Final words

Do whatever you feel you need to in order to feel and stay safe.

We hope you enjoyed our guide and found it useful!

To read the full, Advanced guide in English click here.

Thank Yous!

This guide is a project by CHAYN, an open-source project that uses technology to empower women against violence and oppression so they can live happier and healthier lives. CHAYN created a set of privacy guides after several interactions with real-life domestic abuse survivors, reading scores of articles on doxxing of women online, and from our very own experiences as women who use the internet. Technology and the internet opens us up to new worlds and provides us information at the touch of a button, but it can also open us up to security risks.

This guide focuses on online stalking, and was created with the help of survivors of domestic violence in many countries. We aim to provide the necessary tools and knowledge to minimise the chance of being tracked by the abusive person(s) after having left the abusive environment. However, the guide can be useful to anyone who is being stalked or tracked online by an abuser, regardless of their gender, location or situation. CHAYN believes in survivor-led design, which means not only do we listen to survivors, they’re part of the production team - they volunteer with us.

Using existing online privacy guides tailored for women as inspiration and for reference, CHAYN volunteers began building this guide by crowdsourcing content. There was a lot to cover but we were determined to build an exhaustive easy-to-understand guide that could benefit all internet users. After we had a Version 1 ready, we sent it out to security experts as well as survivors of domestic violence, and people who have experienced stalking and other forms of cyber harassment to give us their feedback. We then assessed their comments and added information to the guide, making it as inclusive as possible.

Then we introduced Securikitty (meooow!) to help make the guide more user friendly, approachable and to help remind readers when to take breaks and encouraging them to stay strong through the process of protecting themselves.

If you found this guide useful, you may be interested in some of our other resources that we have produced such as How To Build Your Own Domestic Violence Case Without A Lawyer and information about domestic abuse in Pakistan, India and Italy Some of these will only be in English but we’re working on more translations.

The content for this document is openly licensed using the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International. All are invited to remix and distribute it as long as it is appropriately attributed.

We would like to thank our amazing partners and allies who have helped us by giving feedback and adding. We would like to thank all the CHAYN volunteers who helped put this guide together from different parts of the globe especially Nikki, Sam, Lee, Dina, Reema, Clarice, Sarah and Aliya. We would also like to thank the many NGO’s and security geeks who helped shape this guide; Sara Baker of Take Back the Tech!, Nighat Dad, Hamara Internet, Soraya Chemaly, Randi Lee Harper, Jacquie Vernimont, Martin Shelton, Right2Know, Lawyers Against Abuse (LAA) and folks at Tactical Tech and Engine Room. We would also like to say that this guide was built by consulting many resources, such as the DIY Feminist Security Toolkit, NNEDV’s TechSafety, Feminist Frequency, The Smart Girl's Guide to Privacy: Practical Tips for Staying Safe Online, and Tactical Tech’s various resources.

A special thank you also to all the translators who helped us translate the guide into the different languages: Naveedullah Pasoon (Pashto), Muhibullah Shadan (Farsi), Mahmoud Qudaih (Arabic), Aisara Yessenova (Russian), Sandra Hernandez Garrido (Spanish), Mariam Faisal (Urdu) and Haude Le Guen (French).

Our projects are always a work in progress and we want your help in making our projects better! If you have any suggestion or ideas, please email us at [e-mail].

Thank you so much for collaborating with us. This will make a real difference to thousands of women who might be feeling alone and powerless. We want to make sure they know, they’re not. We’re here and so are many others.

The CHAYN Team.

http://chayn.co | @ChaynHQ | [e-mail]