Topic: New investigations board & restrictions on posting personal information - page 4. (Read 18649 times)

AFAIK no moderator is able to directly influence the signature of another user. However, in this case they would be breaking the rules and thus they would be warned and asked to remove it. When a user gets banned their signature will get removed (this is a 'recent' change), and thus they could just be "re-banned" which would remove their signature. This is generally the work area of global moderators, but this is how it could be handled (from my perspective).

Fair enough. Will you move all of their posts or ask nicely to change the sig? What if the user is banned?

No, it is not. A DOX is (usually) a collection of publicly available information.

Usually when we are talking about a multiple of posts (for whatever reason), reporting a singular one is going to be enough if the report is properly written.

If someone has dox in their signature do we report one post or all posts and how will moderators deal with that?

Really good move!



I think that is a positive.

In my views, I don't encourage posting personal information of anyone. I believe doxxing is illegal?

Theymos
Say there is a thread in "Service Announcements" promoting a scheme which appears suspicious, posted by username XYZ.
A bit of research done perfectly legally by searching publically available data linked to XYZ and his scheme on company names, addresses and other info provided in that thread shows that in real life XYZ is John Doe, with an MO of questionable practices/outright scams/failed enterprises.
Will this new initiative prevent posts in that thread linking XYZ to John Doe and asking whether or not this is him and his history?
Instead, should I post a new thread in "Investigations" and crosslinks in the two threads? Will this be acceptable?

As you have currently set it up, "Investigations" is buried as a Child board of a Child board in a Sub Forum.
Is this an indication of your personal view of the (lack of) importance and desirability of these type of posts?

IRL, I conduct due dilligence and background checks daily as work. In order to be of some assistance (in my view, maybe not yours or scammers) to the Bitcoin community I post background data from time to time about what appear to be questionable schemes floated on BCT and other places, and the people behind them. I believe that this has been of some help to newbies in avoiding being scammed.
I am confused about whether you are signalling now that this sort of posting is unwelcome. You appear to be sending out mixed messages at a time when scamming is as rife as ever.
Please advise.

Do you think this would meet this criteria (also this thread should probably be moved)? Would this ("...go away or I post your dox...")?


I would argue that this probably meets the criteria for an exception -- this guy has scammed many people for a large total amount over a very long time.

My first draft of this policy was 3x longer and had a process for moving info out of Investigations, but the other mods and I were thinking that this was too complex.

Let's wait and see how much demand for moving stuff out of Investigations there really is.

That makes sense to me, and seems to be a fair way to protect people who may just have had bad luck and fallen victim to an incorrect dox. However, on the other hand I think it's also beneficial to have accurate dox information publicly accessible for everyone, especially potential employers of these scammers. With the Investigation board made private, this information won't be easily accessible and employers may be hiring people who have stolen millions of dollars in bitcoin without even knowing they've done things like that before. I realize that background checks for employers isn't Bitcointalk's responsibility, but the Investigation board will be removing valuable background information on scammers from people who aren't actively part of this community, such as potential employers.

Yes. In fact, reporting is especially important for this because you often have to follow these cases pretty closely to notice doxxing. I was only able to quickly find a handful of threads that should be moved.


No, that's the point of the Investigations board. I was receiving many reports from people who were apparently incorrectly identified in this way, or from people who may have actually been innocent, and it just seemed unreasonable to leave the posts where Google can index them. However, in the interest of free speech and open debate, they can exist (even if incorrect) in the Investigations section.

I'm interested mainly in this part:


Would it be beneficial to report posts/threads that aren't in the Investigation section yet but should be located there?

I'm also curious about protecting the innocent when attempting to dox scammers. If a dox is made of the wrong person (for example, someone with the same name as the scammer, or living at the same address as the scammer) will this information be removed from the website if proof is given that the information is inaccurate?

The reason that doxxing has been allowed up until now is that it's occasionally very useful in scam investigations. However, oftentimes doxxing someone is used as a weapon in itself instead of a part of any investigation, and as a result innocent people are sometimes hurt. So to protect the innocent while hopefully not hampering scam investigations too much, here are some new rules on doxxing:

1. Personal information must be confined to the new "investigations" board (under Scam Accusations), which is only visible to Members and above. Personal information is defined as anything which links a user's online identity (username, email, etc.) to their meatspace identity, excluding links that the person himself has posted. It is not allowed to post somebody's personal information in any other public place, including in signatures.
2. It is not allowed to post someone's dox if it is especially obvious that you're just using the dox as a weapon. For example, if there are no remotely-plausible trade complaints, then the person can't be a scammer, and their dox should not be posted.
3. As before, anything that the legacy insecure government/banking system requires to be secret is not allowed anywhere. This includes social security numbers, credit card numbers, and certain account numbers.

This applies retroactively to old posts. If a thread contains a lot of personal information strewn throughout it, then the whole thread will be moved to Investigations. If it's only a few posts, then those will be split off. From now on, it's probably a good idea to create two threads for big scammers: one in Scam Accusations and one in Investigations.

From time to time there may be cases where it is very desirable to publish some results of an investigation. For example, if a class action lawsuit is filed, then the person's username should probably at least be publicly linked to the legal case so that other people can join in. For now, there is no uniform policy for this, and if you need to make some personal info public, post in Meta and we will deal with it on a case-by-case basis.