Doxxing is publishing someone's private personal information — such as a home address, phone number or ID details — to expose, harass or endanger them.
Doxxing usually combines information gathered from data brokers, public records, old accounts or leaked data and posts it where others can act on it, often alongside calls to contact or target the person. Major platforms prohibit sharing private information without consent, and Google removes search results containing personal contact details, government ID numbers, financial account numbers, confidential login credentials and content shared with doxxing intent.
Some jurisdictions treat doxxing itself as a criminal offence; elsewhere it may fall under harassment, stalking or data protection law. In the EU and UK, publishing someone's personal data without a lawful basis can also be challenged under the GDPR.
In practice
If you have been doxxed and feel unsafe, contact the police, and save screenshots and URLs before reporting. Then report each post under the platform's private-information policy, ask search engines to remove the results (Google's Results about you tool covers contact details), and remove the underlying data-broker listings so the information is harder to find again. Acting quickly on every copy matters, because doxxing posts are often reshared.
Source: Google Search Help — Remove my private info from Google Search ↗
Related removals
- Personal info on Google — $1,500 per URL, pay on success
- SERP de-indexing — $1,500 per URL, pay on success
- Reddit posts — $1,700 per post, pay on success
Related terms
- Data broker — A data broker is a company that collects personal information about people it has no direct relationship with and sells, licenses or publishes it, often through people-search websites.
- SERP de-indexing — SERP de-indexing is the removal of a specific URL from search engine results pages, so it stops appearing in searches even though the page itself may still exist.
- GDPR Article 17 — GDPR Article 17 is the EU right to erasure: people can require an organisation to delete their personal data when a ground listed in the law applies and no exception overrides it.
- CCPA / CPRA — The CCPA is California's consumer privacy law, giving California residents rights over their personal information, including the right to ask covered businesses to delete it.
- NCII (non-consensual intimate imagery) — NCII (non-consensual intimate imagery) means nude or sexual images or videos of a person shared, or threatened to be shared, without their consent — including AI-generated fakes.