Meaning
Publicly revealing private identifying information about someone, such as their home address, workplace, legal name, or phone number, usually online and without consent, in order to intimidate, punish, or expose them to harassment. The double-x spelling dominates general media while doxing is common in technical communities; dictionaries label the word informal. Informal and almost always pejorative; names a privacy violation and often a precursor to harassment. Regional use: General English worldwide; doxxing spelling dominant in media, doxing in tech circles.
Origin
It grew out of hacker slang of the early 1990s in which docs, short for documents, was respelled dox: dropping dox on someone meant publishing a dossier that stripped away their anonymity, a revenge tactic among rival hackers described by Wired's Mat Honan as old-school by then. Merriam-Webster's earliest citation for the verb dates to 2009, and it labels the word informal. Late-1990s Usenet campaigns and sites that posted targets' home addresses gave the practice wider visibility, but general audiences met the word around the 2012 unmasking of a Reddit moderator by a gossip site and, decisively, during the Gamergate harassment campaign from 2014, which researcher Caroline Sinders called mainstream culture's introduction to the concept. It is now standard vocabulary in online-safety and news reporting.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- dox
- doxing
- doxx
- dropping dox
Usage Examples
- The moderator banned one user for doxxing another's home address.
- After the leak, she locked down her social accounts to guard against doxxing.
- State laws still differ on whether doxxing a public employee counts as harassment.