The ease with which ordinary people can put and pull information on and from the internet has allowed certain cyber crimes to flourish.
Cyber crimes are those illegal activities that happen online, on the web. One of these is spamming. Although our laws consider it illegal, it’s mostly an irritant, causing wasted hours to address, say in your email inbox.
Another cyber crime that can have ruinous consequences is hacking, which can lead to identity theft and economic losses if your personally identifiable information has been compromised. There’s also the distribution of malware, viruses that can destroy sensitive computer systems around the world in the blink of an eye.
Although tracking these crimes can become tedious, they leave electronic trails behind that can be followed by the authorities to enable prosecution. Online stalking, particularly in social media, is a little bit difficult to spot, prove and prosecute on the other hand.
Stalking is when a person or persons follow another with obsessive tendencies and regularity. The key here is that the attention isn’t welcome and the stalking can be so intense as to cause the stalked to fear for her life or be terrorized about the obsessive attention.
With the easy accessibility and popularity of such social media platforms as Twitter and Facebook, it’s now easy for stalkers to acquire information about their targets as well as their victim’s whereabouts. That’s because on social media, people don’t think about sharing stuff about themselves—pictures, relationships, locations and the like are shared without thought of who else other than kith and kin can access these information. Their stalkers are following the minutiae of their lives and they’re completely ignorant of it.
via When Social Media and Stalking Intersect | Free Law Information Blog.