Doxxing: How to Stay Safe and Protect Yourself - NYCLU (2024)

FAQs

How can we protect against doxxing? ›

Minimize Your Digital Footprint. Your social media presence can reveal a lot about you. You should review your privacy settings on your social media accounts. You may want to remove personally identifiable information, change your account visibility, edit who can see your posts, or remove certain media.

California's Laws Against Doxing

Cyberstalking is a direct form of cyber harassment. It is a direct action against a person. Doxing is an indirect form of harassment. California prosecutes doxing under its electronic cyber-harassment statute (Penal Code §653.2).

If an individual or organization has targeted/doxed you along with false or misleading statements about you on their website, social media accounts, or elsewhere, and these statements are causing you harm, consider sending a written request to the organization to remove or correct the statements.

Can You Sue For Doxxing? Yes, it is possible to sue someone for doxxing, especially if they post private and personal data of yours. You can bring a tort, which is a type of civil suit against the people who doxxed you.

This means that doxing someone with the intent to make someone fear for their safety or to incite others to cause them harm can be illegal. Furthermore, the First Amendment does not protect people from being sued for: Publishing highly personal information about someone that's not of legitimate concern to the public.

This information can include details such as their full name, home address, telephone number, place of work, and other sensitive information. Doxxing is often carried out to expose, threaten, or intimidate someone and can lead to severe consequences, such as physical harm, stalking, or loss of employment.

The most common way people realize they've been doxxed is when they start to notice the consequences. However, you can also find out if someone is leaking your private details by: Searching your name online. Checking social media.

The information that is shared can vary. Some of it might just be innocent data, but other info can be harmful or dangerous. The effects of doxxing can be quite annoying, such as unwanted pizza deliveries, but can also result in more serious problems such as cyberbullying or harassment in real life.

There are currently no federal laws that explicitly criminalize doxing members of the public. A handful of states, including California, Arizona, and Illinois, have recently adopted laws criminalizing certain forms of doxing.

Can I report someone for doxxing me? ›

Once you have evidence (or sooner if you are under immediate physical threat), you should contact local law enforcement. It's not generally against the law to dox someone in the US, but it is illegal to harass someone – and sometimes doxxers can go well beyond simple harassment to severe physical endangerment.

While the word “doxxing” isn't used in the U.S. federal criminal code, it is a federal crime to make “restricted personal information” of certain individuals publicly available if it was done with an intent to threaten, intimidate or in an act of violence.

Set your profiles, usernames, and handles to private. If you maintain a public profile for your work, consider maintaining a private account for close friends and family only and set individual posts that may be sensitive to "friends only." Remove any addresses, places of work, or specific locations from your accounts.

Doxing is the act of revealing personal information about someone online without their consent. It can include information such as the victim's real name, home address, workplace, phone number, financial information, and other personal details.

Can a VPN prevent doxxing? A VPN prevents people from tracing your IP address, which can deter potential doxxers. However, a VPN is only one layer of protection, and should not be relied upon alone, as personal information can still come from social media accounts, public records, or data breaches.

Thirteen states have adopted statutes to protect members of the public and/or those in certain professional occupations from doxing. Ten states protect all persons, Minnesota only applies to law enforcement officials, and Colorado and Oklahoma apply to a specific list of government officials.