Totally agree on that.
People overshare at the point of keeping their phone's geotags on all the time, so you can always see where they are. And at the same time they share quotes about Orwell's 1984 to appear smart, lol.
Because of this oversharing, doxxing people has become trivial. Back 20 years ago, doxxing someone needed some serious detective work, including tracing IPs to see the person's approximate location, etc. Today, all it takes is just enough patience, a Facebook and Twitter account, and Google: you find everything on the table. And the most difficult ones are dots that don't take too much effort to be connected.
I highly doubt that what happens to them can be considered doxxing, too: according to Cambridge Dictionary, doxxing means "to publish private information about someone on the internet, without their permission and in a way that reveals their name, where they live, etc.:"
To publish private information on the internet means that the info were NOT on the internet, I got them by offline means (i.e. by knowing that person IRL), and I posted them somewhere. But if the info were already on the internet, can it be considered doxxing, if even the average joe can get them with minimum effort?
Inspired by
@AltisticRight 's informative mild PL above, I'd like to add on to this through my professional experience.
How do you think credit card companies, banks, eCommerce merchants, etc. figure out if it was actually
you who ordered that expensive piece of tech for your folks that live across the country? Or when you place an order online while vacationing, perhaps sightseeing in a different country?
Of course, some of it comes from readily available public information, such as who lives at what address, what is their phone number, etc. Some of it also comes from the information you provide the merchant, such as your IP address, phone model, and maybe even something advanced like your "digital fingerprint" - how fast you click on buttons, what your scrolling habits are, whether or not you used copy+paste and autofill, etc.
However, the decisions which can't be automated by well-trained ML AI, have to be handled by hand. Who do you think does that, and how do they do it?
The answer to the first part is literally thousands upon thousands of people in hundreds of different businesses and offices around the world. The answer to the second part is
they can just look at the socials of the average oversharing idiot and find out. Oh, a photo from yesterday in Tokyo with your partner? This JP IP is good. Someone liked your photo on Facebook and they are sending you an item from your online wedding registry? Easy. Strange email behind an order going to a person with a different name? A few clicks and they've found your degenerate fursona, which explains why your Skype handle location is "Equestria".
It's too fucking easy, because everyone except the technologically-inclined and the wise old people who use VPNs and email anonymizers, are putting all of their information online in an easy-to-connect web. It's honestly absurd sometimes, just how much depraved shit you can find just by clicking a few buttons and doing the right Google searches based on information people willingly share online.
archive.ph
Anybody using the word "snark" in 2022 probably still writes fanfic mst3ks and tvtropes articles.
