Doxing is the intentional public release onto the Internet of personal information about an individual by a third party, often with the intent to humiliate, threaten, intimidate, or punish the identified individual. In this paper I present a conceptual analysis of the practice of doxing and how it differs from other forms of privacy violation. I distinguish between three types of doxing: deanonymizing doxing, where personal information establishing the identity of a formerly anonymous individual is released; targeting doxing, that discloses (...) personal information that reveals specific details of an individual’s circumstances that are usually private, obscure, or obfuscated; and delegitimizing doxing, which reveals intimate personal information that damages the credibility of that individual. I also describe how doxing differs from blackmail and defamation. I argue that doxing may be justified in cases where it reveals wrongdoing, but only if the information released is necessary to reveal that such wrongdoing has occurred and if it is in the public interest to reveal such wrongdoing. Revealing additional information, such as that which allows an individual to be targeted for harassment and intimidation, is unjustified. I illustrate my discussion with the examples of the alleged identification of the creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, by Newsweek magazine, the identification of the notorious Reddit user Violentacrez by the blog Gawker, and the harassment of game developer Zoe Quinn in the ‘GamerGate’ Internet campaign. (shrink)

Digilantism is punishment through online exposure of supposed wrongdoing. Paedophile hunting is one example, and the practice is open to many of the classical objections to vigilantism. But it lies on a spectrum that contains many other kinds of digilantism. Scambaiting is among the other kinds. It consists of attracting online approaches from perpetrators of different kinds of online advance-fee fraud. Characteristically, it takes the form of protracted email exchanges between scammers and scambaiters. These exchanges are mainly down-to-earth and occasionally (...) testy conversations about the details of fictitious money transfers or involved explanations of delays in payment. They succeed in their purpose if they waste a lot of their targets’ time, but they can also be pursued as a sort of comic art form. Scambaiting exchanges seem often, but not always, to be relatively harmless. They therefore help to make intelligible a region of morally permissible digilantism on the spectrum of digilantism. Not that scambaiters never go too far, but their typical weapons inflict and risk inflicting far less harm than those of other digilantes, and there are actual scambaiting norms that have been chosen because of their relative harmlessness. (shrink)