Retired Stalker: Facebook, Foursquare Making Gen Y Stalkers Lazy

Feature

Jul 02, 2010

Consumer Electronics Cybercrime Enterprise Applications

CIO.com can't reveal his name, but this 30-year veteran of stalking thinks the next generation of cyberstalkers is too spoiled. Between Facebook and Foursquare, it's no wonder, he says.

Stalkers have got it too easy today. That’s the opinion of a now-retired stalker who broke his silence to CIO.com this past week.

“This new breed of stalkers—these cyberstalkers, these kids—they have no idea how hard it was to stalk people back in the day,” says the long-time serial stalker, who requested anonymity due to his more than three decades of stalking and several pending allegations. “They’re soft.”

When asked to elaborate, the 57-year-old man (whom we’ll call “Slim”) launched into a rant about “teenage slackers” who are relying solely on the Internet (what he called “AOL”) and mobile devices (what he refers to as “car phones”).

“I hear about all this new stuff. Hey! We didn’t have no GPSs, or this Facebook, or…The Google—all this fancy boy stuff,” Slim says. “Back then, I used to have to sit in my El Camino for hours and hours each night, eating the same stale fast-food day after day, just waiting for my stalking victim to emerge from her apartment, office or aerobics class. It was hard work!”

Slim says it’s a shame that some of the younger stalkers have no concept of how to climb a tree to get a better view of their intended victim, or how to impersonate a member of the wait staff to know where their victims are and what they are having for dinner.

He says it depresses him to see just how much private information people are willing to divulge. “I mean, think about it: These subjects are willingly giving away all this information, and it’s all right there on the Interweb,” Slim says. “Even celebrities have their own Facebook pages. It’s ridiculous!”

When told about Twitter and Foursquare—two social-networking technologies that enable geo-tracking capabilities, among other communications—Slim looks away and scoffs.

“I’m really worried about this next generation,” he says. “It’s just too damn easy.”

[Editor’s Note: This story is a work of fiction, but the threats to your privacy are not: See CIO.com’s You Are Here: Scary New Location Privacy Risks.]

Do you Tweet? Follow me on Twitter @twailgum. Follow everything from CIO.com on Twitter @CIOonline.