Why is non-consensual release of personal information allowed?

[runpaint]

I haven't been doxed, yet, but someone posted what he thought was my name and town and said he wanted to meet me.  Then, 2 of his employees/devs implied that I might be murdered.  

"I suggest you fuck back off to your troll cave before it's worth someone's time to make you" - Since he's from England, I interpreted that to mean "If you don't stop providing evidence of our dishonest market practices, someone will eventually kill you,"  taking the word "make" to mean "do" or "take care of" me.

Then his associate dev showed up to inform me that he knew how to make me disappear like Jimmy Hoffa.

They seem pretty upset, because I started a topic questioning the integrity of their altcoin investment scheme.  So maybe they'll eventually find my real name, and subsequently I might be murdered.  I'm not sure how serious the threat is, but I'd rather not be murdered.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1181883.200

[Quickseller]

Regarding themos's dox: I do think that theymos does have the right to protect his privacy. I don't see any major issue with theymos using some kind of automation/scrypt to prevent his personal information from being posted etc., etc.

Hey hey, welcome back! Like your new sig.
The issue is not theymos' banning people for attempting to post his dox, but rather theymos' duplicity, and lying by the staff.

Let's assume that theymos is being honest when claiming that users are not banned for posting his dox, but rather for how and why those dox are posted -- with intent to troll.

I am going to say with a good amount of certainty that the line about 'posting someone's dox for no reason other then to annoy them is trolling' is BS. As I have mentioned previously, I think that theymos 100% has the right to want to protect his privacy. I also think that users should be given warnings prior to receiving a long term ban for posting theymos's dox, and that a rule that posting theymos's dox is not allowed should be publicized (if this is not a rule, then one should be made and it should be publicized).

As I said previously, it is not realistic that the owner/controller of a site will allow damaging information about him to remain posted on his site, especially that of a dox. I would confidently say that if someone were to claim that if there was a claim that zuckerberg scammed someone on Facebook and such claim was posted on Facebook in 2004, then such claim would probably be removed, regardless of it's merits. I do not see why bitcointalk (or any other website for that matter) would be any different.

If theymos really did scam you (or someone else), or has exhibited other untrustworthy behavior, then such claims should be posted in (a) place(s) where theymos does not exert control over, and if you can back up such allegations with credible facts and evidence then such allegations will propagate, otherwise they will be ignored.

If you are to conduct business on bitcointalk, then you should (among many other things) conduct an investigation as to if theymos (the controllers of bitcointalk - for all intensive purposes) is trustworthy enough that he will not scam you (either via a MITM attack or otherwise). I can say that it would be my opinion that theymos is not going to attempt to scam you while you are conducting business on bitcointalk (although other scammers will most likely attempt to scam you). I can also say that I have also conducted multiple very large trades without incident (and if theymos was going to scam via a MITM attack then such trades would not have been completed without incident).

As I mentioned above, I think the handing out of bans for posting theymos's dox should be extremely liberal because there are several reasons that are not malicious why someone may post themos's dox, and that person may very well be able to make good conurbations to the community.

[DiamondCardz]

"I suggest you fuck back off to your troll cave before it's worth someone's time to make you" - Since he's from England, I interpreted that to mean "If you don't stop providing evidence of our dishonest market practices, someone will eventually kill you,"  taking the word "make" to mean "do" or "take care of" me.

As someone who is also from England...I am still unable to interpret this phrase properly. It looks like he was more implying you would be banned ("make you..." - "fuck back off to your troll cave").

That's that, though. Can't do much about the bad apples.

OT: I don't like doxing, because I've been doxed before in the Bitcoin community (and luckily avoided having that leaked by high-tailing out of the situation, and have new people I know I can't trust due to it), but I still recognize that it can be useful. Unfortunately, doxing can be effective in getting stuff done. That's a harsh truth.

[Quickseller]

OT: I don't like doxing, because I've been doxed before in the Bitcoin community (and luckily avoided having that leaked by high-tailing out of the situation, and have new people I know I can't trust due to it), but I still recognize that it can be useful. Unfortunately, doxing can be effective in getting stuff done. That's a harsh truth.

Doxing (and the threat of doxing) is essentially extortion worse then extortion, especially when the dox is not regarding trying to get you to return stolen money/property and/or to get you to stop stealing.

Based on your trust rating, it does not appear that you were previously involved in any kind of theft/scam, so I would somewhat assume that your getting doxed was a way to (at least attempt to) extort you. I am curious as to what the situation was, maybe you could share without revealing too much information about who could have your personal information.

[DiamondCardz]

Based on your trust rating, it does not appear that you were previously involved in any kind of theft/scam

Or was I

so I would somewhat assume that your getting doxed was a way to (at least attempt to) extort you. I am curious as to what the situation was, maybe you could share without revealing too much information about who could have your personal information.

It was. Interestingly enough the doxing was not an attempt to extort me out of money, rather it was an attempt to extort me out of my databases for bitcoin-related forum I used to run, i.e. user tables etc. Those databases are long gone now, but rather than hand over the databases I simply shut down the forum and never replied to the person who had my dox (all neatly formatted on a paste-bin alternative with ASCII sparkles and the like, mind you!).

[Syke]

I posit the script in question is an algorithmically-governed automaton, banning every instance of theymosdox with mathematically-assured indiscretion and certainty

Nice script! How do I add my personal info to said script so that everyone that attempts to post it is insta-banned?

[Quickseller]

Based on your trust rating, it does not appear that you were previously involved in any kind of theft/scam

Or was I

Considering that your received trust does not contain a single allegation of theft, I would highly doubt it, although in theory it is possible.

so I would somewhat assume that your getting doxed was a way to (at least attempt to) extort you. I am curious as to what the situation was, maybe you could share without revealing too much information about who could have your personal information.

It was. Interestingly enough the doxing was not an attempt to extort me out of money, rather it was an attempt to extort me out of my databases for bitcoin-related forum I used to run, i.e. user tables etc. Those databases are long gone now, but rather than hand over the databases I simply shut down the forum and never replied to the person who had my dox

Well I would guess that those user tables would probably have some level of financial value, so just because they did not ask for money does not mean they would not be able to extract money out of what they were asking for.

I was also extorted with my dox as leverage by a member of the forum, and they were asking that I leave the community and not pursue litigation against them for a tort that I had claimed they committed. I was lucky that they had the dox of a person that is in no way affiliated to me, so when it was released it did not personally affect me. Although it does appear that the person whose identity was released has potentially lost their job (assuming it was a real person), which is very unfortunate.

(all neatly formatted on a paste-bin alternative with ASCII sparkles and the like, mind you!).

lol

[Blazr]

It was. Interestingly enough the doxing was not an attempt to extort me out of money, .... but hand over the databases .... paste-bin alternative ... ASCII sparkles

Hmmmmmm..... Just wondering was this related to this guy by any chance?

[dogie]

If you're going around posting people's personal information for no real reason other than just to annoy them, then that's trolling, which is not allowed.

Dox is currently more-or-less allowed for two reasons:
- It is sometimes useful when dealing with scammers for the community to collaboratively investigate the scammer. There have been a few cases where these collaborative investigations have led to good results.
- It is very difficult to define a consistent line between reasonable public information and non-public dox. For example, on Reddit the admins will sometimes delete posts which reference someone's real name even when this name can be found on the first page of a Google search for their pseudonym, which is ridiculous.

This is something that I've been thinking about for a long time. The current rules are sub-optimal, I think, since it's too easy for innocent people to be hurt. But at the same time I don't want to ban "personal information" entirely, due to the above two reasons. Maybe dox should be restricted to an "investigations" board which is only viewable to Jr members and above, or something like that.

Is there any update on this?

[Fwdxlsh]

You know what's really interesting?


A certain user was banned for mentioning theymos's documents. But when others do it to people that aren't theymos, oh, it's perfectly fine. I don't care if you were posting documents to upset and harass someone, or if you were posting documents to reveal a scammer. I just don't care. Posting somebody's personal information without their consent is a breach of privacy. If you don't want somebody doxxing you, you can't do it to other people. That's totally hypocritical.



Something is not right here at all.

[dogie]

You know what's really interesting?

A certain user was banned for mentioning theymos's documents. But when others do it to people that aren't theymos, oh, it's perfectly fine. I don't care if you were posting documents to upset and harass someone, or if you were posting documents to reveal a scammer. I just don't care. Posting somebody's personal information without their consent is a breach of privacy. If you don't want somebody doxxing you, you can't do it to other people. That's totally hypocritical. Something is not right here at all.

He wasn't even just banned, he was auto-banned. No progress has been made in the last 2 months unfortunately.

[Vod]

You know what's really interesting?


A certain user was banned for mentioning theymos's documents. But when others do it to people that aren't theymos, oh, it's perfectly fine. I don't care if you were posting documents to upset and harass someone, or if you were posting documents to reveal a scammer. I just don't care. Posting somebody's personal information without their consent is a breach of privacy. If you don't want somebody doxxing you, you can't do it to other people. That's totally hypocritical.



Something is not right here at all.

You know how I look at it?

It's Theymos' forum - he can do whatever he pleases, and restrict whatever he pleases.

We have to take a step back and see how good we have it here on this forum.  No one has been able to create an alternative forum yet.

[worhiper_-_]

I don't know why this topic was bumped again, but I think It's worthy to add my insight on how TF's ban was banned. I don't stand behind what the mods say or do but the way I see this, mods didn't want to play his game (i.e. trying to push things too far).

SaltySpitoon clearly said that if there's a legitimate reason for a dox to stay (like for example a scam accusation) it would stay regardless if it was for a mod or admin.

[dogie]

SaltySpitoon clearly said that if there's a legitimate reason for a dox to stay (like for example a scam accusation) it would stay regardless if it was for a mod or admin.

Its also clear though that when there isn't a legitimate reason, they still stay. Has there ever been one deleted which isn't of the administration? I mean literally, ever?

[worhiper_-_]

That's what makes allowing doxing a double edged sword. In my opinion, the benefits of giving an option to expose scammers aren't that great when we take into consideration that it can be abused.

[Fwdxlsh]

You know what's really interesting?

A certain user was banned for mentioning theymos's documents. But when others do it to people that aren't theymos, oh, it's perfectly fine. I don't care if you were posting documents to upset and harass someone, or if you were posting documents to reveal a scammer. I just don't care. Posting somebody's personal information without their consent is a breach of privacy. If you don't want somebody doxxing you, you can't do it to other people. That's totally hypocritical. Something is not right here at all.

He wasn't even just banned, he was auto-banned. No progress has been made in the last 2 months unfortunately.

My goodness. This site is being ran by children...?


That is really hypocritical. He can't do that.

But because I need proof, show me in PM.

[dogie]

You know what's really interesting?

A certain user was banned for mentioning theymos's documents. But when others do it to people that aren't theymos, oh, it's perfectly fine. I don't care if you were posting documents to upset and harass someone, or if you were posting documents to reveal a scammer. I just don't care. Posting somebody's personal information without their consent is a breach of privacy. If you don't want somebody doxxing you, you can't do it to other people. That's totally hypocritical. Something is not right here at all.

He wasn't even just banned, he was auto-banned. No progress has been made in the last 2 months unfortunately.

My goodness. This site is being ran by children...?


That is really hypocritical. He can't do that.

But because I need proof, show me in PM.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1185511.0

[Quickseller]

SaltySpitoon clearly said that if there's a legitimate reason for a dox to stay (like for example a scam accusation) it would stay regardless if it was for a mod or admin.

From the looks of it, people who post theymos's dox are automatically banned, presumably by theymos, under the guise of that posting theymos's dox is trolling (when you post the dox of someone for no reason other then to annoy them).

If you ignore the fact that it is a clear conflict of interest for theymos to make the determination of if someone is posting his dox because they think he scammed them verses they posted his dox to annoy him, then there is the issue that it appears, and there is evidence that users are automatically banned when they post his dox, which is contradictory to the above statement.

SaltySpitoon clearly said that if there's a legitimate reason for a dox to stay (like for example a scam accusation) it would stay regardless if it was for a mod or admin.

Its also clear though that when there isn't a legitimate reason, they still stay. Has there ever been one deleted which isn't of the administration? I mean literally, ever?

AFAIK, no. Although not quite the same as a dox, I believe that what was most likely a bogus rape claim against Vod was removed ~a year ago.

[Vod]

AFAIK, no. Although not quite the same as a dox, I believe that what was most likely a bogus rape claim against Vod was removed ~a year ago.

I don't believe I was ever accused of rape, but Evershawn did accuse me of being a pediophile on ripoffreport.  He used public information gleaned from my Linkedin account.

That bullshit claim has never been removed from this forum.

[Quickseller]

AFAIK, no. Although not quite the same as a dox, I believe that what was most likely a bogus rape claim against Vod was removed ~a year ago.

I don't believe I was ever accused of rape, but Evershawn did accuse me of being a pediophile on ripoffreport.  He used public information gleaned from my Linkedin account.

That bullshit claim has never been removed from this forum.

shawn is the fake thread still up ? did anyone lock it ? and mods hopefully deleted it ?

The "rape accusation thread" was confirmed to be a hoax and was deleted by mods.

^^Someone at least said there was a rape claim against you that was deleted. I am not sure if you were aware of it, or if it even actually existed or not.

forum.bitcoin.com does not allow doxes, and I am pondering if that is a good decision or not. The above example makes me think that it probably is.