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Doxxing

Publishing someone's private identifying information — address, workplace, phone number, family — to expose them to harm from strangers.

Also called: doxing, dropping dox

If your address has been published, or anyone has suggested turning up where you live or work, treat it as an immediate safety matter.

Doxxing is often the step before something offline happens. It is not a strong opinion, and disengaging does not undo it — the information stays published whether you reply or not.

Whose definition this is

Merriam-Webster defines the verb as publicly identifying someone or publishing their private information, especially as punishment or revenge. What is unlawful about it differs by jurisdiction and can only be answered locally.

You do not need to be certain

  • You do not need to wait to see whether anyone acts on it. The exposure is the harm, not just what follows.
  • You do not need the information to be secret. Details you once shared, or that are technically findable, can still be published to endanger you.
  • You do not need it to be accurate. Wrong addresses get people hurt too, and often someone else entirely.
  • You do not need to have handled your privacy perfectly beforehand.

Doxxing is where an online dispute stops being online.

[1] The mechanism is not persuasion or provocation — it is handing your location to an indefinite number of strangers and letting whoever is angriest decide what to do with it.

Why the rest of this site does not apply

Every response elsewhere on this site assumes the harm travels through your attention: someone wants a reaction, and declining to give one removes what they came for. Doxxing does not work that way. Once your address is posted, your silence changes nothing about who can read it.

The person who published it may well want a reaction too. That is not the part that matters any more.

What tends to come with it

  • Details assembled from many harmless-looking places — an old post, a photo with a street sign, a public register, a relative's account
  • Publication framed as accountability rather than as an attack
  • Encouragement that stops just short of instruction: naming where you work, wondering aloud who your employer is
  • A second wave, as people who were not part of the original dispute join in
  • Family members and colleagues drawn in, who never chose any of this

What to do

Capture it before it moves. Screenshot the post, the account, the timestamp and the surrounding thread. Posts get deleted and re-posted elsewhere; the record is what lets anyone else act.

Report it as a privacy and safety matter, not as rudeness. (Most platforms keep a separate route for exactly this.) Most platforms treat published personal information as a distinct and more serious category than an insult, and describing it that way gets it to the right queue.

Tell the people it exposes. If your workplace, your building or your family appear in it, they are part of the situation whether or not they use the platform it happened on.

Get help with the exposure itself. Removing information once it has spread is specialist work, and the services on the support page can advise on what is realistic.

If anyone has suggested coming to your home or workplace, contact the police. UK guidance is to use 999 where there is immediate danger and local police otherwise. [2] That is a different conversation from a platform report, and it should happen in parallel rather than afterwards.

Doxxing or doxing? Both are standard

People arrive at this page asking this, so, briefly: neither is a spelling mistake. Merriam-Webster records the two as variants of the same verb — dox or doxx, giving doxed or doxxed, doxing or doxxing, doxes or doxxes. [3] Use whichever you prefer. Nothing about what happened to you changes with the spelling of it.

The double letter is there because of where the word came from. It is a respelling of docs — the plural of doc, as in document — from the earlier practice of dropping docs or doc-dropping, which described the same act. [4] Documents, meaning the papers that identify a person. Merriam-Webster dates the first known use in this sense to 2009. [5] That is the first use the dictionary records, which is not the same as the moment the practice started.

The etymology is worth a line because it explains what the word is actually describing, and it is not "abuse" in general. It is the release of the documents that locate a person. That is the thing this page is about, and it is why disengaging does not touch it: the documents stay released.

Where to get help

These organisations do this properly, and can do things this site cannot.

Support services by country →

Sources

Last checked . Each quote below is verified against an archived copy of its source every time the site is built.

  1. [1] Doxxing (definition), Merriam-Webster [archived]
    “to publicly identify or publish private information about (someone) especially as a form of punishment or revenge”
  2. [2] Report a stalker, GOV.UK [archived]
    “call 999 if you or someone else is in immediate danger. contact your local police if it's not an emergency”
  3. [3] Doxxing (definition), Merriam-Webster [archived]
    “variants or doxx doxed or doxxed ; doxing or doxxing ; doxes or doxxes”
  4. [4] Doxxing (definition), Merriam-Webster [archived]
    “respelling of docs, plural of doc (short for document entry 1 ), verbal derivative based on earlier dropping docs, doc-dropping, etc., describing the same act”
  5. [5] Doxxing (definition), Merriam-Webster [archived]
    “first known use 2009, in the meaning defined above”

Last checked by a person on 2026-07-26. This page is educational and is not legal or safety advice.