(Credit:PCMag/Zain bin Awais/Michael Burrell/Peshkova/Juanmonino/via Getty Images)
The internet never forgets. With every post, comment, like, and share, you hand out information about yourself and your habits. Doxxing, short for “dropping documents,” is the act of leaking someone’s personal information with the intent to harass, humiliate, bully, or extort them. There’s no hard list of reasons someone has to doxx another. Rather, it is a concerted, malicious effort that could stem from opposing views, personal disputes, or simple opportunism. The distressing truth is that attackers don’t need a specific motivation to doxx someone.
This article was made possible in part by Incogni. It was written and edited independently without partner oversight.
Unfortunately, complete protection against doxxing is impractical. Even if you manage to remove all traces of your digital footprint, individuals with ill intent can still upload your information and place you or your loved ones at risk. But the situation isn't entirely hopeless. I'm here to help you understand what doxxing is, and some simple steps you can take now to protect yourself in the future.
What Does a Doxxing Attack Look Like?
Imagine this: A few days ago, a social media post of yours went viral. It could have been a divisive political comment, a meme, or maybe it was something as mundane as a pet photo with your front yard in the background. All of a sudden, your phone is blowing up with calls from strangers yelling obscenities or leaving harassing messages. Your employer, too, has had dozens of complaints filed against you from people you don't know and have never interacted with.
Friends and family are trying to contact you over posts on their social media profiles about you. It continues to escalate. Erroneous food delivery orders get placed to your house. Piles of junk mail from various companies and organizations begin to clutter your mailbox. Your children’s school receives threats. People post photos and videos online of themselves passing by your house. Anyone looking for it can now get their hands on your address, place of work, and more. You could become a victim of swatting or a more traditional break-in. It becomes necessary to freeze your credit and bank accounts over fears of identity theft.
The nightmare doesn’t end overnight, as social media coverage snowballs the problem, keeping you in the internet’s spotlight for weeks, if not months or years. Finally, the harassment settles down, but it doesn’t erase the trauma, financial fallout, and potential social exclusion you’ve faced.
5 Smart Ways to Protect Yourself From Doxxing
Doxxing is a legal gray area. Some states, such as Oregon, have measures in place for victims of doxxing to seek restitution. However, implementing fierce anti-doxxing laws is tricky since it can infringe on free and protected speech. Similar to age verification laws, these initiatives can use good intent as a way to censor and silence speech. While the release of personal information in itself isn’t usually illegal, how that information was obtained and the actions surrounding its use often fall under applicable laws for harassment, stalking, trespassing, and threats.
1. Limit What You Share
The best thing you can do to protect yourself from doxxing is to limit what you share in general, especially on public platforms. While it isn’t a foolproof solution in a world of data breaches and leaks, restricting the personal information you share across social media and other sites makes it more difficult for anyone to dig up information on you.
2. Use a Personal Data Removal Service
Scouring the web for every scrap of personal information can be a monolithic task, especially if you've grown up with social media. Personal data removal services can take care of some of that hard work by scrubbing the web for you. Incogni and Optery, for example, can show you what aggregators have your data for free, though you'll have to file your own requests for it to be taken down unless you subscribe to a premium plan. These tools are quite effective at removing public information, making it more difficult for bad actors to gather a profile on you.
3. Consider a Pseudonym
Pseudonyms can help by obfuscating your real name at first glance, but they likely won’t hold up against a concerted effort to unmask you. To be the most effective, all of your social media profiles need to be anonymized with different names. Even then, one slip-up from a friend referring to you by name or an accidental tag in a post could undermine your anonymity.
4. Use a VPN
Though it won’t completely anonymize you, a virtual private network (VPN) like Nord or Proton can help. Using a VPN will obfuscate your real location, making it difficult for prying eyes to get geographic data on you based on your browsing habits. What it won’t do is stop bad actors from pilfering publicly available data on social media profiles.
5. Bonus Tips
Some additional measures you can take include:
- Adjust the privacy settings on social media to limit who can view your profile.
- Manually remove sensitive personal data from accounts.
- When registering a domain, ensure your WHOIS registration is hidden.
- Use a password manager to mitigate the risk of account takeovers.
- Lock down your online presence and be mindful of what you share.
Ultimately, you never know who is on the other side of a username or what lengths they will go to harm you. While many of us prefer to operate under the idea that strangers are operating with good intent, this isn't always the case. Malicious entities prey on people's good faith to exploit them, whether that be for data or more nefarious aims. Always be sure to guard your private information as though it has immense value, because it does.