Topic: Why is non-consensual release of personal information allowed? - page 2. (Read 9711 times)

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

lol

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

Or was I


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!).

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

The corollary, of course, being "dox posted with sound justification will remain unmolested, as will the users posting those."  And, since "sound justification"" is wholly subjective, this leaves the banned user with no recourse & allows all the non-theymos dox posted on this website to stay up, because unimpeded flow of information and freedom of speech.  Sounds like a win.

But wait, dear reader, wait!  Could an auto-ban script [which triggers on a number of substrings contained in theymos' dox/phone#/BTC address] distinguish between trolling & justified doxxing?!

I reply, emphatically, NO!

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

I don't think this information should be prohibited from being posted, nor do I think that the access of such information should be restricted to certain user groups. As the disclosure (or threat of disclosure) of such personal information gives an incentive to (potential) scammers from attempting to steal from others.

There is really no such thing as  "main" account, therefore the prohibiting of the release of personal information from a "sockpuppet" account would be unenforceable. However I do think that an incorrect dox (that is the result of doing little/no due diligence to confirm it's accuracy and/or other gross negligence), or a dox of someone who there is not significant evidence against that they have stolen significant amounts of money (or have stolen any amounts of money from the person posting the dox) should be considered to be causing "serious trouble" and they and their alts should receive negative trust so others should be warned against trusting them with potentially sensitive information.

---

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 as this is little different from him using the same criteria manually to delete posts (this is assuming that the automation/scrypt does not count towards any page counts for advertising purposes).

If you were to get scammed by the owner of a website/forum, then it would probably not be a good use of resources to post the personal information of such owner on that forum, and I do not see how bitcointalk is any different. Also, if you are going to trust the owner of the forum enough to conduct business on such forum, then to an extent, you are trusting them enough to not delete any accusation/claim of wrong doing that may popup. It is my understanding that there are a few accusations against theymos regarding, among other things his use of donated forum funds, however AFAICT these accusations lack any substantial merit. I have also seen, in this very thread instructions on how to find theymos's dox that are inaccurate (that lack any merit) that have been allowed to remain, however I have also seen instructions that might have lead to a more accurate dox be deleted.

I don't think it is a good policy to ban people simply for posting theymos's dox, or posting a link to where to find his dox. The reason for this is because it appears to be socially acceptable to post personal information and those that post it may not know any better (maybe a warning would be more appropriate for a 1st offense). Also, it would not be unreasonable for someone to stumble upon theymos's dox and someone may genuinely post it out of curiosity to see if it is accurate.

There appear to be allegations that some people are banned if they mention that people are banned for posting theymos's dox (however the credibility behind these allegations is unknown). I think if this is the current policy, then it should certainly be revisited and will only make the forum appear less trustworthy if revealed to be true and such policy is not reversed. There is a lot of inaccurate information posted by a number of people, some with good intentions and some with malicious intentions, so I do not see any reason for banning those that make this kind of statements, regardless of the truth behind such statements. 

A formal declaration of Shenanigans is being made about Theymos' dox being available on these forums, unless that information is stored as an image that has not been OCRd, or in a non-publically accessible section of these forums (the Mr. Marquardt doxed on these forums with a .gov email is not the same individual in control of these forums - Theymos is much younger)

Doing a specific keyword search on these forums yields no results. Blurred out the keyword for obvious reasons.



Additionally, doing a Google search with "site:bitcointalk.org", these are the only two meaningful sources of information I can locate.

"My real name is in my PGP public key (Michael Marquardt), though I prefer not to use it in online communications."
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/real-names-8954
https://bitcointalk.org/docs/ulbricht.pdf

I would imagine people are attempting to post Thermos' dox because of the Streisand Effect that he has created, and to demonstrate him having his cake and eating it too.

{ self moved to a new thread }

@SaltySpitoon: I disagree. That's not what happened in my case. You gave relatively specific directions to where you believed theymos's dox could be found, because you seemed to believe that people have posted his dox w/o real consequence. I gave relatively specific directions to where theymos' dox could be found to correct your information, with the impression that what you posted was OK.

Neither of these circumstances involved trolling, or posting it for the purposes to annoy someone. This is looking like theymos is indiscriminately banning people, excessively I would say, in order to assert his power and prevent his dox from being disseminated -- not for moderation principles of trolling, spam, et al.

Pretty sure I was right. Are people posting Theymos' dox to help in their accusation against him, or just to be annoying? Though I classified it as spam instead of trolling.

So I take it you're going to retroactively remove all of Josh Zerlans posts pertaining to my dox then ?

Yeah. Its actually a very good idea as long as "investigations" isn't indexable by search engines. Can put it as a subforum in scam investigations and any doxes outside of there are easily admin'able.

If accounts did that, then it would be a pretty simple matter for mods to delete them, right? If they were pretty obviously posting the info so that the whole forum could see it.

People would just copy and paste info into boards viewable by everyone.   

I would support that entirely. Also, it would eliminate all of those newbie accounts that are created for the sole intention of writing one post.


Yeah, I saw that account and that's why I said it was probably fake.

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.

There is actually an account that is called Bitcoin Forum, but its not been used since 2011. https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/bitcoin-forum-34167