The gay bar scenario is telling -- males can be very aggressive, and simultaneously, willfully oblivious to "back off" signals. Your polite request for privacy and unwelcoming body language might protect you from, say, 90% of approachers. The remainder can be very overt and dominating in their attempts.
So yeah, if you're so confident that you've solved the problems of every attractive woman, everywhere: try it out.
Additionally, what you're offering is like me -- suppose I live in a nice house in the hills -- going down to the ghetto and asking why people bother locking their doors at night and putting bars on their windows. I don't do any of those things and I don't have a problem with home-invasion roberries -- why are all these people so paranoid and afraid!?
Put another way: you would have no clue if, say, you were riding a bus full of predators, because you are not prey -- a woman more likely would.
I could type an entire essay here explaining how and why women have different motivations and risk profiles than you, but I doubt you would respond with anything more thoughtful than "obviously, problems happen." Instead of speculating as to why you might be so obtuse here -- I would guess it's because you are resentful of the seemingly inconsistent and inexplicable behavior of women -- let me just offer this: stop fixating on how things should be and start understanding things as they are now.
This is really no different than entrepreneurs bitching about how risk-adverse investors are, and how they won't respond to 99% of cold calls, even if only to politely decline. Or how investors vastly prefer known founders, even when they have been previously burnt by them, rather than taking risks on unknown quantities. But at the end of the day, investors have the money and women have the vaginas, so they make the rules and they don't have to be fair, scrutable, rational or consistent -- they only have to be advantageous.
Each one should make his or her own risk assessment. I was talking about dismissing people from your environment who look up your public information as stalkers.
Stop trying to tell marginalized groups that they are silly to be worried. We know our own lives and our own experiences. We've seen the odd stare or remark someone has made. We all worry that sometimes this person will go very far. Work on reducing the amount of hatred that spewed out by some groups which encouraged the people that attack us.
After all if a woman says the same ("I'm a lesbian"), often that'll encourage some idiots.
And sometimes there are loads of "straight" men in gay bars. Why do you think many lonely heart / hook up ads some gay men will say that they cannot accommodate (the sexytimes in their house)? They don't want the wife or girlfriend to see. :P
Female actors often have a lot of searches coming from their original hometowns. Sometimes the same ip address over a period of months. I guess that might be mom back home, but I tend to think of it as a little more stalkery.
Male actors can have the same thing, but it happens much less often. Which is another argument against it being mom back home.
If I was a girl in college and a classmate did that first I think I'd be a bit weirded out that he felt the need to try to come up with interests to talk about in advance instead of just starting up a conversation and finding out stuff about me.
But there's a lot of social conditioning in this—like, if I was a guy in college, and a girl did that to me, I'd be more understanding because girls in the US generally aren't encouraged to cold-approach guys in the first place, and so it would be cool for it to happen, period.
You can pretend to have shared interests at first regardless of how you find out about the other person's interests, so it's not restricted solely to that sort of creepiness, but it still feels like an awfully roundabout way of talking to someone you want to talk to compared to just talking to them.
Besides if you check out somebody you might like and find that they are into Scientology or extreme right wing politics or whatever you might reconsider asking them out in the first place.
The main thing e-stalking reveals is how interested the guy is, and maybe how smooth he is (smooth guys don't do as much research, or they know how to hide it better). So if he brings up the horses, she knows he's into her and maybe a little awkward, but it doesn't tell her he's definitely a psycho- she'll probably judge his weirdness from his appearance and manner.
The creepiness of normal stalking depends on how attractive the target finds the stalker. If you're a hot, rich, 100 year old vampire, you can watch a girl sleep every night for months and she'll think it's awesome (but the vampire didn't admit he was doing it until after they were dating).
If he realized "horseback riding" was the key she'd used to encrypt all her passwords, then that'd be a serious red flag. So there's certainly a point where stalking becomes creepy no matter how hot you are, but looking at someone's Facebook profile isn't it.
Someone who knows enough about you to find you online (knows your name, has seen you, has probably said hi to you) actually saw you online either by searching or by FB suggestions, and saw the part of the profile that you left public. So far nothing stalky about this. This is just someone who wants to know more about you or wants to strike a conversation with you.
Now, if this was a complete stranger who followed you to your locker to find out your name, has it tattooed in his or her butt, slept in his or her car outside of your house, etc, then yeah that's pretty fucked up.
But the fact that people look up what you make public about you isn't stalking. Looks to me like someone with a precious princess complex. Checking on someone's FB and not directly admitting is normal if there's not much confidence, as in not enough to actually send a friend request. Trying to avoid awkwardness is completely human.
It's so that people can discover things you have in common that may not have come up in your conversations.
That's why it's there at all.
Well, that and better ad targeting, but they sell it to us for the reason above.
The real world is far more complicated. I'm sure most girls would agree that less attractive gents can be considered "so sweet" and handsome gents can definitely be creepy.
I have a friend who is quite unattractive, women seem to get creeped out by him if he so much as sits near them.
EDIT: I've known otherwise-attractive guys who've done things like that and provoked "creepy" as a reaction; I've known otherwise-attractive girls who've done similar things and provoked "desperate" as a reaction.
Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but in general the further you get past just talking to mutual friends for "research" the more you're risking coming off bad. The real trick is trying without looking like you're trying. "I dunno, fly casual."
The thing that gets lost in all these attempts to come off good initially is that just being able to talk to someone entirely off-the-cuff and carry a conversation is a very valuable skill—one that's worth practicing!
The creepiness comes in depending upon how they use that information. If they use it to lie and suggest their interests are aligned in ways they aren't or in other deceptive ways then yeah that's creepy but in a way that is actually independent of the so-called "e-stalking". It would still be creepy if they learned the information they used from a friend or whatever other old-school method.
If, on the other hand, the person sees on Facebook that you're a huge fan of some hobby and they too are actually a huge fan of some hobby and they mention that, I don't see that as being creepy at all, but again YMMV.
For example I have a friend who has an extremely good long term memory , he can recall the smallest details about the most insignificant events and conversations that happened many many years ago. He also basically carries an encyclopaedia of trivia around in his brain.
He eventually learned that he had to pretend to be dumber and more forgetful to avoid being thought of as creepy and pedantic.
She was teaching (as a grad student) and realized on the first day of class that she already knew the names of almost all of the students in the class, and little bits about them, from random encounters (like "I was sitting behind those two on the bus a few months ago").
She pretended to be learning their names, anyway, because that's just way too creepy, as you said.
Her memory serves her well in life; she writes fiction. She's also really useful for me to have around -- I have a terrible memory for data I'm not actively using (possibly due to lots of general anesthesia as a kid...), so she remembers tons of things for both of us.
There's nothing wrong with trying to give someone a good impression, but when you research someone's hobbies so you can feign interest in them, you are starting your relationship off on the wrong foot. If you can't be yourself around someone, then things probably aren't going to work out anyways.