As we increasingly turn to the internet for a variety of tasks and social activities, our digital footprint grows. While platforms such as Facebook, WhatsApp and Telegram bring new ways to stay connected to friends and family and make new connections, we need to be careful about the information we leave in the public domain, who could potentially find it and how it could be used.
An awareness of the downsides of social media platforms is growing: they are known vehicles for the spread of misinformation and the incubation of potentially dangerous views and ideologies. They are also used by perpetrators of doxing (intentionally revealing personal information about a targeted individual online), both for gathering information that may harm an individual when launched into public awareness, and for circulating and publicising it.
Doxing: when personal information is revealed online
The term doxing, deriving from ‘dropping’ documents or ‘docs’ to reveal someone’s identity, now refers to any digital attack where personal information about an individual is found online and published or shared with the intention of publicly humiliating or condemning them or compromising their safety. Doxing has led to campaigns being launched against those affected, with consequences ranging from reputational damage to threats to their safety and that of those close to them. Doxing can also lead to cybersecurity issues, making victims more vulnerable to hacking.
The technique of doxing is often motivated by a desire for revenge or to punish someone for holding opposing views or beliefs to those of the perpetrator, and the aim is to violate the victim’s privacy and for them to be embarrassed, threatened or harassed as a result. Victims include high-profile celebrities and politicians, as well as those in specific occupations such as abortion providers, and members of activist groups. However, anyone can potentially fall victim to doxing if someone has a vendetta against them as a result of conflict either online or in the real world.
How doxing happens
Doxing involves scraping the internet to find information about an individual that could cause them harm if brought to public attention. Such information can include contact details, addresses, business interests, comments and views posted online, and photos.
Doxers seek this data from a number of sources: search engines and social media provide a wealth of readily-available information, and some doxers also use paid-for databases, data brokers and the dark web to uncover information. Investigations are often progressive, with just a small amount of data opening doxers up to discovering much more. For example, people often use the same username across different platforms, so once a doxer has identified an individual’s username on one platform, it’s often easy for them to find material posted by the same person across a variety of websites.
Once sourced, doxers publish their findings online to crowd-source attacks and drum up negative sentiment. Resulting actions against the victim can range from embarrassment and reputational damage to threats and even physical harm. Once published, the information is often circulated, shared and commented on, compounding the problems and making it extremely difficult to remove the material from the internet.
What are the digital platforms doing to combat doxing?
In April 2022, Meta took steps to reduce doxing on its platform by banning the sharing of residential addresses, including photographs taken outside private residences, regardless of whether they are publicly available elsewhere online. Meta did, however, announce an exception to the policy if “the property depicted is the focus of the news story” or a publicly-owned official residence. And while such measures may help reduce doxing, some argue that social media companies are not going far enough: Meta has announced it will not be creating a channel to specifically handle complaints of doxing.
How can you minimise the chance of falling victim to doxing?
The best way to avoid falling victim to doxing is to carefully manage your digital footprint.
To gain a comprehensive understanding of your digital footprint that will enable you to manage it successfully, extensive searches must be undertaken to capture any content relating to you online.
There are some straightforward steps, such as ensuring your social media profiles are set as private, that you can take immediately to limit the amount of information about you that is publicly available. You can also contact companies who hold data on you and request that it is removed. Preparation ahead of any potential abuse of your public information is key to shaping your digital profile and mitigating the risk of falling victim to public doxing. Taking steps to prevent opportunities for your privacy to be violated is key: protecting your digital data is as important as protecting your physical possessions.
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We firmly believe that the internet should be available and accessible to anyone, and are committed to providing a website that is accessible to the widest possible audience, regardless of circumstance and ability.
To fulfill this, we aim to adhere as strictly as possible to the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 (WCAG 2.1) at the AA level. These guidelines explain how to make web content accessible to people with a wide array of disabilities. Complying with those guidelines helps us ensure that the website is accessible to all people: blind people, people with motor impairments, visual impairment, cognitive disabilities, and more.
This website utilizes various technologies that are meant to make it as accessible as possible at all times. We utilize an accessibility interface that allows persons with specific disabilities to adjust the website’s UI (user interface) and design it to their personal needs.
Additionally, the website utilizes an AI-based application that runs in the background and optimizes its accessibility level constantly. This application remediates the website’s HTML, adapts Its functionality and behavior for screen-readers used by the blind users, and for keyboard functions used by individuals with motor impairments.
If you’ve found a malfunction or have ideas for improvement, we’ll be happy to hear from you. You can reach out to the website’s operators by using the following email webrequests@digitalis.com
Our website implements the ARIA attributes (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) technique, alongside various different behavioral changes, to ensure blind users visiting with screen-readers are able to read, comprehend, and enjoy the website’s functions. As soon as a user with a screen-reader enters your site, they immediately receive a prompt to enter the Screen-Reader Profile so they can browse and operate your site effectively. Here’s how our website covers some of the most important screen-reader requirements, alongside console screenshots of code examples:
Screen-reader optimization: we run a background process that learns the website’s components from top to bottom, to ensure ongoing compliance even when updating the website. In this process, we provide screen-readers with meaningful data using the ARIA set of attributes. For example, we provide accurate form labels; descriptions for actionable icons (social media icons, search icons, cart icons, etc.); validation guidance for form inputs; element roles such as buttons, menus, modal dialogues (popups), and others. Additionally, the background process scans all of the website’s images and provides an accurate and meaningful image-object-recognition-based description as an ALT (alternate text) tag for images that are not described. It will also extract texts that are embedded within the image, using an OCR (optical character recognition) technology. To turn on screen-reader adjustments at any time, users need only to press the Alt+1 keyboard combination. Screen-reader users also get automatic announcements to turn the Screen-reader mode on as soon as they enter the website.
These adjustments are compatible with all popular screen readers, including JAWS and NVDA.
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Users can also use shortcuts such as “M” (menus), “H” (headings), “F” (forms), “B” (buttons), and “G” (graphics) to jump to specific elements.
We aim to support the widest array of browsers and assistive technologies as possible, so our users can choose the best fitting tools for them, with as few limitations as possible. Therefore, we have worked very hard to be able to support all major systems that comprise over 95% of the user market share including Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Opera and Microsoft Edge, JAWS and NVDA (screen readers), both for Windows and for MAC users.
Despite our very best efforts to allow anybody to adjust the website to their needs, there may still be pages or sections that are not fully accessible, are in the process of becoming accessible, or are lacking an adequate technological solution to make them accessible. Still, we are continually improving our accessibility, adding, updating and improving its options and features, and developing and adopting new technologies. All this is meant to reach the optimal level of accessibility, following technological advancements. For any assistance, please reach out to webrequests@digitalis.com