In my law school days, I came across with a family who had gone through land line phone stalking for continuously six years. The stalker took pain to find out the name of the registered customer for the number, the neighboring homes etc by manually scrutinizing the huge public phone directory itself. This incident happened nearly ten years back when stalking by phone was an unknown term in India. The victim family felt terribly humiliated, but kept the matter to themselves because when they contacted the local police, they were advised to switch to new communication media , the mobile phone. They were told that mobile phones were better as there were no such easily available public directory. Well….ignorance is no bliss. Mobile phones are vicious devises indeed. I finished my law degree and joined the profession. One day I too owned a brand new mobile phone and felt as secured as the victim-family because I circulated my number to only chosen few. One fine day I found a charming voice of a caller who randomly pushed the buttons and got my voice to hear. He felt it was the best option to flirt with women. But by then I was so busy with my baby daughter that I preferred to hear to her yelling rather than hearing this mobile romeo. I handed over the phone permanently to my husband and the mobile romeo obviously didn't prefer to hear male voices, neither felt like inquiring about the female voice which suddenly changed into a male voice .
But this may not be the case always for every one. There are many ignorant 'first time mobile owners' like me who use social networking sites as public platforms to announce their “prize numbers”. Resultant they become the prize catch for many predators also. I understand that there are three typical routes to harass women by mobile numbers: 1. leaking the number in one of the numerous adult website and cache the number so that in the search engine this number will appear again and again; 2. leaking it in the social networking sites with detailed name and informations ,so that any one and every one of the 'cyber socialites' can have ‘good time’ with the victim; 3.hacking the mobile network to tap the calls and thereby making life miserable for the victim. We do have laws in India to prevent such data leaking. But I consider them very weak when compared to the laws of US or the UK. Yes, we do not have public directory for mobile phone numbers like what we did have for our land numbers, but there are numerous data available in the cyber space by which the victim can be found out and if the harasser is as desperate as the stalker I mentioned above, such easily available data can work better than public directories.
But, very few note that the ‘safety pin’ actually remains with us from the beginning and we, the general mobile phone users tend to ignore the need to pin up the hole. The safety pin could be used when filling up the profile for the social networking sites, when emailing with ‘signature’ or even when exchanging mobile phone numbers with virtual friends etc by following some awareness notes such as:not to publish the mobile phone number anywhere, not to circulate it among not so known acquaintances etc .
However, I do note that while filling up the form for BSNL services, we are required to choose whether to go for ‘national do not call registry’ or not. No this does not serve any purpose when you speak about personal data protection for mobile customers from potential harassers who may go for data mining and leave threatening /annoying messages ( the objectives of the NDNCR clarifies that ‘message’ means only unsolicited commercial communication (UCC) .See http://ndncregistry.gov.in/ndncregistry/index.jsp?reqtrack=qvwhHPNkiQGNDNpwrlvARvsog) But yes, if seen from a broad perspective, this could to a certain extent prevent messy situations that may result due to cloud computing. However, even though harassments through mobile phones are now being considered as one of the core cyber crimes, more stricter laws (well, we do have I.T Act, 2008 to penalize such communications, but it still needs to be broadened) may be needed to restrict unsolicited data mining.
Please Note: Do not violate copyright of this blog. If you would like to use informations provided in this blog for your own assignment/writeup/project/blog/article, please cite it as “Halder D. (2010), “Mobile phones : some thoughts about victimisations done through it”, 29th November, 2010, published in http://cybervictims.blogspot.com/
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