Have you been Doxed?

Have you been Doxed? a reader asks…

Hi Chris, I’ve become a victim of someone posting a bunch of information and pictures about/of me on various social media. Some of it’s true, and some isn’t, all of it’s embarrassing and not something I’m happy with being visible online. Is there anything I can do about this?

Sorry to say, you’ve been doxed. Doxing is a nasty practice where someone collects information about you and makes that information public. It can include partial or full fabrication of information, and can be posted or made available in a lot of different ways. Recently, Donald Trump doxed Senator Lindsay Graham’s private cell phone number (read about that here) in a news conference. And previously, someone hacked into Jennifer Lawrence’s Apple account, stole racy pictures of her and posted them all over the internet. By the way, that wasn’t really a problem with Apple’s security, but with Jlaw’s not-so-strong password. On the flip side, doxing is used by law enforcement to help solve crimes, such as the pictures distributed after the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013.

Sadly, doxing is on the rise as a form of revenge for real or imagined hurts, as well as an outlet for internet trolls and papparazzi with low standards. The first thing you should know is that posting private information is most likely not illegal unless it’s used for slander, blackmail purposes or if information is tied to your identity (SSN, pin codes or passwords). This all depends on the laws in your jurisdiction, so your first step is to find out the legal situation (talk to a lawyer).

If you have no legal recourse, you are more limited in what you can do about removing information from various online locations. One of the first things you should do is contact the social media outlets and issue a report or lodge a complaint. Here’s some options for the most popular social media outlets:

• Facebook: There’s a ‘Report’ link on the right side of every posting on Facebook, and you should definitely use that. In addition, you can also complete this Facebook online form.
• Twitter: On any tweet or image, click the ‘More’ icon (3 horizontal dots), and then choose the ‘Report’ option.
• LinkedIn: You can report fake profiles by clicking the Down arrow next to Send a Message or Send InMail in the top section of the member’s profile, then selecting either Block or Report. LinkedIn has more detail on what you can do at this Help Center article.
• Google +: In the top right corner of the post, click the drop-down arrow, then click ‘Report this post’.
• YouTube: Below the video player, click on the “More” button, highlight and click the “Report” button.
• Pinterest: Click the flag at the bottom of the Pin and choose the report type and reason.
• Instagram: tap the More icon (3 dots), and choose ‘Report Inappropriate’
• Tumblr: Visit their policy statement for specific ways to report inappropriate content, which basically means filling out a form and submitting it online.

Under no circumstances should you retaliate online, you weaken your case for getting things taken down and set yourself up for even more doxing. Your safest course of action is to work to have the information taken down, and just ignore whatever you can’t get removed. With the passage of internet time (like a few days), most of the information will be buried under tons of more current postings of cat videos, what I ate for dinner, and the latest Hollywood scandal.

Now for anyone who wants to reduce their vulnerability to doxing, there are some steps you can take, but you may not like all of them. They include either not using social networking or using only fake profiles, avoiding posting any personal information online, using different email accounts, and auditing yourself. For this last, you can do a google search on yourself and also look up yourself (by email address, usernames you’ve used, etc.) on one or more of these websites:

• https://pipl.com/
• https://www.truthfinder.com
• http://com.lullar.com/
• http://www.whitepages.com/
• http://knowem.com/
• http://www.zabasearch.com/
• http://www.freeality.com/

If you find information about yourself at any of these sites that you don’t want to share, go to the source (social network or other online destination where the information resides) and remove it if at all possible. But remember, information that’s already on the internet is almost impossible to completely eradicate – just ask Jlaw.