YOUR FAULT OR MY FAULT OR A BIT OF BOTH?

     Is it still considered cyberstalking if you're only passively using the internet to keep an occasional eye on someone? I don't know. Usually when I hear the term I associate it with attempts to crack passwords or creating sock-puppet accounts to surreptitiously follow a person on social networking sites...shit like that.

     But what is it when it's passively done? Y'know, like with no attempts to communicate or harass? Like the girl I had a crush on in high school. We went to the same school...even had some of the same classes, so of course I saw her most days of any given week and would pay attention to her and get to know things about her through observation and overhearing things about her and on rare occasion by her. But I wouldn't bother her. I wasn't trying to use her friends to get to her. Okay, I did steal a picture of her once and followed her home this one time.
      Now I know that sounds bad, especially the latter one, but both were done opportunistically. In the latter case, it's not like I was waiting for her to leave at school and following a safe distance behind (or ahead as was my case). If I had done that, then yes...total psycho-stalker creep. The reality was that I just happened to notice she was walking about a block behind me. I ended up going out of my way, curious to where she was gonna turn. But it was just that one day and time. I even found out totally by chance later on, that that wasn't even where she lived. I dunno, maybe she was babysitting there or something. No, a mutual friend was bringing us home one day (school project...different story) and dropped her off first. So now I knew where she lived...but not because I had TRIED. And I didn't do anything about it. It became something I just knew.

      Anyways, my point is that. Because the internet is the thing these days. What if your cyberstalking is exclusively a passive activity? That is, you're just taking advantage of the person's lax security settings like you're a friend of a friend on Facebook and all the settings on the photos are viewable by "Friends of Friends" or they have a public Twitter feed or a public Instagram/Photobucket/Flickr account? Does that count or is that more like the equivalent of finding a phone number and address in an old phone book?
      Is searching on Google or Bing an e-mail address considered stalking or is that again, like looking someone up in a phone book?

      I feel like these attempts at justification answer my own question and that is, "Of course they are!...but I understand." What compels me to look in the first place? It's that feeling alone which poisons the activity no matter how benign. But still...it feels different. It's more like gathering intelligence and again, it's all passive. It's not like I'm using keyloggers or surreptitiously photographing at a distance or harassing their family/friends/coworkers so what exactly is IT that I am speaking of?
       A slightly different scenario. A girl shared several nude photos of herself with me a couple of years back all linked to a Photobucket account. The folder those pictures were in was marked private. However, the files were either unchanged default names (like IMG_0014 - put that in a Google Image Search and see what comes up! For additional fun, put MVI_00## in a YouTube search and see what comes up) or simple words like "pink", "me", or "silly". Now, you can't see the album, but if you have a direct link you can see the picture so on some bored nights I would try and guess file names and would occasionally succeed. Now that is tougher to justify. In fact, I can't. I think that actually counts as cyberstalking as I was taking advantage of a site vulnerability (since corrected by Photobucket...unfortunately) and not lax security protocol on the part of the user. I remember MySpace having a few exploits as well though the picture ones were fixed (unfortunately) before I ever got an account.
      Facebook offers a questionable example. Back in 2009 I believe, they changed their security settings and defaulted everything on everyone's profile to "Friends of Friends" unless you changed it. I was still reading Gawker at the time and was immediately aware of it and fixed my settings immediately. Not everyone did, including one of my crushes. She eventually did fix it but only after Facebook made it much easier to do so (I'm gonna take it she's not very computer savvy). Its current privacy screw-over is that all cover photos and all new profile photos are Public by default. You can change the profile picture setting, but not the cover photo. She hasn't noticed this...yet. But is that a site vulnerability issue making it thus cyberstalking or is that a user issue making her responsibility and thus I am merely seeing what anyone is allowed to see?

     It's such a confusing thing...

The first six unfiltered Bing Image Search results for IMG_0014:

IMG_0014 collage

MVI_0014 on YouTube