Did you hear about the one where the blogger revealed so much personal information about herself that a psycho killer showed up at her house, and raped and murdered her?
Or the pedophile, that scoured mommy blogs for pictures of little children so he could use them inappropriately, or even worse, kidnap the children?
Stories like this scare the hell out of me and made me a little hesitant about starting a blog in the first place, but we can't let stories like this force us into cocoons and prevent us from writing about what we love. We just need to be careful about how much information we wish to reveal about ourselves while still managing to enjoy communicating with the majority of the good, well-intentioned people in our blogosphere.
I encourage everyone to read this wonderful article written by fellow blogger Darren Rowse. It details his experience with a cyberstalker and how you can protect yourself from having a similar experience happen to you.
Blog Stalkers - Personal Safety for Bloggers
4 comments:
I know what you mean.
I was hesitant when I first started blogging about disclosing too much information about myself. Even though I don't give out personal information, I sometimes feel uncomfortable knowing that some weirdos might be reading my thoughts.
very interesting relevant post Chic M. This is why I never post photos of self/family etc on my blog. I've had some fairly irritating "discussions" with people on blogs and always just left it, instead of escalating, because you never know which of these idiots will turn out to be a frothing-at-the-mouth psycho. Although I do not post much identification material on my blog, I guess anyone who was really determined wouldn't find it too difficult to identify me. Best protection is my small but elite readership!
L- I know what you mean. I sometimes think that the only people reading my blog are the ones who leave comments, but that's not always true. We must be careful of those who lurk.
fbt-that's one of the reasons I also try not to post about topics that are too sensitive like politics and religion, even though I may have some strong views about them. I try to stick to girly mommy topics to avoid any potential confrontations with psychos. Fashion and celeb stuff is what I talk about with my girlfriends anyway, so keeping my blog posts centered around that is working out well so far.
By the way you can prob tell by my flurry of comments that I love your blog. Will have to bookmark it:)
thanks for this. I have a sort of "stalker" they dont follow me in real life I hope but they trail my sites and used to leave creepy comments that I promptly deleted. It's very scary...
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