Stalk me if you can

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Teenagers hooked on to the wild world of social networking have charted many territories, but stalking seems to be the new buzzword. From chasing friends and keeping a tab on enemies to checking out your crushes’s cute pictures on Facebook, it is a stealthy, voyeuristic world out there and how! Facebook — an interface born to keep your tiny microcosm connected, is replete with cryptic gossiping on the walls and shady privacy settings... do the teenagers know they are being watched. And for those who are doing the watching, what drives them?
Says Mehreen Ahmed, a 17-year-old from Nasr School, “Who doesn’t love Facebooking? I also like going online to check out my friend’s walls and status updates. It is fun knowing who is doing what and more importantly it’s a great way to kill time. I would browse through their photos and check out the comments. Privacy settings are important, if someone has tweaked it to high, you cannot access their images.”
For unassuming Afreen Arastu, 17 from Sri Chaitanya Junior College, Facebook stalking went the whole monty when one of her buddies learnt her password to the email account. What was amusing, yet scary was the fact that people thought she was a FB stalker instead. “Someone hacked into my account and started chasing my friends. I couldn’t access my email at all, nor Facebook. I had to create a second profile, now there are two profiles online. I was rather upset because I learnt of it just before the exams. Now I come off as a stalker. It is infuriating to know that someone has access to all your personal details like that,” she laments.
For others like Akram Firdous, 18, FB stalking is no big deal and is a way to keep his relationship alive. “I like to keep a tab on my girlfriend and I am sure she does too. It’s hard enough to know whether you are being cheated upon and waiting for someone else to tell it to you is as sour as it gets. I am glad I keep a lookout for any red flags, while partying or FB chatting. It also comes in handy when some “pal” slips and utters a secret known only to him, it is easy to know where the leak was from. I hate it when a secret is flushed out on Facebook and my enemies know about it,” he says.