Doxxing disproportionately impacts women, existing laws falling flat: Expert

By Emre Basaran

ISTANBUL (AA) – Technological progress inherently comes with high risks, and one of the threats stemming from today’s increasingly digitalized way of life is “doxxing.”

The term refers to the act of searching for and then publishing private or identifying information about anyone on the internet – typically on social media.

It is possible to dox someone with no evil purpose but “doxxers” almost always act with malicious intent.

According to Amanda Manyame, a digital law and rights adviser at women’s rights watchdog Equality Now, the harmful act disproportionately affects women, while existing laws and regulations are proving insufficient to prevent it.

“So, doxxing is essentially when someone finds your private, personally identifiable information, and they publish it onto the internet. Usually, it’s to make this make a person identifiable or findable in the physical space,” she explained.

It could be something “as simple as publishing someone’s home address, or any of their family member’s home addresses or work address,” she said, but added that it is “usually followed with a number of other forms of harms.”

“These harms could be coercion. They could be threats. And it actually could also be physical harms where someone does come to your home or someone mails things to your home,” she added.

Recent research by Equality Now, focusing on the US, found that there is still no federal law in the country regarding doxxing.

They also studied laws in several US states such as California, Virginia, and Texas, along with regulations in countries including the UK, New Zealand, Australia, Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya and Scotland.

“And we also looked at the European law as a regional bloc, as well as international law,” said Manyame.

One of the major points was that “you won’t find the term doxxing in the laws,” she said.

“That’s possibly because doxxing is not necessarily a legal or formal term. So, you don’t necessarily find that as a term. But what the laws do provide, generally, is a protection of someone’s personal information,” she said.

“It’s just that you cannot share personally identifiable information without the person’s consent. However, the protection of someone’s privacy, in this instance, is not fit for purpose when it comes to covering cases of doxxing.”

- Need for ‘digital-specific laws’

Speaking about the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Manyame said that is also insufficient to prevent doxxing.

“There aren’t really laws that are fit to protect from this form of harm,” she emphasized.

She said the GDPR fails to protect users, and especially women, against doxxing due to its structure, which makes proving the existence of the crime difficult – and also because of the many parties involved, such as data processing companies.

“Because the harm is not occurring in the way that the GDPR is meant to protect. When it comes to privacy violations, you could maybe look at constitutional rights to privacy, because those could be broadly applied. But again, because the law is so specific, you would need to meet certain requirements for you to be able to establish a criminal case or a civil case,” she added.

“So, the challenge becomes each law prescribes what the requirements are … In this case, our laws had not foreseen that a harm like doxxing would necessarily occur, especially in the way it is. So those requirements would then be difficult to meet if you’re trying to bring in a doxxing claim.”

All of this, Manyame stressed, proves the need for “digital-specific laws.”

“We had phone books back in the in the day, but not everyone was going to pick up the phone, look up a random name and call people and harass you and send things to your home. It is a lot different now,” she said.

The expert also mentioned the risks stemming from malicious use of artificial intelligence (AI), referring to increasingly convincing and realistic implementations of deepfake technology, especially to produce revenge porn.

“So, definitely, the laws do need to be tailored towards protecting people within the digital space,” she added.

Manyame also mentioned the convoluted and complex nature of abusive content on the internet, saying that “it spreads across multiple countries.”

“That also adds an additional layer of law enforcement needing to work across different countries, law enforcement needing to work with not just one tech platform, but multiple because content does go from X to Facebook and Instagram. So now, it’s dealing with content that’s been shared to multiple platforms,” she said.

- Regualtions for tech platforms

Manyame called for the US to implement laws concerning doxxing and revenge porn, which continue to affect American women disproportionately compared to men.

“The US does need to have legislation that mandates taking down of content such as deepfake-based sexual abuse. It needs to make it a lot easier to have it taken down,” she said.

Currently in the US, under the Communications Decency Act’s Section 230, she explained that platforms are “not liable for content which is on their platform, unless they’ve been made reasonably aware, unless that content is content of terrorism, or child sexual abuse material … (or) unless it is content of sex trafficking.”

“So, unless it is the content that I’ve mentioned, tech platforms would not be liable for it because they are just a mere conduit. It is not content that they created, it is just content that is sitting on their platforms,” Manyame said.

In the current circumstances, these tech platforms are “not required to actively monitor what is on their platforms, unless you’ve made them aware of it,” she said, adding that it is imperative to change this situation at the earliest.​​​​​​​