Doxing simply refers to the process of gathering or deducing other people’s information such as name, age, email, address, telephone number, photographs etc. using publicly available sources such as the Internet. In other words, doxing is the act of using the Internet to search for personal details about a person.
Doxing is done by initially taking a piece of information (such as “name” or “email address”) and keeping it as a base to find out other possible details about the person. The term “doxing” is derived from the word “document tracing” which means to retrieve documents about a particular person or company in order to learn more about them.
Steps to Protect Yourself from Doxing:
The following are some of the most commonly targeted pieces of information that can be easily obtained through doxing:
- Full name
- Age, gender and date of birth
- Location and place of birth
- Email addresses and username
- Phone number
- Social networking profiles, websites and blogs
So, it is always a good practice to keep the above bits of information hidden. Even though it is not possible to do this in all cases, you can still take care to protect as much information as you can from going public. You can consider the following additional tips for further protection:
Do not upload personal photographs on web albums such as “Picasa”. Even if you do, make sure that your album is hidden from public and search engines.
If you do not intend to show up your profile on search engines, it is a wise choice to make all the Internet profiles private.
Maximize the privacy settings of your social network profiles. Make sure that your individual albums and photographs have their privacy settings configured.
Do not use the same email address for all you accounts. Instead, create separate email IDs for individual activities such as gaming, forum participation, banking accounts etc.
