Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: How Do I Recover From Doxxing?
An anonymous reader writes: I've been doxxed on a popular forum, by one of the moderators no less. The forum owner doesn't care, the hosting company doesn't care. I'm getting bombarded by email and social media, even via GitHub. How does a person recover from this? I don't want to create a whole new identity or shut down all my web sites, social media etc. Can't really change my real name either, at least not without an incredible amount of hassle. The police don't care, and since the forum owner is on the other side of the world it's unlikely there could be any legal consequences, and even if they were they would probably only draw more attention to me. I've tried to clean up Google's search results about me. How do I fix this? What does a fix even look like?
Start Here. Unfortunately there's really not much you can do if the webmaster doesn't care other than maybe try to go over their head somewhere in that chain.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
You know, back in the day they published whole doxxing books. One per town (though you could request another town's by mail). In fact many such doing books were shipped for free to everyone. They were white and yellow too, if I remember correctly.
-------
1. Enjoy your job
2. Make lots of money
3. Work within the law
Choose any two.
trying to live on the web, a "place" that does not really exist. The internet is a great thing for communication and to go looking for information, but there is really no reason for most people to have a "web presence" and people who do not (like 99.99% of all people in human history) do not end up with these sorts of totally artificial and unnecessary problems.
Your first question therefore should be: "why do I care?" followed shortly after by "what does it REALLY matter?"
People who actually know me know what I am like and no amount of online dirt about me would convince them otherwise. People who do not know me could be easily convinced to believe anything about me they might find online - but they do not matter to me; since I do not know them I do not care if they know me or if they imagine they know me. I do not know the internet reputations of any of the people I deal with in the real world, I do however care very much about their actual reputations in the real world and I know who I can trust on their word or a handshake.
This silly mental disorder of the Twitter generation that thinks that an online reputation or identity matters at all need to seriously contemplate what really matters in life and need to remember that NOBODY on Earth in all of human history even had an online reputation before about 20 years ago. In most places, the people you actually need to interact with in the real world care nothing about your internet identity/presence.
If you go to a user page on GitHub, you can report abuse and/or block users.
Even if they are using an alt account, reporting abuse is a good first step because if they create more alts, GitHub may eventually block those, and even the main account if they have one.
On email, mark the sender as spam, for the phone if you can just disable voice mail for a while and whitelist calls.
It's probably just a handful of idiots so if you ignore them and carry on eventually they will tire of getting nothing out of their efforts.
If the moderators of a forum are against you not much you can do except carry on and complain to the web site owners. But do be really sure about what you are complaining about and present evidence of what you are claiming they did.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Questioner here. By publishing my details on this forum they have started off a campaign of harassment. I also have to keep checking Google and bing to make sure I'm not going to be screwed next time I apply for a job, and that it won't stop people contributing to my open source projects.
The worst part is that although I'm not the one doing it, at a casual glance it makes me look childish. Like some 4channer who pissed off other 4channers.
AC nailed it.
Remember when Google insisted that everyone use their real names on G+? I never did offer my real name. Google contacted me three or four times about it, threatening to terminate all services if I didn't supply my name.
I told them that I'm almost sixty years old, and that I've made enemies in my lifetime. I wasn't willing to publish my name and address, so that one of those enemies could find me and murder me.
It was a bullshit story - but it made a point. It is stupid and potentially dangerous to post your real life contact information randomly all over the internet.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
"OMG! Like, Tiffany? She totally told Heather that I had sex with Trevor. I mean, no way! He's such a dork! Anyway, Heather told Megan who told Sierra who wrote a note and passed it around 7th hour band and now everyone in the school thinks Trevor and me are an item! My life is like totally ruined! Now I'm afraid no one will ask me to the prom because they're all gonna think I'm a slut!"
That's what you sound like, and your doxxing problems are going to be about as meaningful a year from now. Your life will suck for a short period of time, then everyone will forget about you and move on to the next bit of juvenile drama.
If you're honestly concerned about your safety (not just your reputation, that damage will blow over and be forgotten) take the evidence to the police and get real legal advice instead of asking a bunch of jerkwads on a random tech web site.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
I see this argument a lot and it's pretty stupid. Phone books were usually only distributed to the local area, where everyone who got one probably already knew you (or your family) and if they tried to harass you via phone the call was easily traced and police would take care of it.
Doxxing on the Internet is different. Over a billion people suddenly have easy access to your info, most of them strangers and many of them out of reach of the law. It's a completely different scenario.
Wait a couple of weeks for the internet's ADHD to kick in and everyone to move on to something else. Problem solved.
This. Wish I had mod points.
In a perfect world one could be honest and use their real identities online. But we live in this world where shit's messed up at the moment.
Unless you need a public persona for your job, or are really committed to being on the front line of an info-war, you are a naive fool if you don't carefully take all prudent measures to preserve your privacy. The "social" fad has just created human cannon fodder for trolls, corporate identity mining operations and nation state surveillance.
So it is with regret that I must inform you: we need more people like you to keep getting doxxed and screwed as collateral damage until enough people wake up and realize that privacy is a pivotal component of a civilized and free society. Good and honest people have the MOST to hide if they want to avoid getting taken advantage of. Don't buy the lies of the "if you have nothing to hide" argument.
Whatever you were doing on the website which screwed you: it should not have required any link to your true identity. If you provided personal info out of free will, then you only have yourself to blame. Sorry for the sour grapes, but there's no recourse. Take the black eye. Soldier on with your life with lessons learned.
Signed your's truly,
{any name I sign with is false}
P.S. Get a password manager and lots of disposable email accounts. If you feel compelled to participate on a forum (hello Dice), do not reuse credentials, emails or nicknames. And even if the administrator is your best friend who you trust with your life, FOLLOW THESE RULES! It's the blackhat who p0wns his website or the troll who abuses it, who you need to protect yourself from, not your friend.
Serious question. Why?
I always use my real full name. My slashdot account is an exception now (it was my email address back in '97) but my email is real. I don't see the benefit of total anonymity--as a free software developer both as a hobbyist and professional programmer, I don't want to participate in development behind some random handle, I want people to know who they are interacting with both in real life and via email/usenet/forums/bugtrackers/whatever. And vice versa Hiding behind anonymous handles is the exception rather than the rule, and while there are sometimes reasons for it, it's unusual. For whatever subconcious reason, I also tend to prefer to know who I'm dealing with--I'd be more likely to ignore or postpone dealing with a bug report from an anonymous person, for example. For some random unimportant forum it might not matter, but when you're participating in development with others over an extended period (years to decades) it would be a bit weird to be anonymous. While I think "doxxing" sounds like childish bullying, I don't see that hiding my name would help much should someone single me out. If they cared enough, they'd find out anyway.
That said, while my name and email addresses are not kept secret, I do value the privacy of my actual personal details etc., and I wouldn't be amused if they were published, but as mentioned in this discussion, stuff like phone numbers and addresses are "public" if you know where to look. Mine is in the paper phone book and you can look it up online. While it would be nice if idiots didn't abuse this, it's not realistic to keep secret stuff we need to communicate with each other. If you do a google image search for my name, three of the first two rows of images are me; two take you to my work profile page and my work contact details (email, phone, address), the other is my github profile. It would probably only take a few more minutes to work out my home address as well for a determined person. Occasionally I do get people contacting my via all these work details for legitimate purposes. While it would be nice to not have idiots abusing these things, we equally can't wall ourselves off from the world in an isolated bubble.
Regards,
Roger
Realistically, do nothing. This will end up falling off the bottom of the page, and people will lose interest / forget. The way to ensure that the problem continues is to respond to it.
Remember the "Bring back our girls" campaign. Had everyone from Michelle Obama down making public statements of support. Go and have a read about how the # tag and search results basically disappeared after a month.
While it sucks now, the people who send you stuff based on a forum are not really invested in you, and once the next object of their hatred arrived it will move on. Keep you head up and weather the storm.
She posted on a board on which people called out others' bad behavior online. Doxxing was against that board's rules. Calling for online-only raids on other sites was against their rules, as I recall. That was around 2004, so it's hardly representative of her current behavior.
Do at least a modicum of research before repeating lies, please.
Said board also bragged about harassing people, including proudly announcing they had one "confirmed kill" -- they were mentioned in someone's suicide note, which they took as a badge of honor. And Zoe Quinn bragged about being part of that community -- until she decided to start playing the Feminist Victim card.
But remember, poor widdle Zoe Quinn is an innocent pure princess and you should give her patreon funbux, plz. And ignore that nasty man she admitted to raping 5 times, he's just a mean old jilted ex.
Oh and definitely ignore that time Zoe and her friend, DailyKOS Intern Margaret Pless swatted a free speech lawyer who had the wrong politics. Remember: Zoe Quinn is a feminist and a girl -- ON THE INTERNET -- which means she's an innocent victim and should be coddled no matter how vile she acts. I mean, pure and innocent. Not vile. Girls can't be vile, that would be as if they were human beings and capable of fallibility -- or responsible for their own actions.
And besides, that Cernovich guy's a conservative, he probably has bad thoughts that make it ok to try to have him killed by the police.
Posting as AC because when you talk about Zoe Quinn, her psychotic supporters (who are currently busy defending Sarah Nyberg, a self admitted pedophile and child pornography trafficker) tend to doxx you, swatt you, and send dead animals to your house. Then act like they never did nuthin' but by god you're evil so you did deserve what they didn't do, and besides, didn't you know white men are the cause of all the evil in the world?