If you've been doxxed, that would seem to be a valid reason for changing your username. In my opinion, anyway.

https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=ata

I don't go searching around online.

It looks like they've been around since at least 2013

in order to support Trump, I peek in over at DI. While wearing a Hazmat suit. And I still shower afterward. Twice.

despite the fact you are a yankees fan......

GO RED SOX!!!

Ever talk about your high school? Classmates is publicly searchable, so is facebook. Social sites like mylife are searchable.
LinkedIn is searchable.

Be really, really careful.

The admins here are really fair. I suspect they would allow you to change.

saying "treestar, right?" How they heck they did that I do not know.

Thought I wouldn't know how.

...and write about them here. Stalkers can follow what you're doing if they're watching you closely enough.
A gofundme donation won't list your DU username but it will list the amount and, at least in the past, your real name. That is the name of the account holder. I suppose you could start a private corporation to make donations and hide yourself but then corporate owners and/or officers and usually registered with your state's department of state or commerce.

My daughter was being harassed online a while back on a message board and I took the time to find every tool available to find the person. This led to an IP address about 25 miles away. A detective from my town got a court order for the ISP to give the street address of the client with that IP. The detective stopped by to speak with her. Used a marked car and brought a uniformed officer with him. I had told the detective when we made the report that we only wanted the harassment to stop and had no wish to ruin anyone's life. No arrests were made.

The detective called me that afternoon and recounted the story. He said she claimed that it must have been someone using her WiFi but my daughter never had trouble again.

I'm very satisfied with the police in my town. I've been here 10 years.

If you are a victim of harassment or other internet activities, document everything. Take notes and screen shots.

inside your home, your favorite jacket, sweater or hat, your favorite hobby, names of streets near you? Stalkers are both relentless and can be very focused, they can use information that you don't think about much to pin you down to a few people, then they keep at it until they know a lot about you.

I was stalked by a person once, thankfully she was not violent and eventually apparently left me alone. But yeah, I wake up at night still to the slightest of noise that is not normal.

Crazy stuff, that is why I try not to give out a lot of details about myself, what my home looks like, ect.

to know about any of that. I have put things on Facebook that might be like that - my relatives, for example. My page is not public but only seen by Facebook Friends. On something like DU I would not post that. So some DUer who figured that out has to be savvy in some way. They can take my state and profession and that narrows it down, but how much? There has to be some type of hacking ability to figure out the email I used for DU where I did not put it in the DU information.

a mind that can make connections and put them together. A good knowledge of Google Boolean searches helps, too. Some people are good at that, and others aren't. We leave footprints behind, wherever we go on the Internet. Bits of information lead to other bits. Eventually, it's often possible to assemble enough information to narrow a search down to a single person.

Those are the techniques such people use. People leave trails. For example, most websites like this one require images to be hosted on an existing website. Images associated with a screen name can be tracked back to their hosting service. More often than you suspect, people attach different screen names to that hosting service. Google lets you search for images, and sometimes people post the same images on different forums, etc. They often use different screen names on those other forums. Other searches can tie things together and narrow things down. Subject matter of posts, unique language usages, and other clues often help, but it's never an easy thing to do.

Now, doing that kind of sleuthing takes a lot of time and requires some intuitive thinking. It's surprising, though, how often just a few steps can home in on a person. Most people aren't all that careful, I guess.

Note: The only time I have used that process is when someone has threatened or stalked me. About half the time, I can pin down who it is with just a reasonable amount of effort. The other half of the time, I give up looking after a while. I never do any of it just out of curiosity.

Maybe they used a tactic similar to what the US used to tap into Angela Merkel's phone.

Pretty scary. But it does not surprise me that a dedicated group of hackers can figure out a password for a phone. Almost all of us use something in the password that has some meaning to us. By studying a person's history from birth, including the parent's names, birthplaces, hair color, eye color, hackers can establish a starting point to hack into a phone, if they are good, they can mostly figure out the most likely passwords to try first. Most security will lock a password if a certain number of attempt happen within x time, but professional hackers would almost certainly know what those rules are and not run afoul of them.

Some hackers can get to bios attached to your posts that you don't realize are there. I generally try to make their job difficult, but if one really wanted to find me, that person would.

Did you hear the news today (Sunday, 31st). The government of Saudi Arabia got into Jeff Bezos' personal phone. Imagine that, a man who has layers and layers of online security around him somehow put out something that allowed his phone to be breached.

While Poindexter Oglethorpe is not my real name, my real name is unique, as in I'm the only "Poindexter Oglethorpe" in this country. Luckily my real name has not come back to haunt me here or elsewhere on the internet.

Actually, I show up on the internet under my real name in various places, and I'm sure plenty of people think I'm a loon, especially my asshole conservative former co-workers who post all kinds of right-wing bullshit on FB.

Laura, do talk to the administrators about this.

And if need be, start all over again under a different name.

I actually did that when my former DU persona became non grata here.

I think there is one and only one person here who knows my earlier screen name, and I've no need to revive bad memories.

I would miss Laura PourMeADrink, but if you feel creeped out, it might be necessary.

My first and last name are extremely common. It's pretty hard to reach the real me even if you know my name.
You would need at least one other piece of information.
I never give out my real name so thus far I've rarely had the issue that someone online figured out who I was.

Some thread, I don’t remember. Trying to mess with me. It never went further than that though. It is creepy, I agree.

They found my home address on Google maps and I still wonder how the fuck they got that information. Creepy fucks.

from my facebook and a fellow DUer pointed out how he was able to find me within seconds by putting that quote in google.

I deleted then re-worded my post, paraphrasing instead.

Scary world.

anywhere on social media.

People should be very careful about giving out too much personal information here. Those people who spend time trying to DOXX us are mentally ill. Maybe even throw them a false clue here and there to waste their time.

Anyone with social media accounts should check their privacy settings to see if they are searchable by the email or phone number you provided them.

I think internet anonymity is mostly a myth. Everything you do is public. Some things are more secure than others (like bank transactions). Forums really aren’t, though.

Whether or not you get doxxed mostly depends on how much willpower there is to do so. Take care!

They quickly get bored with the intellectual argument, and go after the much juicier subject of who said it and why they are a bad person, which makes their argument bad. Total fallacy. But it's all they've got. That's why they have so much will to find out who the person is.

And we know they lurk here, they have a whole forum dedicated to trash talking us. Hi, by the way!

to do it. Shit, I don't blame them considering they are intellectually bankrupt and whatnot.

That's what reasonable people do.

Hahahaha.

for tid bits. Just,...juvenile.

However, I haven’t given a fuck about it in a very long time.

In fact, I use my real name and DU username on Twitter.
If a deplorable wants to find me, they do so at their own peril.

I will say that they themselves are the reason why I haven’t.

and nothing particularly interesting, but it’s good to know. He/she/it caught some crap for it too. 😄 To be fair the post they were ranking on was pretty dull. 😂

Scarlett Jackson
From Kankakee Michigan.

At least I don’t think I did.

Be sure to let someone know if you change!! Someone might miss you!

What a waste of time. Creepy.

That is actually why I have a new account now
A few years ago I managed to acquire an internet stalker.... He found me on websites that there's no way he could have known that I would be on and he somehow figured out which person was me and was contacting me to respond to my posts on here and other websites.....

It was creepy af... So I ended up deleting all my accounts all over the Internet and creating new ones....

converse and debate?

say, make intellectually dishonest arguments, regurgitate Limbaugh talking points.

Or

Him: “Obama is destroying America!”
Me: “hmm let’s talk about one specific policy of Obama’s that is destroying America. What Obama
Policy is destroying America?”
Him “.............”
Him: “Obama is destroying America!”

are well known for doxxing DUers. They have no rules against doing so, and some members of those forums take great pleasure in revealing people's names, locations and occupations.

Unfortunately, most people who post online on a regular basis inadvertently reveal personal information in their posts, either here or elsewhere. Many use the same screen name on multiple sites. It often doesn't take very long for someone to use Google to find other instances of a person posting, often in places where their guard is down and they reveal personal info.

Most often, being doxxed on one of those sites doesn't lead to anything negative happening. However, it has caused great problems for a few, and the posters on those sites are very proud of costing someone a job or some other negative consequence.

One fruitful path is to contact your attorney, if you have one, and provide that attorney with information about the website where you were doxxed. A cease and desist letter from an attorney with notification of possible consequences will often get the posts where that information was revealed taken off the site.

That takes some research, of course. You'll need to use a whois site to discover the ownership of the site, and document the posts where the doxxing or any celebration of negative consequences can be found, with links. You can also use the tools in your browser to save threads to your hard drive, in case they are removed by the site.

It is very difficult to maintain anonymity on the Internet. It can be done, but we often reveal information that can be used to discover our identities without realizing it.

I say all this because I have been doxxed on multiple websites. My answer has been to simply abandon any hope of anonymity and act accordingly online. I don't work for an employer, so that can't be a source of harassment. I have also had an attorney send a cease and desist letter a couple of times, to good effect.

I'm sorry that happened to you.

She was a waitress in a tourist area. Can’t remember her name, but someone let her boss know about it and I think she got fired. She gave out a lot of information about her workplace.

No idea if she got her job back.

They have done other things to other DUers, too. I won't go into it, but they've stirred up problems for them and have cost a couple people their jobs. Despicable, and it's too difficult to sue them. It's an ugly sort of thing, and something I won't participate in, even when I know who those people are.

and give many many details. Very risky thing to do.

I’ve seen it many times.

I know of two people who have lost their jobs, and another who had a different problem caused by those people.

who had something happen to them as a result of their posts, but the details I’ve lost in the memory mists.

Good on you for confronting your stalker. I think that was a perfect way to handle that.

In some cases, however, people are successful in concealing who they are. In those cases, I just move on to other things. In another case, it took me quite a great deal of time, about three years, off and on, to discover who the person was. By the time I did, it turned out that he was deceased. My search ended with his obituary, finally. It was, oddly enough, a sad discovery for me.

I guess wanting to get someone fired is a purpose, but why otherwise? I really don’t get it.

I guess some people simply have too much time on their hands.

Some sort of sense of anger and a desire for some sort of retribution, I think, is a big part of it. Of course, it's rare for any actual action to be taken. That does happen, though, from time to time.

I don’t think she posts here anymore.

Hope she got her job back.

Holy Shit. Now I would love to go over there and shut everybody down but I guess that's not allowed and I would get banned for being liberal.

OK then I'm stuck with the dregs of the earth over at the Daily Caller then. Gosh I haven't been there in awhile. Whenever I go I get stuck there for hours because I am compelled to shut every deplorable down and let's face it it's like shooting fish in a fucking barrel since they all suffer from INTELLECTUAL ROT.

PS I've never used my real name on these social sites, anywhere not even Facebook.

that aren't public-facing. In those, they get into the details and keep records of people they have doxxed.

One now defunct forum, Old Elm Tree, had one of those secret forums. I got a saved thread about MineralMan from someone who had access to that secret forum. It's very interesting to read, and very informative of who was collecting that information. With only a little research on Google, I soon discovered the real name of that individual, along with his location, etc.

I sent both the saved forum thread, and my information to that individual's email address, which I also discovered, along with a suggestion that he stop wasting his time following me around. I haven't heard from him since, and don't see his screen name any more on sites he used to frequent. Apparently, he did not know that he could be doxxed, too. The difference is that I would never share that information with anyone, anywhere. I hope he has learned from the experience.

I use my real name on FB and many people, friend and foe know who I am when I use Cold War Spook. All you have to do is Google Cold War Spook and it gives you my name and the small town I live in. Easy enough to find me.

Posting pictures of pets, vehicles, favorite sights near where you live, hobbies, where you have lived, when you were born, your age, ect, can give you away. I also don't open the DU site around other people.

and they just don't think. They post a picture of their pets wearing their tags. A person can zoom in and they'll get a phone number, maybe an address, even the owners name sometimes. People need to blur their pets tag before posting, I swear it's too common.

So sorry it happened to you.

I hope you can get a civil action against their website, or some criminal enforcement action against them to make them less cocky.

I leave my keys in my car and truck so I don't have to look for them.
I don't lock my door either. I don't have much to steal. I think my most
valuable possession is my old ES335 Gibson. I've been here for a while,
no one will steal from me. The OG's in Douglas and Agua Prieta cover me.