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The conceptual expansion of Doxxing as complained about online, at the same time that internet privacy has collapsed in most cases, is fascinating.
Fifteen years ago Doxxing was a narrow concept: you hunted down and exposed the real identity of someone who was posting pseudonymously on the internet, who at least tacitly hid their identity and did not want their "real" identity to be connected with their pseudonym.
Today, I see people accused of doxxing for things like finding out public information about someone who was real-name and real-face posting to begin with. Or finding the identities of public officials who performed public acts. Or normal acts of paparazzi following celebrities. It has been reduced to publishing any information about anyone in any situation.
In my mind, Doxxing properly has three factors: to be guilty of Doxxing you must a) expose real life details about b) someone posting under a pseudonym on the internet who c) had a reasonable expectation those details wouldn't become known. A LOT of people believe in exceptions for "this guy is really bad tho actually" or "well this was a journalist doing it;" I don't necessarily buy those.
This is clearly not a case of doxxing, it fails all three points. Franco wasn't posting on the internet under a pseudonym, he was communicating using his government name with a company. No real life details about him were exposed beyond his name, the rest came out after it was already a story. Franco can't possibly have reasonably expected that his message was private, particularly when it consisted of an insult.
The definition of "doxing" also has been muddled by the decision of several state governments (example) to criminalize publication of personal information with intent to harm (i. e., harassment) under the name "doxing" (which, under the traditional definition, does not necessarily involve intent to harm).
Last year, the administrator of Kiwi Farms urged that website's users to switch to a different word, such as "phonebooking", "unmasking", or "sunshining".
I see no reason to follow Kiwi Farms' definition. Claiming that they have rules against using the information to harm ignores, probably deliberately, that they're facilitating harm by other people.
Yes, it's "different" because they don't intend harm themselves, but 1) it's easy to lie about that without being detected, and they probably are lying about it and 2) there's no useful moral principle that says that it's okay to participate in harm because the harm wasn't your terminal goal.
How is it facilitating harm to post publicly available information? If someone wanted to use the information for harm, they wouldn't be stopped just because Kiwi Farms deleted it. It's public information, so they can find it anyway.
In fact, it's security theater to think that information, once published, can somehow be unpublished. You can't put the genie back in the bottle, and it's better to accept that it's out there and deal with it accordingly. To do otherwise would be to delude yourself and operate under false beliefs.
Do you have any evidence for this or is this just baseless speculation? I can find countless examples where people who used the information to cause harm (a/k/a cowtipping) were summarily banned from the site. How is it possible to lie about that?
Making things easier to do facilitates it and, in practice, can drastically increase its prevalence, even if it is not impossible to do without your help. This is a common rationalist fallacy: "They could have done it ANYWAY". Things don't work that way.
Also see Scott's article https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/07/29/against-signal-boosting-as-doxxing/
Observation of how human beings behave in similar contexts.
But surely then you would direct your ire at the ones who actually make doxing possible, i.e. the data brokers who hoover up everyone's data without even the slightest resistance. A lot of American doxes happen because it's possible to type someone's name into a people finder site (like TruePeopleSearch) and get their address in seconds. I myself have done this many times when writing threads, it's shockingly easy. Furthermore, they make deleting this data impossible. You can send in removal requests, but this only happens temporarily and they will republish your data a few months later when they update their database with new dox. There are several paid services dedicated to regularly sending takedown requests so you don't have to do it yourself.
I can understand why people take issue with doxing, but whenever I confront people about this, they seem to not understand where doxes actually come from and it comes across as an isolated demand for rigor to complain about Kiwi Farms and spare not even a crumb of attention on data brokers. It promotes a false sense of security to paint this picture where the only problem is having a thread on the site, and if it was just gone, everything would be fine. Not so. The reality is that if you're an American (and you own a house, or have a job, or drive a car), you're one leak of your legal name away from having your address known to malicious actors. If you post under your legal name, then you should consider yourself already doxed.
I really cannot understate how uniquely an American problem this is, and how most of the problem is from data brokers. Most other countries have laws against data collection which at least attempt to mitigate people buying and selling people's data. Most of the people I've doxed are Americans and most of them were doxed using people finder sites. Sure, other countries have people finder sites, but they are limited in completeness or searchability. If data brokers disappeared overnight, 90% of the doxes posted on KF would not be possible anymore, and we would have to rely on good old-fashioned detective work (e.g. geolocation of images posted by the subject). The sooner people dispense with this fiction that doxing is some magic wand waved by dark wizards, the sooner people can direct their attention to the actual doxers, the data brokers who make doxing possible.
And who knows, if I'm being optimistic, maybe we can also have a conversation about how we ought to not collect people's data in the first place. I've said it before and I'll say it again, data leaks are inevitable. The only solution to data leaks is to not collect data. It's bad enough that KYC laws force companies to force customers to dox themselves to access money, that's just a vector to leak their identities. It's even worse when sites like Discord freely give in to age verification regimes and force people to take ID selfies. The gold standard should be services like Mullvad, which collect as little identifying information as possible. They don't even require an email address.
The central example in this post was obviously done with the intention of ruining his chances at employment. I don't like that, and I don't think that's in the spirit of the farms (that leans closer to a-logging territory), but surely I'm still allowed to discuss someone's posts without going full a-log like this. Obviously, nobody on the farms would care if someone made a racist joke, but I otherwise can't think of a principle that wouldn't preclude discussion of anyone on the Internet at all.
That's not evidence, that's just speculation. Granted, I suppose it's not as baseless, but I'm not impressed by this answer.
By the reasoning in the first part of your post, that shouldn't matter at all. The Twitter thread had no effect on him because since he posted under his real name, people could have gone to a data broker, found his employer, and harassed him regardless of whether the Twitter thread existed or not.
The reason that it did matter is that human beings don't behave the way you describe. A thread on social media is a coordination point to harass a person, even if the information is already available from a data broker or anywhere else.
Scott's whole point was that even though the information was public, spreading it still enables harassment that wouldn't have existed without it being spread. You seem to recognize that this is true for Scott's example, but you don't seem willing to generalize it. Kiwi Farms and that Twitter thread are in basically the same situation. Just like that guy could have his chances at employment ruined (even though Twitter only spread information that existed anyway), people whose information is signal-boosted by Kiwi Farms have a much greater chance to be harassed (even though Kiwi Farms only spreads information that existed anyway).
That's the autistic answer. People routinely act in ways which can be predicted, but do not follow from logical deductions. You need to be able to recognize them.
I only agree with Scott's example because the signal booster basically said "let's ruin his chances at employment indefinitely." Again, that's a-logging behaviour. If she had just said "this man is racist," I wouldn't find that objectionable (besides that I disagree on the object level of racism being an issue). Obviously, if someone with a huge following tells her audience to contact his employer, they will probably go and contact his employer and harass them.
I don't agree that criticising someone, regardless of the way you frame it, especially when you have explicit disclaimers against harassment as we do on the Kiwi Farms, is somehow enabling or promoting harassment. That principle seems to imply that no one is allowed to criticise anyone for any reason, lest the criticism become a coordination point for harassment.
Scott's point was that just because the information was available anyway doesn't mean that spreading it doesn't cause harm. This point does not depend on anyone explicitly saying they are going to cause harm. It's about refuting the argument "oh, the information is available already". It's true that in this specific example someone said they were going to cause harm, but Scott's point is more general than that.
Explicit disclaimers are things you put in when you need to cover your ass. The reason the Twitter doxing didn't include explicit disclaimers is that anti-racism social justice has such status that nobody is going to go after them no matter what they do, so they didn't need to cover their ass. Kiwi farms doesn't have this status, and people there need to cover their ass.
If Kiwi Farms posters actually didn't want to cause harm, they wouldn't signal-boost information that can be used to harm. Their actions would be consistent with not wanting to cause harm, not their disclaimers.
Someone can be criticised without mentioning their real name, address, or employer, aside from edge cases that apply to almost nobody attacked by Kiwi Farms.
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