Lewis
Partner Project Final Report

Are social networks enabling stalkers?

Stalking is all ready a major problem, but has the internet made it easier? For our project, we decided to focus on how social networks and online communities may be bringing the bad guys too close and too able to access information about us.

According to the National Center for Victims of Crime (NCVC), 3 in 4 stalking victims are stalked by someone they know. Going off that statistic, and the fact that we know of the people in our class, we decided to start with the class twitter accounts. With the class twitter accounts alone, more than ¾ of the people we were following had their full name on their account; about half had some sort of location, varying from specifics like the University of Maryland, to a more general Maryland, USA. We also did a search of students affiliated with the “UofMaryland” twitter page. The most information that seemed to be readily available was academic majors, hometowns, and current locations. Very few people had security settings so their tweets were open to the public to see. This information linked with other findings can bring a stalker dangerously close.

We then moved to Facebook, and using the information we got off of the twitter accounts, continued to search for more information about our classmates. The main link to access their pages was our network affiliations with the University of Maryland. If they were not listed in the network and we could not recognize their faces in a picture, chances are we did not find them. Most classmates had some form of security settings, such as only being able to see their personal interests and friends in common as well as photos. Our shared online network with the University of Maryland allowed us to view information such as full name and age including the year they were born, while others listed their education, employment history and current living location.

Oddly enough, there were a few students who had their phone numbers and a home address listed. Obviously, there are sights such as Google maps and other GPS sites that can bring a stalker directly to a person’s home with an address without them having to leave their computer. Not only that, there are upcoming sites such as Nabe Wise which are trying to give users a first look at a prospective neighborhood they would possibly plan on moving to. A classic example of a source a stalker can use to better acquaint him or herself with another person’s environment from information obtained through Facebook. After looking at this data it appears that being part of an online network makes us vulnerable to stalkers. Although it is a good way to get to know your peers and meet new people in your near by communities, it seems that because networks include a vast amount of people, it welcomes those with ill intentions and makes it easy for stalkers to find out where we are.

To take it a step further based on the statistic that most victims know their stalkers, and that about a third are stalked by their current or former stalkers, another angle we took was what information we could find about people by actually being “friends” with them on a social networking site like Facebook.

We chose one person in particular, and looked at every aspect of his account in the ways a stalker would if they were trying to get information about them. To start, Facebook allows users to “subscribe” to friends’ statuses. Meaning, when you “subscribe” to someone’s profile, you get a text with their status, and that text gets sent as soon as it’s posted onto their profile. There’s actually another application that possibly going through that allows you to subscribe to someone’s entire profile, so you’d get a text update about EVERYTHING that person puts on their profiles. From status updates, to posting pictures, to commenting on other people’s profiles, it’s a stalker’s dream come true (especially if the stalker is a current partner that wants to watch and control the victim’s every move).

Some things we were able to find on this particular person’s profile would be of great use to a stalker. These things are very simple, and not things that most people would think could be revealing information, but to a stalker, they can be extremely vital information. As we talked about before, statuses can notify people where you are, and what you’re doing, which can make it easy for a stalker to follow you and show up wherever you are.

Though we surprisingly found someone’s home address on their profile (which wasn’t blocked by any kind of security settings), most people only put their email address, thinking that that won’t really do much for people to do harm against others. However, according to the NCVC, 46% of stalking victims experience at least unwanted contact per week, and combined with the statistic that 1 in 4 report being stalked through the use of some form of technology, it is very obvious where emails come into play.

Another revealing aspect to a Facebook profile is your photos. Your albums can often have pictures of pets, prized items like cars, and pictures of people who are close to you like your family or friends. Because these people are tagged and also have Facebook pages that can be accessed it provides an endless trail of information. In addition, there is a theme of types of pictures that are posted by college students such as high school graduation day, college events, family vacations, and romantic relationships. These types of themes give a stalker a better idea of where to find a person base on their activities and hang out pots such as college sports games and dorm rooms. Stalkers are notorious for damaging their victim’s home, car, property (like pets), as well as family and friends.

Also, many people post their hometowns, their high school, college, and work places, making it easy for stalkers to identify information on other networking sites (including your school’s pages) that can help them to find you in person without you even knowing they’re coming. Comparing this information with the backgrounds illustrated on the photos can allow a stalker to come dangerously close.

All in all, we saw that with our research, there is a lot of information that people willingly put out there on social networking sites like Facebook, as well as many others, that can really help those out there who have malicious tendencies. This really poses the question about what you should really have on your profile. It seems as though everything we put out there could potentially victimize us, even when we do have privacy settings on our profile.

I will post a follow-up blog entry to speak on how this relates to my topic of Family Communication.


Sources:
Katrina Baum et al., (2009). "Stalking Victimization in the United States," (Washington, DC:BJS, 2009).http://www.ncvc.org/src/main.aspx?dbID=DB_statistics195

O’Dell Jolie, “Facebook testing a ‘stalker button’” (September 2010) http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/social.media/09/03/facebook.stalker.button.mashable/index.html