Welcome to this week’s Tip of the Hat!
The Executive Assistant has her paws full this week with rescheduling and shifting various project timelines around thanks to recent events. She was batting objects off of ledges redoing Gantt charts when she came across a small list of privacy-related things to do on a rainy day and promptly knocked the list off the pile and onto the floor. While this is not a rainy day, a few of us could use a distraction, so what can be a better distraction than protecting your privacy?
Today we’ll explore doxing: what it is, how it can harm you and your patrons, and what you can do to protect yourself and patrons from being doxed.
Doxing and You
Doxing is the act of publishing private or otherwise identifying information about a person to the public. This can include your home address, phone number, private email address, or bank account details, but it can also involve publishing private information about those close to you, like family members, along with your private information. Most times doxing is used as a tactic to intimidate or to harm a person or their loved ones – an infamous example of doxing in action is Gamergate, where online harassers doxed several games journalists, researchers, and others in the gaming industry.
Being doxed can mean a stranger showing up at your home or otherwise harassing you as you try to go about your daily life, but it can also mean that your identity can be stolen. With just a few pieces of private personal information, you can social engineer your way through customer service staff and help desk representatives to get access to critical accounts, potentially destroying the financial and reputational aspects of a person’s life in the process.
How to Dox Yourself (@ the Library)
The scary part about doxing is that anyone with little time and effort you can get access to private information. The New York Times recently published a guide on how to dox yourself, describing the various places where you can find information that you thought was not available to the public. Search engines, social media, and data brokers are all potential sources for doxers looking for your private information. Take some time to study their resource guide and perform some searches on your favorite search engine. You might be (un)pleasantly surprised as to what you can find about yourself.
Libraries are not exempt from being potential targets for doxers to gain information about a person. Library patrons routinely contact library staff with requests or questions about their patron account or another person’s patron account. What can be in the patron record that can potentially be used to dox someone? Legal name, home address, and birth date are three pieces of patron data that come to mind. Chances are, though, that your patron record includes much more, including telephone numbers, email addresses, and even government or organization-issued identification numbers, such as driver’s license numbers or student or employee id numbers.
Library workers also face the possibility of being doxed and harassed. An article by American Libraries recounted the experiences of two library school professors who were doxed for their research on racial microaggressions in academic libraries. Library workers are subject to the same harassment and doxing that their patrons face in daily life, as documented in the article. Any private information of both patrons and library workers is fair game to a doxer, even at the library.
Dox Defenses
How can you protect yourself and others from doxing?
On the personal front:
- Remove any personal information from the internet that you want to keep private. There are several good guides you can use to help you through this process:
- Be judicious to what you post online through social media and other digital spaces
On the library front, review policies and procedures surrounding patron data confidentiality, particularly surrounding requests to disclose patron information:
- Do you have a procedure in place to verify the patron’s identity if they request access to information in their patron record? What are the procedures regarding identity verification in-person versus over the phone versus online?
- What information is used in the verification process?
- What information do you disclose in the patron record in person? Over the phone? Online?
- What is the procedure when the patron doesn’t have this information for verification?
- What is the procedure if the patron requests access to another patron’s record?
Employee information also needs protection; however, a different set of regulations, policies, and procedures apply. Check with your human resources staff as well as legal counsel to determine what information is private, what is public, and when employers are allowed to disclose employee information to others.
Doxing is scary and can lead to harassment and other dangerous situations. The best personal defense against doxing is to be proactive in limiting the amount of private information a random person off the street can access through a data broker, your online presence, or other places where private information can be accessed by someone with a little bit of time and resources. The best library defense is making sure that there are policies and procedures in place for verification of the patron’s identity before disclosing patron information in certain situations, as well as protecting the privacy of library worker information, be it from not publishing private information such as home addresses to protecting the data from unauthorized access.
