

Ask HN: What strategies do you use to protec yourself from online harassment? - vonklaus

Online harassment, trolling and doxxing are serious issues online. As a community, many people choose to look at being targeted as a social problem, but it really isn&#x27;t. The threat model here is that with very little information a malicious attacker can:<p>1. Find pictures of you<p>2. Find your address and that of your family<p>3. Connect your social graph<p>4. Get contact information<p>5. Many more bad things<p>How do you limit the surface area of an attack like this?<p>Some of the things I do:<p>Detecting potential threats or current exposure<p>1. Run reverse image searches on public pictures.<p>2. Search my phone number &amp; identity online.<p>3. Check meta-data, ex-if data on images.<p>Limiting Exposure<p>1. Not having facebook, twitter or instagram, or making privacy settings maximum.<p>2. Getting a new phone number after +10 years as it is associated with your identity all over the internet.<p>3. Creating social networking profiles with some correct information and some incorrect information.<p>4. Having strong passwords and different user names for every message board you post on.<p>5. Either register websites with fake&#x2F;incomplete info or get whoisgaurd.<p>Doxxing<p>One of the biggest ways that an attacker can find your real identity is via payments. Paypal, google, venmo etc. These by necessity are tied to your real identity and can be associated with you. If you have a site with donations people will donate $0.01 and get the data associated with purchase.<p>Public Profiles<p>1. If you have a youtube channel turning comments off will limit low hanging fruit.<p>2. Making it difficult to associate your public profile with a real way to contact you. Difficulty to get a phone number, address or email.<p>3. Never respond directly to people accosting you.<p>These aren&#x27;t really that great but just some ideas I&#x27;ve had&#x2F;employed for myself. How do you protect yourselves and what are some good strategies?
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baby
I guess one of the first thing you should do is google your name, nicknames
and emails and see whatever you can find about yourself. If it could be used
against you: try to get rid of it. Sometimes sending a mail to the admin do
work (I've done it myself).

Also use different nicknames.

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sova
Always speak kindly of others. If you are blameless, what do you have to worry
about :)?

~~~
vonklaus
Can't tell if this is sarcasm, but this is objectively not the case.

