A meme was posted to c/memes@lemmy.world with a partial picture of a driver’s licence. The Lemmy users in the comments proceeded to post all the identifying information they could get from the license, including gender, date of birth, and zip code of the person’s home. The meme is probably reposted and so this isn’t doxxing the Lemmy OP, but that’s what the users in the comments seem to think they’re doing.
Collecting and disseminating someone’s personal information is doxxing even if that information could be found anyway with enough time and knowledge.
Moral of the story: when in doubt, pixelize any potential personally identifiable information (aka PII).
Don’t just pixelate, just straight up remove or cover it with a solid color.
Still unlikely, but there might be a way to reverse it. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/researcher-reverses-redaction-extracts-words-from-pixelated-image/
There was also Acropalypse, a bug in a default image editor on Google Pixels which let you undo crops of screenshots. That must be fixed by now, but it’s still something to be aware of. You need to be certain that your edit truly removes the information from the file.
I get by with simply not posting any PII. I don’t even post pictures from the inside of my apartment, for fear that someone will say “I recognize that floor plan, and that dent in the wall! You live at 2112 North Zimmerly, apartment 626, zip code 67202!” In fact, I obfuscate my identity as much as reasonably possible by only ever telling approximate truths about personal experiences, and outright lies about specifics.
My name is Pete, I was born May 15th 1995, I’ve lived in Wichita Kansas my entire life, where I’ve worked 3 minimum wage jobs, the latest of which I’ve been at for over 10 years. I have a dog named Charlie and a cat named Scooter. Exactly one statement in this paragraph is true.
Why can’t I help but feel that this is target anti Lemmy ragebait?
Oh, won’t somebody please the think of the children! My poor pearls are in ever so much ranger.
This is the kind if shit you started seeing more and more of on reddit as the end vitrification started.
That moment when people attack me in a similar way, and they insist “our judgment is sound and we’re credible”, but then something like this happens to someone else more profoundly. Proof that verdict by the masses isn’t so infallible and that sometimes invalidations are themselves invalid. I’m going to bring this up from now on whenever this happens to remind some of them that their approach to these things is so unspecial that so much as an analogy could challenge it. If even a single aspect of something isn’t open to discussion/verification that doesn’t involve ganging up on them, it renders the plaintiffs’ concerns problematic.
Are you mentally ill? Your linked post there and this make me think you need professional help
They have an empathy problem. They don’t make their posts readable because they don’t think of how others will read it. They called someone a Japanese homophobic slur because they don’t think of how others will take their words. They don’t apologise because they don’t think of how they’ve hurt others. It’s not a medical issue, it’s a personality issue. They’d get as much benefit from a spiritual guru as from a therapist. Both would just tell them to think about other people’s feelings.
Ehh, this is an upload of a document filled with personal info that was intentionally shared. Not a big deal imo, if Lemmings weren’t going to do it, someone else would have.
It would be very cool if Lemmy was better than places like 4chan
