When someone stalks you, it can be devastating. You might start to second guess yourself. Is that LinkedIn account really nessecary when a stalker knows where you work and who your boss is? Most people don’t think about that when they are filling out their profiles. The goal of websites such as LinkedIn in are to network and give professional and hard working people an outlet for displaying their credentials. What happens when that information becomes compromised and used against you? Here are 8 tips on preventing online stalkers from preying on you, without having to compromise your social networking ventures because of anonymous online stalkers.

1. Never display your full name or last name publicly. Most sites will have settings to disable your profile from being searchable online.
2. Make all your social network profiles private or exclusive so that others have to be a member to view your profile or friends list.
3. Pay attention to who you friend or connect with, it might just be a fake account set up. View the history of the person and note what type of friends or connections exist with that account.
4. Never use the Places feature in facebook. As tempting as that is, your cyber stalker will only turn into a real-life stalker when he or she starts to learn about your location and patterns!
5. To add on to the previous tip, if you have a 4square or some other kind of location-based account, then don’t use the same alias or username! Better yet, don’t add to the trend by creating an account either. We don’t recommend these types of web sites at all! This makes it easier for your stalker to associate with and find your accounts!
6. If you have to absolutely list your place of employment on your LinkedIn profile, find the corporate office location rather than listing your local office. If this is not an option, use the major/biggest city name close by rather than your town name
7. Change your birthday (on your accounts) immediately. This is a classic way for stalkers to reset your passwords and hack into your accounts –when they’ve gotten your personal information. If your friends are your friends, they will know when your birthday is. Bottom line is, you don’t have to list it for everyone else to see.
8. Delete old posts and entries that are no longer valid or necessary. When stalkers stalk, they are obsessed! And they will search far and wide to find information about you to use against you and strike a conversation with you anonymously or even with your friends and family! Delete those old Facebook statuses, forum and message board posts and twitter tweets!

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Recently, I ran across a website called Wayback Machine. It’s sort of like a time machine, for the Internet! Some people might think it’s the coolest thing, but what if there is information out their that is posted about you, or information that you have posted in the past and have come to realize that, that probably wasn’t a good idea. Now that there are more cyberstalkers out there, our information becomes more vulnerable. Stuff that we thought was fun and would do no harm, are now becoming cold realities. We all make mistakes, but why should we have to dwell with them forever? With the Wayback Machine,  your information can be archived for years regardless if you took it down or requested someone to remove it.

If you have a website that you maintain, here is how you can prevent this organization and others like it from archiving and searching for your information on your website:

1. Create a .txt document and name it ‘robots’

robots.txt is a document that will tell ‘robots’ such as google or other search engines from searching your website automatically. It’s like turning the switch off so that there is no electricity coming through.

2. Now copy and paste this code into your robots.txt documentt

User-agent: ia_archiver
Disallow: /

The first line is to idendify that you are referring to the Wayback machine, the second will tell it to disallow any robots snooping around!

3. Upload this document to your MAIN root of your website through FTP or whatever program you use to edit your web pages.That’s it!

If you are not sure how to do this, we can help. Please use this from to contact us for more help.

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