Dangerous trend: A deep rise in the ‘stalk’ market

The city is widely growing and with its huge growth, there are many a new things going on and on and have been creating a menace since their advent in this city.

Obviously, these weren't new for the other metros, but as a city goes metro, some of these features always come and are actually governed or driven by frustrated people. Not going to the psychic analysis, let me talk about today's most disturbing as well as often regarded as most dangerous types of cyber crimes, cyber stalking.

A very famous RJ of the city was a victim of it. The case so happened that, she used to receive mails as well as some private data which she was damn confident was only known to her and not even to her closest people. The person sending those abusive as well as very disturbing data was finally caught and when it was recovered that how he was able to get so much of info on her, the unexpected reply came was that he used to stalk her on the cyber space.

Looking to such other cases, cyber stalking is mainly observing or monitoring on a person's personal life through their cyber associated lives. But the main part of this type of stalking is using all that information that was gathered for fun, or some other illegal purposes, which the Indian constitution recognises as an act of crime.

The purpose or the intentions of doing such type of stalking using the internet can be many at various times. Like in business relations, it is used for getting the business deals of rival firms.

But, generally, we find applications of such behaviour in impersonating and making fake profiles to personally achieve some gain, as we saw in the above case. There are many methods through which these stalkers use to haunt the originals in the cyber world.

As per to the Indian Information Technology Act 2000, Chapter XI Para 67, the government of India clearly considers online pornography as a punishable offence. The Para states the following:

Whoever publishes or transmits or causes to be published in the electronic form, any material which is lascivious or appeals to the prurient interest or if its effect is such as to tend to deprave and corrupt persons who are likely, having regard to all relevant circumstances, to read, see or hear the matter contained or embodied in it, shall be punished on first conviction with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to five to ten years as well as fine upto one lakh or two lakh rupees.

The first is making or creating a fake profile. It may be a profile of the same person whom he is going to stalk or it can also be of a random person. Using such profiles, the important data that is sourced is then put up and showed mercilessly on the profiles as well as the links to the profile are spread throughout the social networking as well as advertisement sites, so that more and more people come to know of it, and generally it is the victim who is the last person to know of this!

But, by using such type of imagery and voyeurism, that is why government has considered it as an act of cyber pornography and has kept penalties as mentioned above.

There is actually no way to know who is going to be stalked or who is already being a victim or whether you are cyber stalking or not? If you are a culprit, then it is advisable for you to shut down your menace before you get penalised. For the other victims, the following points are key to notice and to be keptalways in mind, while making your own thumb impression in the cyber space:
While creating a profile, do not supply wrong personal information or such things.

It may be considered in a fake profile impersonation.
Use secure web browsers, like Google Chrome and Firefox to avoid hacking and profile capturing through cookie data.
Once a profile is created, do share your life on the cyber space, but keep it to a limit. And if that is not even in your control, all social networking websites allow privacy for viewing profile, so do keep that into account.

Don't add unknown people and strangers even if they seem to have some mutual friends or some nice relation which they can think of convincing you to add. Add only after verifying, even if they state many a known common things, because if they are stalking you they are bound to know all these things.

Do not reply to unknown mails and off lines as they may be then able to get hold of your profile.

Most importantly, if anything happens, without panicking, report to the nearest police station or cyber crime cell, and shut down your profile and try to keep it shut as long as the case is not solved.

As soon as you believe you are being stalked or hacked, change your passwords, keep them changing frequently and as soon as possible remove all the personal data, photos, videos everything from your profile for the meantime, and report the case.