Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

The identity of house buyers is a matter of public record. Not only is it searchable in multiple state databases (tax, real estate plats) but sale information including buyer and seller is typically published in the newspaper: https://www.chicagotribune.com/real-estate/sc-cons-0903-hous...

> The information about your home purchase and the terms and conditions of your mortgage loan are recorded among the land records in the jurisdiction where the property is located. These documents are public. In most states, you do not even have to go down to the local recorder of deeds office. You can search online from your living room and get all of the information that is published in your newspaper.

View on HN

Do wealthy or famous people use some kind of property management entity to hide their personal info in those records?

Yes, they set up trust and then trust owns the property. You can still sometimes figure out the owner based on the trust name.

Yes. Also, if this is a concern, the property involved may never have been publicly listed as for sale.

They use trusts, or if they really want to be private, they have their estate lawyer's firm buy it for them and be the owner of record.

Yeah, generally you have what’s called an Illinois Land Trust. I think every state but Louisiana now allows them.

The public record will say that the owner is “Trust #541341324132 with XYZ Bank/Title Co/Law Office”

If you want to know the real owner (“beneficiary”), you go to court and present the reasoning for wanting to know. If it’s a valid reason, the court will issue an order that you take over to XYZ Bank/Title Co/Law Office and they’ll give you that information.

> The identity of house buyers is a matter of public record.

That…has no bearing on whether sharing it violates Facebook policy on “privacy and personal information”. What would have a bearing would be citing the language of the policy and showing how the action was inconsistent with it, and I suspect that is not happening because the action is, in fact, consistent with the policy.

It's difficult to see this as anything other than a selectively enforced policy, which seems to be applied in a very lop-sided politically-motivated way.

Whether it's a policy of Facebook's or not is completely irrelevant. If they do not enforce this policy consistently, it opens them to accusations of political bias... which is what we have here.

> It's difficult to see this as anything other than a selectively enforced policy

I have seen no presentation of acts similarly situated with respect to the policy which have been treated differently. What is the basis for the claim of selectivity?

The OP that you’re replying under gives one...

Yes, facebook is known for its strong stances regarding "privacy and personal information"

What's glaring is that there's not even a veneer of consistency in this decision. Will they now be going back and censoring all articles that could lead to someone's residence? All future articles?

Of course they won't. They're content to be self-evidently biased on this point. As a liberal this troubles me.

Facebook will happily let you share articles about Kimberly Guilfoyle’s new mansion: https://www.facebook.com/KHOU11/posts/10161394155724062. Just to pick literally the first example that came to mind.

Doxxing that results in harassment is very often done via public information. What’s your point?

That the sharing of public information of public figures is in the public interest.

Also, doxxing isn’t illegal, although harassment is.

Maybe facebook has more insight as to how this article was being shared.

> doxxing isn’t illegal

It is against Facebook's rules.

Is sharing unusual real estate transactions without the actual address doxxing? I wouldn’t think so. This allows the dissemination of information without triggering Facebook’s inconsistent application of their own rules, and the public can refer directly to the canonical real estate ownership ledger (county records).

The problem is that Facebook selectively enforces these rules.

No, doxxing is the release of private information. That's the universally understood meaning of the term, and the only useful one. If you want to redefine the term to pertain to public information, then the term is no longer useful. It's just "displaying public information" at that point.

The canonical dox is posting someone’s name and address. If that’s not doxxing, the word has no meaning.

> canonical dox is posting someone’s name and address

Posting a pseudonymous person’s name and address divulges private information: the real person behind the pseudonym. Posting a public official’s name and address isn’t doxxing.

Like saying Bidan lives at the white house? Stating public information actually very public in this case isn't doxing.

"and the only useful one" Actually this is a useless definition, because what constitutes "private information" is exactly at issue

In exactly what way is information available in public government databases considered private. Please be specific.

Regardless of your definition of public, the word doxxing has never covered it. We have plenty of other language to refer to the sharing of publicly available information. The word doxxing was coined to give a name to a type of invasion of privacy that came to prominence with the rise of the Internet. If you want doxxing to just mean gossip, then your word no longer has a useful and distinct meaning.

If I didn't consent to that data to be stored in a public government database.

Your consent is irrelevant here. The information is still publicly available to anyone who wants to look.

You can make the case that this data should be private, and I might agree, but that doesn't change the fact that it is currently public, hence there is nothing to be "revealed" or "doxxed". The information is already out there, in public, easy to find.

Real property transactions are public by operation of law. It’s been that way for literally hundreds of years.

But I didn't consent to it existing in a second database: Twitter.

‘Doxing is an effective tool for bad actors, because the internet can cough up a shocking amount of publicly available information about practically anyone.’ - https://www.wired.com/story/what-do-to-if-you-are-being-doxe...

‘While doxers sometimes use hacking or deception to uncover personal details about their targets, contrary to popular belief “most of the info is public,” according to one researcher who has spent years studying and participating in the practice of doxing.’ — https://www.dailydot.com/debug/dox-doxing-protection-how-to/

The vast majority of doxxing does not require unauthorized access, social engineering or betrayal by an affiliated person. Instead, it’s almost always connecting dots between openly available bits of information and then packaging that information so as to direct and simplify harassment.

https://helgesverre.com/blog/how-to-dox/

I think there are multiple social media sites that consider giving addresses and personal information to be ‘doxxing’ regardless of whether or not the info was found in public databases. Twitter, Wikipedia and Reddit being examples.

No, nope, and no again.

Here's Reddit's definition:

"Doxxing is where a user publishes private or identifying information about (a particular individual) on the Internet, typically with malicious intent." [1]

Twitter's:

"Sharing someone’s private information online without their permission, sometimes called doxxing, is a breach of their privacy and of the Twitter Rules." [2]

And Wikipedia's:

"Doxing or doxxing is the act of publicly revealing previously private personal information about an individual or organization, usually through the Internet" [3]

1 - https://www.reddit.com/r/modguide/comments/e6nl5o/doxxing/

2 - https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/personal-info...

3 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doxing

The reddit one you quoted is exactly what the parent is talking about:

> publishes private or identifying information

No, those aren't the same thing at all, and this is made obvious by the examples they give on that page.

"Identifying information" refers to revealing the true identity of a pseudonymous user on the site (e.g., violentacrez), or a person who has no previous association with the site (e.g., Sunil Tripathi). In these cases the perpetrators used information that was known only to them, or that the "public" had no easy access to, or that the "public" didn't even know existed until the perpetrators brought it to their attention.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com