International Women's Day: Online Safety Guide for Women in India

...and that's exactly the thing people don't talk about enough. We celebrate women going digital — getting online, building businesses on Instagram, freelancing on global platforms, finding community on Twitter and Reddit — and that celebration is real and deserved. But there's a shadow side to every one of those stories, and most women in India who've spent any real time online know exactly what I'm talking about. The DM requests from strangers. The comments that start with flattery and escalate. The feeling that someone's watching your stories a little too carefully. The day you find your photo on a fake account you didn't create.

This International Women's Day, March 8, 2026, I don't want to write another piece that just says "be careful online" and calls it empowerment. Women already know to be careful. They've been careful their whole lives. What I want to do instead is get specific — really specific — about the threats, the tools that help, the legal protections that exist (even when they're imperfect), and the practical steps that actually reduce risk without requiring you to disappear from the internet entirely. Because the answer to online harassment shouldn't be "don't go online." That's not safety. That's surrender.

The Threats in 2025

The National Commission for Women's data from 2025 showed a continued upward trend in cybercrime complaints from women. Cyberstalking, morphed images, non-consensual intimate content, sextortion, and online harassment made up the bulk of cases. But the numbers capture only a fraction of what's happening, because most incidents don't get reported. A woman getting harassed in her Instagram DMs is unlikely to file a police complaint about it. She'll block the person, maybe tell a friend, and move on — unless it escalates to threats, doxxing, or image-based abuse, at which point the emotional toll has already been steep.

Types of Online Threats

The types of threats women face online in India break down into a few recognizable patterns, and understanding them helps with both prevention and response.

Cyberstalking is the most common and the most underestimated. It isn't just someone following you on multiple platforms. It's the persistent monitoring of your online activity — tracking when you're active, where you post from, who you interact with, and using that information to maintain a presence in your life that you haven't consented to. Stalkers might create multiple accounts after being blocked. They might message your friends or family to get information about you. In severe cases, they combine online surveillance with physical stalking, using location data from your posts or check-ins to show up at places you frequent. It's exhausting, it's frightening, and it's extremely difficult to stop once it's underway.

Image-based abuse — sometimes called "revenge porn," though that term unfairly implies the victim did something to invite it — involves the non-consensual sharing of intimate or private images. In India, this often takes the form of a former partner distributing photos or videos after a breakup, but it also includes morphed images (someone superimposing a woman's face onto explicit content using readily available apps) and AI-generated deepfakes, which have become alarmingly easy to create. The harm here is twofold: the immediate violation and the permanent anxiety that the content might resurface. Once images are online, complete removal is nearly impossible, and the victim lives with that knowledge indefinitely.

Doxxing — publishing someone's personal information (home address, phone number, workplace, family details) publicly to enable harassment — is a weapon of escalation. It takes online harassment into the physical world. Women journalists, activists, and public figures in India face this regularly, but it happens to private individuals too. A disagreement in a Facebook group or a Reddit thread can lead to someone digging up and posting your personal details, and suddenly the harassment isn't just messages on a screen — it's calls to your phone, threats sent to your workplace, or strange vehicles outside your building.

Online sexual harassment needs no elaborate explanation. Unsolicited explicit messages, lewd comments on posts, sexual content sent without consent, requests for images or video calls that turn predatory. On dating apps, the line between normal conversation and harassment gets crossed with depressing frequency. Women on professional platforms like LinkedIn aren't safe either — "networking" requests that veer into personal or sexual territory are a widely reported experience for women professionals in India.

Impersonation and fake profiles involve someone creating accounts using your name, photos, and personal details, usually to interact with others while pretending to be you. Sometimes the fake profile is used to catfish people. Sometimes it's used to post content that damages your reputation. Sometimes it's just about the power of taking someone's identity and using it without permission. Reporting fake profiles to platforms is a process — each platform has its own reporting mechanism — and it can take days to get a response, during which the fake account continues to operate.

Practical Security Measures

Now, the practical measures. I'm going to go through these in detail because the devil is in the details, and generic advice like "set your profile to private" isn't enough when you don't know which settings actually matter.

Start with social media account security. On Instagram, go to Settings > Privacy and set your account to private if you're not using it professionally. Even if you are, consider having a public professional account and a private personal one. Turn off activity status (so people can't see when you're online). Restrict who can send you DMs — set it so only people you follow can message you directly, and message requests from others go to a filtered folder you can review on your terms. Disable the "similar accounts" suggestion, which can surface your profile to people searching for accounts like yours. On Twitter/X, protect your tweets if you don't need a public presence. Turn off photo tagging or set it to manual approval. On Facebook, review the privacy settings for each section of your profile — who can see your friends list, your posts, your phone number, your email. Lock down the "About" section. Disable the public search engine indexing of your profile.

For every single one of these accounts — Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Snapchat, all of them — enable two-factor authentication. Use an authenticator app, not SMS, if the platform offers it. This prevents someone who obtains your password (through phishing, a data breach, or guessing) from accessing your account. I can't overstate how much this matters. Account takeovers are a common precursor to impersonation and image theft.

Think about your phone number exposure. In India, your mobile number is basically your identity — it's linked to Aadhaar, bank accounts, UPI, and every app you've ever downloaded. Giving it out freely is giving out a master key to your digital life. For online registrations, food delivery orders, e-commerce purchases, and anything where your number isn't strictly necessary for the core service, use a secondary number. Services like Truecaller's second number feature, Doosra, or simply a prepaid SIM you use only for non-personal purposes can wall off your primary number from the general noise of commercial and potentially malicious contact.

For dating apps specifically — and this is where warm advice meets cold reality — the initial stages of any online connection require deliberate information management. Don't share your workplace by name early in the conversation. Don't mention the specific neighborhood you live in. Don't share your daily routine (gym at 7 AM, office by 9, walk the dog at 8 PM) because that's a map of your physical movements. Use the dating app's built-in chat rather than moving to WhatsApp early, because WhatsApp reveals your phone number and your last seen/online status. When you do decide to meet someone, choose a public place, tell a friend where you'll be, and have your own transportation. These aren't paranoid precautions. They're reasonable ones, given what the data tells us about how dating-app-initiated stalking and harassment typically escalate.

Location data deserves its own paragraph. Turn off geotagging on your camera — most smartphone cameras embed GPS coordinates in every photo by default, and when you share those photos, the location data goes with them. On iPhone, go to Settings > Camera > and toggle off location. On Android, it's in the camera app's settings. Separately, disable location tagging on social media posts. An Instagram photo tagged "Home" or "Office" with your actual location is exactly the information a stalker needs.

Documentation and Reporting

If you're being harassed, document everything before you block. This is counterintuitive because the instinct is to block immediately and stop looking at it. But screenshots with timestamps are evidence, and without evidence, legal action and platform reports are much harder. Take screenshots of abusive messages, comments, or posts. Use your phone's screen recording feature for threats made through stories or live videos that disappear. Save the URLs of relevant profiles and posts. Store all of this in a cloud folder (Google Drive, iCloud) that's accessible even if your device is compromised. Then block, and report to the platform.

For formal complaints, India has multiple channels. The National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal at cybercrime.gov.in has a dedicated category for crimes against women, including cyberstalking, image abuse, and harassment. Complaints filed there are forwarded to the relevant state cyber cell. You can also call the Cyber Crime Helpline at 1930 or the Women Helpline at 181. For immediate safety concerns, call 112. Filing an FIR at your local police station is also an option, and you can insist on it — police are legally obligated to register an FIR for cognizable offenses, and cyberstalking and image-based abuse fall into that category.

Legal Protections and New Avenues

The legal protections available to women in India for online abuse include Section 354D IPC (now replicated in the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita), which criminalizes stalking including cyberstalking, with up to three years' imprisonment for a first offense and seven for a repeat. Section 66E of the IT Act addresses capturing and publishing images of a person in private contexts without consent. Sections 67 and 67A of the IT Act cover publishing obscene and sexually explicit material electronically. The POSH Act extends to online harassment in the workplace, which in 2026 includes remote work settings — if a colleague or supervisor is sending inappropriate messages through work channels or personal platforms, that's actionable under POSH.

There's a less-discussed legal angle worth raising: the DPDP Act's implications for image-based abuse. Under the Act's data protection framework, your images are personal data. Their processing (which includes collection, storage, and sharing) requires your consent. Non-consensual sharing of intimate images is therefore arguably a violation of the DPDP Act in addition to being a criminal offense under the IT Act and IPC. As the Data Protection Board becomes operational, it could potentially become another avenue for victims to seek redress — one focused on getting the data (images) deleted and the data fiduciary (the platform hosting them) held accountable, rather than just pursuing criminal prosecution of the individual perpetrator. This hasn't been tested yet, but the legal theory is sound, and it's worth watching how the Board handles cases where personal data and image-based abuse intersect.

Emerging Threats and Workplace Issues

On the technology side, AI-generated deepfakes represent an escalating threat that existing legal frameworks weren't designed for. Creating a convincing fake video of someone in a compromising situation used to require technical skill and expensive software. In 2026, free apps and websites can generate deepfakes from a handful of photos in minutes. Women with any public-facing photos — which, in the age of social media, is most women — are potential targets. The detection tools exist (Microsoft's Video Authenticator, various academic research tools), but they're not widely accessible to ordinary users, and by the time a deepfake is detected, it may have already been shared thousands of times. Some platforms are implementing AI-generated content labels, but enforcement is spotty and the technology to create fakes is advancing faster than the technology to detect them.

There's also the workplace dimension that deserves specific attention. The shift to remote and hybrid work in India has blurred the boundary between professional and personal digital spaces. A colleague who sends inappropriate messages via the company's Slack or Teams is subject to the organization's anti-harassment policy and the POSH Act. But what about messages sent on personal WhatsApp after work hours? What about unwanted LinkedIn connection requests from a manager that become increasingly personal? The legal framework covers this — the POSH Act isn't limited to office premises — but awareness among both employees and Internal Complaints Committees about online harassment in remote work contexts is uneven. Many organizations' POSH training hasn't been updated to address digital harassment scenarios, and employees who experience it often don't know whether it qualifies as a workplace complaint.

The Reality of Enforcement

I'll be honest about the limitations, though. Filing a cybercrime complaint in India is still a frustrating experience for many women. Police cyber cells are understaffed and unevenly skilled across states. Investigation timelines are long. The legal process, from FIR to charge sheet to trial, can take years. Some women have reported being dismissed or discouraged from filing by police officers who don't take online harassment seriously, though this has been improving slowly with better training and dedicated women's cybercrime cells in some states.

Organizations like the Internet Freedom Foundation, IT for Change, and Point of View do excellent work supporting women facing online harassment through legal aid, advocacy, and resources. The Digital Rights Foundation's "Hamara Internet" project, originally Pakistan-focused, has useful safety resources applicable across South Asia. Knowing these resources exist matters, because dealing with online abuse alone is isolating and overwhelming.

There's something else I want to name here, something that gets left out of most safety guides. The emotional and psychological toll of persistent online harassment is real and significant. Anxiety, hypervigilance, sleep disruption, withdrawal from online spaces, and a corrosive sense that your body and identity aren't fully yours — these are documented effects, not abstract ones. If you're experiencing them, that's not weakness. It's a normal human response to being targeted, and talking to a counselor or therapist about it is as valid as any technical security measure. Several NGOs offer free or subsidized counseling for women experiencing cyber harassment.

I wish I could end this piece with a confident prediction that things are getting better. The legal framework is stronger than it was five years ago. Platform safety tools have improved. Public awareness is higher. But the attacks are evolving too — deepfakes, AI-generated abuse content, and more sophisticated stalking tools mean the threat environment isn't standing still. The honest answer is probably that safety for women online in India is going to remain a moving target, something that requires ongoing attention, updated practices, and continued pressure on platforms, law enforcement, and lawmakers to do better. That's not the tidy conclusion anyone wants. But it's the truthful one, and I think women deserve truth more than they deserve empty reassurance that everything's getting better when the numbers say otherwise.