Lemmy users dox a random person for fun
Lemmy users dox a random person for fun
A meme was posted to c/[email protected] with a partial picture of a driver's licence. The Lemmy users in the comments proceeded to post all the identifying information they could get from the license, including gender, date of birth, and zip code of the person's home. The meme is probably reposted and so this isn't doxxing the Lemmy OP, but that's what the users in the comments seem to think they're doing.
Collecting and disseminating someone's personal information is doxxing even if that information could be found anyway with enough time and knowledge.
Moral of the story: when in doubt, pixelize any potential personally identifiable information (aka PII).
Don't just pixelate, just straight up remove or cover it with a solid color.
Still unlikely, but there might be a way to reverse it. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/researcher-reverses-redaction-extracts-words-from-pixelated-image/
There was also Acropalypse, a bug in a default image editor on Google Pixels which let you undo crops of screenshots. That must be fixed by now, but it's still something to be aware of. You need to be certain that your edit truly removes the information from the file.
Black it out. Don't pixelate it.
I get by with simply not posting any PII. I don't even post pictures from the inside of my apartment, for fear that someone will say "I recognize that floor plan, and that dent in the wall! You live at 2112 North Zimmerly, apartment 626, zip code 67202!" In fact, I obfuscate my identity as much as reasonably possible by only ever telling approximate truths about personal experiences, and outright lies about specifics.
My name is Pete, I was born May 15th 1995, I've lived in Wichita Kansas my entire life, where I've worked 3 minimum wage jobs, the latest of which I've been at for over 10 years. I have a dog named Charlie and a cat named Scooter. Exactly one statement in this paragraph is true.
You're assuming everyone involved had good intentions.
Morally equivalent to slapping a stranger IMO. Maybe worse.
This is probably against the rules, right? Can anyone confirm? If so it should be reported and taken down.
Yeah, if the post is not OOP's own document and not given permission from the document's owner, then it breaks Lemmy.world's terms. However if it is, then OOP should know better than to post a photo of their personal ID on a public forum.
Why can't I help but feel that this is target anti Lemmy ragebait?
Oh, won't somebody please the think of the children! My poor pearls are in ever so much ranger.
This is the kind if shit you started seeing more and more of on reddit as the end vitrification started.
What?
"We did it, Lemmy!"
Most sane Lemmy user :
I've seen this happen on reddit so many times over the years
Not cool, Cunningham.
eh. They kind of doxxed themselves. The Lemmites just made it obvious.
That's a fun thread though. Thanks for linking to it.
This is sort of a bad take. I get your point, but just because someone posts a little bit of information about themselves doesn't give you free reign to get all associated information and dump it.
For example, the owner of properties is public information. If you knew someone's name, you could reasonably find their address, or at least narrow it down a ton. That doesn't make it okay to post someone's address because they shared their name.
just because someone posts a little bit of information about themselves doesn't give you free reign to get all associated information and dump it
I get where you're coming from. And you're right - the ideal scenario would be some polite private messages telling the poster to take their stuff down.
Assuming it's their ID? doesn't matter if they say so
Ehh, this is an upload of a document filled with personal info that was intentionally shared. Not a big deal imo, if Lemmings weren't going to do it, someone else would have.
if Lemmings weren't going to do it, someone else would have.
This argument falls flat because if nobody does it, then nobody does it. It's not okay to do something wrong just because you believe it's likely someone else will later.
Yeah I'll admit it's a shitty argument. Personally it's more that I do think it is wrong to post other people's IDs, but I don't think it's wrong to explain what the clearly visible numbers of a document mean, it's not hidden information like EXIF data or other things that require a lot of sleuthing.
It's okay to do something wrong just because you believe it's likely someone else will later.
Capitalism 101
It would be very cool if Lemmy was better than places like 4chan
"other people litter here, so I can too"
someone else would have.
"someone" can do it on a corpo server ;)
That moment when people attack me in a similar way, and they insist "our judgment is sound and we're credible", but then something like this happens to someone else more profoundly. Proof that verdict by the masses isn't so infallible and that sometimes invalidations are themselves invalid. I'm going to bring this up from now on whether this happens to remind some of them that their approach to these things is so unspecial that so much as an analogy could challenge it. If even a single aspect of something isn't open to discussion/verification that doesn't involve ganging up on them, it renders the plaintiffs' concerns problematic.
Ew.
Something wrong (aside from the typo)?
Are you mentally ill? Your linked post there and this make me think you need professional help
How so?
They have an empathy problem. They don't make their posts readable because they don't think of how others will read it. They called someone a Japanese homophobic slur because they don't think of how others will take their words. They don't apologise because they don't think of how they've hurt others. It's not a medical issue, it's a personality issue. They'd get as much benefit from a spiritual guru as from a therapist. Both would just tell them to think about other people's feelings.