In the case of “cyberstalking” (and “stalking”), it’s particularly complicated because the bulk of offending behaviour (in terms of time if nothing else) is almost certainly undetectable by the harassee: the actual process of watching. Maybe it’s an RSS feed; maybe email notifications; maybe the person keeps refreshing the page; maybe they set up a new account as soon as they’re banned. The sheer determination to continue can be in itself a frightening thing, because the harassee simply won’t be able to match that determination in response - and wouldn’t want to. Ultimately, human ingenuity is such that security measures cannot reliably keep someone at bay. I think the best that can be hoped for in such a case is to make it thoroughly apparent when an unwanted presence has not been successfully blocked - while providing some ability for the harassee to use countermeasures, of course. Top few IP addresses to hit your page, along with an indication of what proportion of the set they account for; for sites which use logins, top few logins; biases in activity relating to time of day; even, perhaps, guesses based on bayesian analysis of text entered. The cyberstalker spends much of his - or her - time cloaked in anonymity: shining a light on him seems like a fitting response.

Probably half of what I said just above is complete nonsense, but it’s a matter that people should think about more, so I make no apologies.

Interesting thoughts all around. I too am consuming far more that I’m presenting these days, and the fact that you are getting such a huge referrer log of people looking for cyberstalking information is quite telling. There’s a reason there was a PSA campaign produced on the topic of cyberstalking/bullying. It’s far more rampant than the mainstream world would care to know.

And, sadly, if they did care to know it would be summarized in an evening news exposé entitled “Do You Know Where Your Children Are Online?” or something equally lame.