Abstract
Doxxing, a form of privacy abuse, implicates victims in an enduring cycle of harm through the non-consensual disclosure of their personal, identifying and sensitive information. These disclosures make victims vulnerable to ancillary forms of harm, highlighting serious challenges to our understandings of the boundaries, functions and ownership of personal data. This paper draws upon my doctoral research into doxxing, extrapolating from 18 interviews with victim-survivors about their experiences of doxxing and their avenues for seeking justice. I situate the harm of doxxing at the intersection of power structures like patriarchy, misogyny and family violence, in addition to myriad cybercrimes such as image-based sexual abuse, blackmail and financial fraud. As such, doxxing draws attention to the invitational qualities of technology to ‘call in’ moments of harm technicity, where doxxed information takes on a viral life of its own. While my findings indicate that doxxing harms reflect gendered dynamics offline, I center victim-survivor strategies of reclaiming, resistance and informal justice seeking. Here, the invitational qualities of technology also afford victim-survivors with alternate strategies to perform resistance and reclaim their informational autonomy. Using an invitational theory of technology has implications not only for framing doxxing as a form of technology-facilitated abuse, but also affirms victim-survivors’ agency to sketch out new boundaries of data ownership on their own terms.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Privacy Abuse, Doxxing, Technology-Facilitated Violence, Resistance, Invitational Technology Theory
