Being tracked?

Following your online habits

While surfing the web, sophisticated technology is collecting data on you through email providers, mobile-phone apps, search engines, browsers, social-media messengers. In the hands of your abuser, this information could endanger your personal privacy, your control over your identity online and your access to free information.

The information that can be collected can be information you provide yourself when you register/create an online account such as physical address, email, personal interests and details as well as information you do not provide knowingly (for example: data from your smartphone like wifi-signals or GPS locations of the places you visited, websites your surfed in your browser).

Emails and pictures can also track you by transmitting data like location, time, sender and receiver

“Social websites like facebook are by nature a vulnerability for your privacy as your contacts’ timeline can give out information that can be used to track you.”

To assess how secure your online presence is, please also consider how your children’s and friends’ online presences and their connections with you can affect your own security. If you or your relatives have received a direct threat online by email, direct messaging or other online means, please contact the police and supply evidence.

Even though you realise that you unknowingly divulged information, you can now act.

Tips to mitigate vulnerability:

• Log out of social media sites after your visit (trackers usually won’t find you when you’re logged out neither would your contacts)

• Install browser extensions that block trackers and ensure better privacy

• Be mindful when posting on social media

• Prefer anonymous chat and erase chat history

Keep in mind your stalker can potentially monitor the devices of anyone they’ve come in contact with, including your children or anyone that has stayed in the same house. At the end, your own security also depends on your friends and family