For a very brief time, "doxing" (that is, dropping dox, that is, dropping docs, or documents) used to mean something useful. You gathered information that was not out in public, for example by talking to people or by stealing it, and put it out in the open.
It's very silly to talk about doxing when all someone has done is gather information anyone else can equally easily obtain, just given enough patience and time, especially when it's information the person in question put out there themselves. If it doesn't take any special skills or connections to obtain the information, but only the inclination to actually perform the research on publicly available data, I don't see what has been done that is unethical.
It's neither of those. Stalking refers to persistent, unwanted, one-sided interactions with a person such as following, surveilling, calling, or sending messages or gifts. Investigating a person's past or identity doesn't involve any interaction with the physical person. Harassment is persistent attempts to interact with someone after having been asked to stop. Again, an investigation doesn't require any form of interaction.
> Harassment is persistent attempts to interact with someone
No, harassment also includes persistent attempts to cause someone grief, whether or not they involve direct interactions with that person.
From Wikipedia:
> Harassment covers a wide range of behaviors of an offensive nature. It is commonly understood as behavior that demeans, humiliates, and intimidates a person.
Doxing in the loose sense could be harassment in certain circumstances, such as if you broadcast a person's home address to an audience with the intent to cause that audience to use that address, even if the address was already out there. In that case, the problem is not the release of information, but the intent you're communicating with the release. It would be the same if you told that audience "you know guys? It's not very difficult to find jdoe's home address if you google his name. I'm not saying anything, I'm just saying." Merely de-pseudonymizing a screen name may or may not be harassment. Divulging that jdoe's real name is John Doe would not have the same implications as if his name was, say, Keanu Reeves.
Because the two are distinct, one can't simply replace "doxing" with "harassment".
Generally speaking, every case I've seen of people using the term "doxing" tends to be for the case that specifically is harassment; it has the connotation of using the information, precisely because if you aren't intending to use it there's no good reason for you to have it.
Language evolves. Connotation tends to become definition. Not always the only definition, but connotation becomes the "especially" or the "definition 2", and can become the primary definition over time.
That's not what I mean. If we agree that harassment is wrong and that doxing is not harassment (because not all doxing is harassment), then it's incorrect to say that doxing is wrong. For example, the article from the blog, even if we agree that it is doxing, isn't harassment. The person being discussed is presented in a positive light:
>I for one will be buying Denis/Masha/whoever a well deserved cup of coffee.
Using one term when what is meant is actually the other serves nothing but to sow confusion.
You can harass someone while discussing them in a positive light.
And i don't just mean under colloquial definition, i mean under the legal definition of harrasment. In fact its fairly common for unwanted "positive" attention to be harrasment - e.g. unwanted sexual advances mostly fit that description.
You are generalizing an irrelevant point. What I was getting at is that unlike the usual usage of doxing, it was not a call to go bother that person. I didn't think I needed to make that point this explicitly within the context of this subthread.
Which is irrelavent as that is not a requirement for it to be harrasment.
I get that a call to action is a common feature of doxing and it wasn't present here, but its not a particularly common feature of harrasment outside of the context of doxing and nothing in the definition of harrasment requires it.
That's just another way of saying "words don't have meanings". Yes, it evolves, but to preserve the original meanings, that evolution should be slowed down as much as possible to avoid “black is white” effects.
In this case archive.today has a lot of influence over the information we take in because of the rise in paywalls. They have the potential of modifying the news we absorb at scale.
In that context I don't think the question ("actually, who is providing all this information to me and what interests drive them") is one that's misplaced. Maybe we shouldn't look into a gift horse's mouth but don't forget this could be a Trojan horse as well.
The article brought to light some ties to Russia but probably not ties to its government and its troll farms. Rather an independent and pretty rebellious citizen. That's good to hear. And that's valuable information. I trust the site more after reading the article, not less.
The article could have redacted the names they found but they were found with public sources and these sources validate the encountered information (otherwise the results could have been dismissed)
Did you read the article? They dug deep, they didn't just do a google search and leave it at that. They drew links between deleted posts and defunct accounts, they compared profile pictures of anonymous profiles.
I'm not defending the archive.today webmaster but it's unfortunately understandable they are angry. Saying what the blogger did was merely point out public information is a gross oversimplification.
That is NOT the line for doxxing at all, I don't know why you hang your argument on that aspect. Even institutions that care about secrecy like governments state that documents that aggregate ostensibly public information can raise the classification level of a document above being non-classified. The reasons for this are obvious, essentially aggregated information can lead one to draw conclusions that otherwise are not obvious. That is akin to what the original article by Gyrovague does.
Again, did you read my comment? I know what it means now. My point is about highlighting the change in meaning, not about obstinately denying what the word means.
>Even institutions that care about secrecy like governments state [...]
A given organization can have whatever policy it wants with regards to which documents it wants to allow to be made public. It could make all documents printed on non-yellow paper classified. That has nothing to do with the ethics of doxing.
>The reasons for this are obvious, essentially aggregated information can lead one to draw conclusions that otherwise are not obvious.
A secret is not something that's not obvious, it's a datum that's strictly controlled by the people who know it. If I can find some information about your real identity just by searching for it online then it's not a secret; you don't control that piece of information. You've given up that control by divulging the information in a public space where information often remains indefinitely.
Eh, you can find in public data things like "what is someone's address" based only on their name by looking up public records of mortgage records. That however is quite bad form, and if you did do that, I think it would be pretty unethical.
It's very silly to talk about doxing when all someone has done is gather information anyone else can equally easily obtain, just given enough patience and time, especially when it's information the person in question put out there themselves. If it doesn't take any special skills or connections to obtain the information, but only the inclination to actually perform the research on publicly available data, I don't see what has been done that is unethical.