Risks

1. Identify your security risks

You should take as much care to protect your online presence as you do with your physical one. Securing your online presence is crucial to health and happiness; if someone intrudes upon our online space, it is easy to feel violated.

2. Assess the strength of your security practices

Ask yourself:

WHO? is your stalker/abuser? Do you know the abuser? Is the abuser connected to you? Are they financially resourceful? Politically/socially influential? Do they know how to use technology?

WHERE? Does your environment increase the threat? What are the laws and policies enforced? What are the cultural norms of your abuser’s community, family or your own?

If you don’t know, try talking to people you trust to get information from them. If it is difficult to obtain information about safety and privacy laws, it is likely that they are either non-existent or weakly enforced, so your environment increases the threat.

HOW? Is it easy to bribe someone where you live? Can your abuser use their economic/social influence to access your information? Does your abuser have power over your relatives?

3. Security areas to prioritise

Take the Privacy Test by Smart Privacy.

Only YOU know what devices you use, what apps and services you access, how you use them and what you use them for. Take that context into account to decide what strategy to use and remember that it may require a change in behaviour or some level of inconvenience, so choose the strategy and recommendations that best suit your situation.

Devices and apps

Select carefully what device, app or network you trust with your information. Remember your mobile phone and laptop are likely to be collecting your data, which could be shared with service providers or could be maliciously accessed by a hacker.

Your connections, applications and services may be insecure, may have been compromised, could be used to monitor your activity.

Email account

It is at the centre of everything you do online, such as other accounts you create on other websites, social-media platforms,etc… If your email is compromised, it puts at risk all of your other accounts and data.

Spyware

Your phone can be set to record and transmit any sounds within the range of its microphone without your knowledge. Some phones can be switched on remotely and brought into action in this way, even when they look as though they are switched off.