Karen's Reflection on Cyber Stalking

Cyber Stalking Facts

This article mentioned that the opportunity to target someone on the Internet is becoming limitless when more and more people going online. The range of cyber-stalking is very wide but most of the (regular) stalkers want to do is intimidate and control their victims. And the Internet provides a way / means for them to find out the victims’ information easily.

Another thing that this article mentioned is America states are attempting to deal with the problem of cyber-stalking and California enacted a set of new stalking laws in 2009. The law can invoke to protect people from cyber-stalking, such as posting others’ information illegal or sending threatening email. Prior to California’s anti-cyberstalking laws, the crime was difficult to prosecute that local law is not feasible for these kind of crimes, then the victims could only keep patience to the harassments.

Because of the technology development, Internet becomes a part of our daily life. It lets our life become more convenient undoubtedly, but it also causes many crimes. As the article mentioned, cyber-stalking is one of them. To deal with this problem, I think we need to clearly know what is the relation of the stalker and victim. The first type is the stalker know the victim in real-life, maybe after a couple separate, one of them try to harass his/her ex-lover. The second one is they only know each other in virtual world but not real-life.

The second one is easier to prevent that people need to be careful, don’t reveal their personality information online, or use two accounts that one is public and the other one is private. Such as Facebook, it is necessarily to set the privacy setting to only access for friends. However, choosing who is friend is also a consideration also. Besides, use at least two email accounts that also one for public and one for privacy is a method to prevent cyber-stalking, too. Use the public email for registering some forums or online services and the private one for someone you can trust.

The first one is more difficult to prevent that the stalker has the victim’s information already. So an appropriate law is necessarily nowadays. But in the case of Hong Kong, it seems it don’t have any laws for cyber-stalking. I think Hong Kong government need to update and modify Hong Kong’s law regularly like America; otherwise, the victims will keep increase only.