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It's one of those debates "Is making it easier to find publicly known info the same as doxing?"
Yes, that's exactly what it is.
My street address is not private. It's in the phone book. But if a journalist with 50k followers tweeted it with the implication that I'm a bad guy, that presents a hazard that didn't exist by my address merely being the in the phone book.
That is, Doxxing is a two-ingredient recipe: 1. The information, 2. The reason for calling attention to the information to a specific audience. Neither ingredient is necessarily a hazard on its own.
Honestly all I need is the intentional malice, everything else is just rules lawyering. If someone unintentionally lets my address out because the posted a photo we took together in front of my home that's not even the same universe as someone doing something intentionally harmful.
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I think this is right. Intent matters. Of those 50k the vast majority will not do anything but all it takes is one crazy person...and also employers, family, etc.
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I've always come down on the side of "yes, absolutely that is doxxing". Because we have a bunch of legal and technical systems that are not designed with privacy in mind at all. The DMV sells off driver license information. House ownership is listed in public court records. Websites often require real life names and addresses just in case an unlikely legal incident requires the website owner to need those things. Phone numbers and addresses are also routinely scooped up by advertising companies and resold.
I think Musk made the point that if someone has been posting these reporters' home addresses all over twitter they would rightly be screaming bloody murder at twitter for allowing that doxing to take place.
I do think that the government should get its fucking act together and start allowing a bunch of these public records to be privatized, or at least hidden from easy public view. At least that will end this silly aspect of the doxxing debate. Though it will probably make things worse in terms of actual consequences for people, since the government routinely scoops up a bunch of private information, stores it in an unsecured way, and gets predictably hacked. The idiots had the whole security clearance database hacked and leaked to the Chinese.
It is precisely because all of those things are historically public information that associating them with someone's real name is not doxxing. Doxxing is specifically and exclusively the act of exposing the real name of a pseudonymous person.
A reporter's home address is not dox unless that reporter is Deep Throat.
That is not what doxxing is. Doxxing is exposing personally identifiable information (PII) about a person online. PII is not just someone's name. It also includes phone number, address, and SSN.
I'm not making these definitions up, search for the definition of doxxing and it will be much closer to my definition than yours.
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If only FDR had thought to add "freedom from inquisition" to his Four Freedoms. I wonder what the corresponding Rockwell painting would look like.
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