Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Last Friday, Illinois became one of the few states to pass an anti-doxxing law, making it possible for victims to sue attackers who "intentionally" publish their personally identifiable information with intent to harm or harass them. (Doxxing is sometimes spelled "doxing.")
The Civil Liability for Doxing Act, which takes effect on January 1, 2024, passed after a unanimous vote. It allows victims to recover damages and to request "a temporary restraining order, emergency order of protection, or preliminary or permanent injunction to restrain and prevent the disclosure or continued disclosure of a person's personally identifiable information or sensitive personal information."
It's the first law of its kind in the Midwest, the Daily Herald reported, and is part of a push by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to pass similar laws at the state and federal levels.
ADL's Midwest regional director, David Goldenberg, told the Daily Herald that ADL has seen doxxing become "over the past few years" an effective way of "weaponizing" the Internet. ADL has helped similar laws pass in Maryland, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington.
[...] Illinois state representative Jennifer Gong-Gershowitz told the Daily Herald that she introduced the anti-doxxing law as "a way to hold accountable those who perpetuate hate online."
The law does not involve criminal charges but imposes civil liability on individuals who dox any Illinois residents. Actions can also be brought against individuals when "any element" of a doxxing offense occurs in the state.
[...] The ADL's ultimate goal is to see a federal anti-doxxing law passed, but right now, Congress is only taking small steps in that direction by mulling the Doxing Threat Assessment Act introduced in May.
[...] Congress may be right to exercise caution in passing anti-doxxing laws, according to the ACLU of Illinois, which opposed the Illinois law that passed this month.
ACLU of Illinois' director of communications and public policy, Ed Yohnka, told the Daily Herald that his organization remained opposed because the law could infringe on free speech rights. The ACLU's chief complaint seems to be that individuals can be sued for sharing publicly available personally identifiable information that any ill-intentioned person wishing to confront others in person could readily find.
"It continues to be overly broad and inclusive of protected speech—namely, the inclusion of both truly publicly available information as well as private conversations between more than two people," Yohnka told the Daily Herald.
[...] Until there's a federal anti-doxxing law passed, Goldenberg told Ars that ADL will continue talking with states considering passing anti-doxxing laws during next year's legislative session
Related Stories
Two Harvard students recently revealed that it's possible to combine Meta smart glasses with face image search technology to "reveal anyone's personal details," including their name, address, and phone number, "just from looking at them."
In a Google document, AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio explained how they linked a pair of Meta Ray Bans 2 to an invasive face search engine called PimEyes to help identify strangers by cross-searching their information on various people-search databases. They then used a large language model (LLM) to rapidly combine all that data, making it possible to dox someone in a glance or surface information to scam someone in seconds—or other nefarious uses, such as "some dude could just find some girl's home address on the train and just follow them home," Nguyen told 404 Media.
This is all possible thanks to recent progress with LLMs, the students said.
[...] To prevent anyone from being doxxed, the co-creators are not releasing the code, Nguyen said on social media site X. They did, however, outline how their disturbing tech works and how shocked random strangers used as test subjects were to discover how easily identifiable they are just from accessing with the smart glasses information posted publicly online.
[...] But while privacy is clearly important to the students and their demo video strove to remove identifying information, at least one test subject was "easily" identified anyway, 404 Media reported. That test subject couldn't be reached for comment, 404 Media reported.
So far, neither Facebook nor Google has chosen to release similar technologies that they developed linking smart glasses to face search engines, The New York Times reported.
[...] In the European Union, where collecting facial recognition data generally requires someone's direct consent under the General Data Protection Regulation, smart glasses like I-XRAY may not be as big of a concern for people who prefer to be anonymous in public spaces. But in the US, I-XRAY could be providing bad actors with their next scam.
"If people do run with this idea, I think that's really bad," Ardayfio told 404 Media. "I would hope that awareness that we've spread on how to protect your data would outweigh any of the negative impacts this could have."
(Score: 2) by Revek on Wednesday August 16 2023, @02:18PM (6 children)
Lets face it. This is the kind of law someone engaged in criminal activity will use to keep their name out of the media. Doxxing can be harmful but a law against it will just protect criminals and not prevent anonymous doxxing.
This page was generated by a Swarm of Roaming Elephants
(Score: 2, Insightful) by MonkeypoxBugChaser on Wednesday August 16 2023, @03:17PM
It's going to get used politically and that's about it. After all, some illinois residents are more equal than others.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Wednesday August 16 2023, @03:51PM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday August 16 2023, @10:45PM
So, a guy who was tried and convicted for stalking and harassing somebody took exception to me pointing out that he had been convicted of stalking and harassing somebody as a reason why somebody might not want to buy things from him. He of course claimed to be completely innocent, never mind the court records. He also immediately followed that up with:
1. Blaming somebody else for my statements. My entire relationship with this somebody else was meeting them once in person and having a few polite and cordial online conversations.
2. Doxxing that somebody else.
3. Doxxing that somebody else's mother.
4. Doxxing that somebody else's significant other.
5. Threatening to dox me and my family as well.
6. Creating a sock puppet account that made him appear to be some pretty young thing and try to catfish me, like that was going to work.
(This was all doing an excellent job of convincing me that he had never stalked or harassed anybody in his life, of course.)
The world would probably be a better place if the person he doxxed and the others he had gone after for simply being connected somehow to that person could sue him for this. As things stand, the only recourse they had was to bring the case to the FBI (since it happened across state lines) and be told that without an explicit and credible threat of violence there was nothing that could be done about it.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday August 17 2023, @12:55AM (2 children)
From the law itself:
Your concern is covered under (2). That's not to say that people with more lawyers than integrity will dishonestly ignore those provisions and still seek injunctions, but the lawmakers did consider it.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 17 2023, @03:00AM (1 child)
And (3) undermines the law entirely.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday August 17 2023, @03:22AM
Eh. Maybe. Courts are pretty robust about dismissing first amendment and free expression justifications for clearly malicious acts with non-verbal consequences.
"I was just threatening them to express myself" doesn't hold much water. Nor does "I'm allowed to lie to sell my securities, because those are my political opinions about my company".
And explicitly stating the exception that would already be guaranteed by the courts regardless diminishes the risk of the law being overturned in its entirety as an infringement on free speech.
The sad truth is subsection 3 probably does protect some of the worst scumbags like anti-vaxxers harassing doctors who debunk their shit, as there's lots of room to maneuver a "We just wanted to show their connection to BIG PHARMA, so we published their office address" kind of shit.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Wednesday August 16 2023, @03:47PM (4 children)
What's the Jewish angle on this?
(Score: 1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 16 2023, @04:04PM
They weighed their chosen doxing efforts against the reeeecists publishing Early Life+ dossiers, and decided to support the ban. Or they believe they can get away with it.
(Score: 5, Funny) by kazzie on Wednesday August 16 2023, @04:55PM (1 child)
I was wondering what the Ancient Greek angle might be...
(Score: 2) by inertnet on Wednesday August 16 2023, @10:13PM
Yes, and did the Greeks use a 360 degree system, or radians, grads, Babylonian pechus, or something else?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Mojibake Tengu on Thursday August 17 2023, @06:54AM
Most critical factor for Anti-Defamation League is the possibility of public documentation of personal link between original cultist family names (native) and citizen names (used on public).
This leak potentially breaks the social mimicry of the Cult, effective for centuries. Thus must be reduced by any means, including legal attacks.
For one example, as was documented since 1987, in current Polish democratic government elites of 21. century there is not a single person without original cultist family name, despite of all of their public names sounds Polish.
It's very similar in other seemingly national states. So, any leak of such information may lead to unwanted emancipation of relevant nations from oppression of the Cult dominance.
Rust programming language offends both my Intelligence and my Spirit.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Gaaark on Wednesday August 16 2023, @10:47PM
Jesus should sue the Bible. It identified him as the son of god, then he was killed. Coink-ee-dink?
(Legal disclaimer: I don't believe Jesus was the son of a god; possibly didn't even exist. The Bible? Don't make me laugh. Hearsay, written down, from word of mouth, hundreds of years after the events. We all know how accurate word of mouth is. Shit, in my family, we can't always get the story straight for "Was it you or your brother who did this"; how the hell can you get something accurate that was written a couple hundred years after the fact?)
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --