With the rapid development of the digital world and anything that requires the internet, cyberstalking is a crime we should watch out for. Cyberstalking has become a very rampant crime lately because the opportunity is very open for many irresponsible persons.
However, the rise of crimes related to cyberstalking is separate from related education that supports the knowledge of many people. There are still many of us who may not fully understand what cyber stalking is.
Not only dangerous to identity theft, but this one crime can also put you in danger due to the misuse of personal information that was successfully obtained. For this reason, you must be more vigilant regarding cyberstalking by understanding more deeply how to deal with it and handle it. Here's what you should know!
What is Cyberstalking?
Cyberstalking is a digital crime or a crime committed in cyberspace to steal a person's personal information to carry out various follow-up actions that can harm the victim.
Ranging from terror and harassment to threats can occur as a result of this cyberstalking. This is included as one of the illegal actions or law violations because of violating one's privacy rights or someone's emotional attack.
Generally, Cyberstalking will begin with the theft of complete information related to the victim through the internet network. For that, those who are often connected to many networks must be careful with this crime!
Motives Behind Acts of Cyberstalking
There are several reasons and motives for cyberstalking that are often carried out by perpetrators. These motives include:
-
Want to be able to see and know all the online activities of their victims
-
Finding out all forms of victim locations both online and offline.
-
Want the victim to feel disturbed by his actions
-
Make the victim afraid and feel intimidated by extortion or control
-
Obtain the victim's personal data in more detail
-
Changing the identity of the stolen victim for other crimes such as fraud and others.
-
And there are many other motives.
How to avoid Cyberstalk so that your personal information is even more secure
For that, for those of you who want to increase the security of your digital account to avoid cyberstalk, it's a good idea to do some of these things.
1. Create very strong passwords for all your digital accounts
A strong password is a password that does not use personal information such as name, date of birth, or other personal information. You can also create strong passwords by increasing the number of characters you use. Also, include a combination of numbers, symbols, and capital letters to make the password more difficult to penetrate.
2. Do not use the same password for all digital accounts
A strong password will be even better if it is accompanied by a variety of passwords in the various digital accounts that you have. This will make your digital account even more difficult to reach by irresponsible persons
3. Be more careful when using public Wi-Fi
If you need to use this network, consider enabling a VPN. However, you should avoid accessing banking accounts or making payment transactions online when connected to public Wi-Fi. This needs to be done to become information related to your financial history from cyberstalking crimes which can be done in many ways.
4. Not using full names online
To keep your digital footprints clean, you can do the following. This method aims to protect your data from data theft that often stalks you at any time. For this reason, it is essential for you always to limit the use or display of personal data on the internet so your data can be carried out optimally.
5. Don't turn on geolocation on social media accounts
Apart from making smartphone batteries more efficient, you can also make your digital footprint more secure by turning off geolocation on your social media accounts. How to do it yourself; you can do it by going to the settings and then deactivating the location menu on your smartphone.
Apart from that, you can also do this via the camera feature via the camera settings and deactivate the location tag printed on your smartphone screen. This is how to disable geolocation on your Android smartphone.
6. Be careful with online dating sites
For those of you who often use online dating sites, you must be aware of this habit. It is not uncommon for online dating sites to become sites deliberately made for unscrupulous individuals to commit crimes.
7. You can also use software to increase security
In carrying out his criminal practices, a cyberstalk actor can utilize malicious software, such as spyware, to gain access to his potential victims' personal information. For this reason, to prevent this from happening, you can use anti-spyware to make your traps better protected.