Is privacy dead in the digital age? 'Consensual doxxing' and the consequences of sharing personal details online
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We are no strangers to the fact that the internet has revolutionised how we communicate with each other, especially over the last couple of decades.
It’s brought us the luxuries of convenience, efficiency, and the ability to stay connected with our loved ones no matter the distance.
But while the online world has become integral to living in the digital age, there's a daunting truth that comes with it — you’re never as hidden as you think you are.
A recent TikTok series chillingly revealed this.
The trend, known as ‘consensual doxxing’, involves a person exposing the name or birthday of people who challenge them to find their details online, even if they believe their privacy settings are at the highest level.
TikToker Kristen (@notkahnjunior) has shown how eerily someone intent on digging up details of another person online can manage to do so with the slightest bit of information left in cyberspace.
That's right, members! Even if you trust yourself to be on your guard whenever you’re online, it can be quite easy for your personal information to be revealed.
But before we get any further, what is ‘doxxing’, exactly? Well, according to UrbanDictionary.com, it’s a recently coined term that takes root from the words ‘document’ and ‘dropping’.
As you probably inferred from ‘consensual doxxing’, doxxing involves exposing someone’s real identity online. (It’s really more of a negative thing though, so don’t go around telling the grandkids you’d doxx them!)
The clincher here is the term ‘consensual’. Kristen doesn’t dig up people’s details unless she’s challenged to do so, which leads us to the case of TikTok user @knoughpe.
On one of Kristen’s videos, Knoughpe told Kristen: ‘I literally feel like I’m invincible if you only have my TikTok.’
And just like that, Kristen got down and dirty in the following video post.
‘Knoughpe has nothing on their (TikTok) profile — no first and last name, no videos, nothing,’ she said of the anonymous account.
True enough, Knoughpe had sparse details on their profile, which only showed a picture of what appears to be a cartoonish version of a face wearing glasses.
With what little she had on hand, Kristen took the first step in her social media sleuthing method: Googling the name.
‘When you type someone’s TikTok username on Google, it shows you posts they’ve commented on,’ she explained.
Kristen’s cursory search gave her a lead: in one post Knoughpe commented on, they wrote: ‘Very nice!! Living on the east coast of Florida since ‘94 so you’re definitely safe!!’
‘Thank you for that,’ Kristen said. But she wasn’t done.
In another post, Knoughpe commented: ‘I have a degree in engineering but I don’t post on social media.’
‘So you wear glasses, you have a degree in engineering, and you live in Florida,’ she summarised, before following with a rather telling comment.
‘What would Full Sail University do without you? I don’t know.’
But even with the impressive information gathered, Kristen really didn’t have a lot to go on. Probably a thousand people fit the criteria she found, so now what?
Well, she went back to Knoughpe’s TikTok profile and looked closer at their followers. Specifically, their first followers.
If you think about it, who were your first friends on Facebook? Most probably family and friends, right? So Kristen was onto something here.
Knoughpe’s first follower was an equally anonymous account called ‘@hooraybeemo’ with only a few followers and a ‘K’ for a profile picture.
Without further ado, Kristen then checked Hooraybeemo’s followers and two of the first grabbed her attention.
By this point, though, she opted not to share the actual names of the accounts and people she found, so bear with us!
Kristen first focused on one profile of what appears to be a woman really similar to Knoughpe’s picture.
‘When you click this person’s profile — I’ll call them “A” — when you click A’s profile, it says they live in Florida… I’m getting close, because Knoughpe lives in Florida,’ she said.
And then, she pointed to the next suspect profile (who we will call ‘B’, like the letter on their profile picture), which she described as having ‘a very common name’, making it hard to pin down anything specific about finding out who they really were.
Ever the sleuth though, Kristen was undeterred. What she did instead was search for A’s name (the real one) plus the term ‘Google’, which revealed a Facebook profile matching A’s details.
But there still was the question of who B was.
So, with what apparently was A’s real Facebook profile, she searched for B’s first name, and then…
‘One person came up, but they didn’t have the same last name (as B),’ Kristen said.
‘Except when I looked at their Facebook URL.’
Facebook URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) sound very technical, but they are simply what you see when you go to a Facebook profile and look at your browser's address bar.
For example, SDC’s Facebook page has the following URL (like and follow us, while you’re at it and if you like!): https://www.facebook.com/seniorsdiscountclub
Play around with a few details and you can come up with an example of a fictional person with facebook.com/johndoe.
Going back, B’s TikTok account name fully matched the Facebook profile’s URL.
‘I knew I was close,’ Kristen said.
But one thing was still unclear: how is Hooraybeemo related to all of this, aside from being the link to Knoughpe’s and the accounts of A and B?
‘I was like, “Hooraybeemo has to be involved here somewhere.”’ she said.
This thought took her to Instagram, where she found an account with the same name set to private, meaning you couldn’t see any pictures or videos posted openly unless you put in a follow request and they approve it.
One detail stuck out: a ‘very unique’ name beginning with the letter K.
‘Guess what?’ Kristen asked. ‘The first person who followed Hooraybeemo (B) is married to someone with that name.’
Okay, phew! Quite a lot to unpack right? And still, we’re left with no definite answer as to who Knoughpe is — something Kristen admitted to thinking.
She then went back to what now seemed to be B’s Facebook profile and scrolled through the pictures they posted.
‘I looked through people who had liked their photos… I was like “All I know about Knoughpe is that they’re from Florida and they wear glasses.”’
While doing her search, she stumbled upon one picture very similar to that of Knoughpe’s on TikTok.
It was of a Caucasian man with half of his face in shadow, wearing glasses.
‘Guess what this person does? They were an audio engineer based on posts I saw and they were in Florida,’ Kristen said, and not without some smugness in her voice.
‘I was positive. And through birthday posts, April 14, 1990… Happy Birthday, Ethan!’ she said in closing, going so far as to utter the real first name of Knoughpe.
The sad thing is, Knoughpe appears to have not commented yet to confirm if Kristen was right on the jackpot with her sleuthing skills, so in the meantime, we’re stuck with waiting!
If you’re thinking this is a one-off kind of thing, well, head on over to Kristen’s TikTok page to watch more of her ‘consensual doxxing’ videos!
Now, as fun (and yes, confusing) as Kristen’s videos are, they do give a great lesson in privacy in the digital age, according to University of Colorado-Boulder Associate Professor of Information Science Casey Fiesler.
On Twitter, Fiesler wrote of Kristen’s videos: ‘This TikTok account of “consensual doxxing” is a gift for folks who teach about social media privacy to young people.’
Fiesler noticed after watching a couple of Kristen’s videos that she was able to track down the accounts of people through three things: interactions with family and friends, shared usernames across platforms, and Facebook.
‘If you actually want to be anonymous on a social media platform, do not friend/interact with anyone you know (in real life), or at least make sure that they know you want to be anonymous and they need to be careful what they say in your comments,’ she said.
Fiesler said to ensure that there are no overlaps of details between social media profiles (if you want to stay anonymous, that is), and that includes posts, videos, photos, and the like.
‘(It’s) worth noting none of these videos ended with "When I found your real name I Googled it and found you on a data broker site." That's one that hopefully people know to look out for.’
‘But instead, it's like "Your high school friend wished you a happy 30th birthday on Instagram!"’ she observed.
‘I think the overarching lesson here is that it’s hard to have 100 per cent control over your privacy in any context (but especially social media) because of the ability of *other people* to reveal information about us.’
‘You should know this and plan accordingly.’
Doxxing still might seem like nothing but a vague, faraway threat, but it’s as much of a danger here in Australia as anywhere else.
In 2019, ABC journalist Osman Faruqi was the recipient of appalling racist abuse and harassment when a far-right activist leaked his personal mobile phone number online after he published a tweet criticising Australians for having ‘a collective delusion that they are laidback and forward thinking’.
Faruqi’s ordeal was made worse by the fact that he ‘hit a dead end’ with authorities and found that current laws were not enough to deal with the consequences of being doxxed.
So with all this in mind, members, if you use the internet, please be careful of the information you leave online. Be sure to take whatever measures you can to keep your personal data safe, and stay away from websites that require you to share personal information that can be easily connected to you.
Online privacy cannot be taken for granted. Remember that even though you may be behind the screen, someone may still be actively looking for you — and probably not with the best of intentions, as three unlucky Aussies found out the hard way.
Keep yourself safe, and stay vigilant!
So, what is your reaction to this story? Has it made you rethink how you behave and the information you share on social media?
Share your thoughts with us below!
Source: TikTok/@notkahnjunior
It’s brought us the luxuries of convenience, efficiency, and the ability to stay connected with our loved ones no matter the distance.
But while the online world has become integral to living in the digital age, there's a daunting truth that comes with it — you’re never as hidden as you think you are.
A recent TikTok series chillingly revealed this.
The trend, known as ‘consensual doxxing’, involves a person exposing the name or birthday of people who challenge them to find their details online, even if they believe their privacy settings are at the highest level.
TikToker Kristen (@notkahnjunior) has shown how eerily someone intent on digging up details of another person online can manage to do so with the slightest bit of information left in cyberspace.
That's right, members! Even if you trust yourself to be on your guard whenever you’re online, it can be quite easy for your personal information to be revealed.
One user on TikTok has shown how easy it could be to track down a person who wishes to stay anonymous online by the bits of information they unwittingly give away. Stock Image Credit: Pexels/Vojteck Okenka
But before we get any further, what is ‘doxxing’, exactly? Well, according to UrbanDictionary.com, it’s a recently coined term that takes root from the words ‘document’ and ‘dropping’.
As you probably inferred from ‘consensual doxxing’, doxxing involves exposing someone’s real identity online. (It’s really more of a negative thing though, so don’t go around telling the grandkids you’d doxx them!)
The clincher here is the term ‘consensual’. Kristen doesn’t dig up people’s details unless she’s challenged to do so, which leads us to the case of TikTok user @knoughpe.
On one of Kristen’s videos, Knoughpe told Kristen: ‘I literally feel like I’m invincible if you only have my TikTok.’
And just like that, Kristen got down and dirty in the following video post.
‘Knoughpe has nothing on their (TikTok) profile — no first and last name, no videos, nothing,’ she said of the anonymous account.
True enough, Knoughpe had sparse details on their profile, which only showed a picture of what appears to be a cartoonish version of a face wearing glasses.
With what little she had on hand, Kristen took the first step in her social media sleuthing method: Googling the name.
‘When you type someone’s TikTok username on Google, it shows you posts they’ve commented on,’ she explained.
Kristen only had a profile picture as her first clue about who Knoughpe was in real life. Screengrab Credit: TikTok/@notkahnjunior
Kristen’s cursory search gave her a lead: in one post Knoughpe commented on, they wrote: ‘Very nice!! Living on the east coast of Florida since ‘94 so you’re definitely safe!!’
‘Thank you for that,’ Kristen said. But she wasn’t done.
In another post, Knoughpe commented: ‘I have a degree in engineering but I don’t post on social media.’
‘So you wear glasses, you have a degree in engineering, and you live in Florida,’ she summarised, before following with a rather telling comment.
‘What would Full Sail University do without you? I don’t know.’
But even with the impressive information gathered, Kristen really didn’t have a lot to go on. Probably a thousand people fit the criteria she found, so now what?
Well, she went back to Knoughpe’s TikTok profile and looked closer at their followers. Specifically, their first followers.
If you think about it, who were your first friends on Facebook? Most probably family and friends, right? So Kristen was onto something here.
Knoughpe’s first follower was an equally anonymous account called ‘@hooraybeemo’ with only a few followers and a ‘K’ for a profile picture.
Kristen was able to grab bits and pieces of who Knoughpe was by some of the comments they left on some TikTok posts. Screengrab Credit: TikTok/@notkahnjunior
Without further ado, Kristen then checked Hooraybeemo’s followers and two of the first grabbed her attention.
By this point, though, she opted not to share the actual names of the accounts and people she found, so bear with us!
Kristen first focused on one profile of what appears to be a woman really similar to Knoughpe’s picture.
‘When you click this person’s profile — I’ll call them “A” — when you click A’s profile, it says they live in Florida… I’m getting close, because Knoughpe lives in Florida,’ she said.
And then, she pointed to the next suspect profile (who we will call ‘B’, like the letter on their profile picture), which she described as having ‘a very common name’, making it hard to pin down anything specific about finding out who they really were.
Ever the sleuth though, Kristen was undeterred. What she did instead was search for A’s name (the real one) plus the term ‘Google’, which revealed a Facebook profile matching A’s details.
But there still was the question of who B was.
So, with what apparently was A’s real Facebook profile, she searched for B’s first name, and then…
‘One person came up, but they didn’t have the same last name (as B),’ Kristen said.
‘Except when I looked at their Facebook URL.’
Along with Knoughpe, two users with their names spelled out in full were among Hooraybeemo’s first followers on TikTok. Screengrab Credit: TikTok/@notkahnjunior
Facebook URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) sound very technical, but they are simply what you see when you go to a Facebook profile and look at your browser's address bar.
For example, SDC’s Facebook page has the following URL (like and follow us, while you’re at it and if you like!): https://www.facebook.com/seniorsdiscountclub
Play around with a few details and you can come up with an example of a fictional person with facebook.com/johndoe.
Going back, B’s TikTok account name fully matched the Facebook profile’s URL.
‘I knew I was close,’ Kristen said.
But one thing was still unclear: how is Hooraybeemo related to all of this, aside from being the link to Knoughpe’s and the accounts of A and B?
‘I was like, “Hooraybeemo has to be involved here somewhere.”’ she said.
This thought took her to Instagram, where she found an account with the same name set to private, meaning you couldn’t see any pictures or videos posted openly unless you put in a follow request and they approve it.
One detail stuck out: a ‘very unique’ name beginning with the letter K.
‘Guess what?’ Kristen asked. ‘The first person who followed Hooraybeemo (B) is married to someone with that name.’
Okay, phew! Quite a lot to unpack right? And still, we’re left with no definite answer as to who Knoughpe is — something Kristen admitted to thinking.
She then went back to what now seemed to be B’s Facebook profile and scrolled through the pictures they posted.
Kristen found an Instagram account named ‘Hooraybeemo’ with a crucial detail. Screengrab Credit: TikTok/@notkahnjunior
‘I looked through people who had liked their photos… I was like “All I know about Knoughpe is that they’re from Florida and they wear glasses.”’
While doing her search, she stumbled upon one picture very similar to that of Knoughpe’s on TikTok.
It was of a Caucasian man with half of his face in shadow, wearing glasses.
‘Guess what this person does? They were an audio engineer based on posts I saw and they were in Florida,’ Kristen said, and not without some smugness in her voice.
‘I was positive. And through birthday posts, April 14, 1990… Happy Birthday, Ethan!’ she said in closing, going so far as to utter the real first name of Knoughpe.
The sad thing is, Knoughpe appears to have not commented yet to confirm if Kristen was right on the jackpot with her sleuthing skills, so in the meantime, we’re stuck with waiting!
If you’re thinking this is a one-off kind of thing, well, head on over to Kristen’s TikTok page to watch more of her ‘consensual doxxing’ videos!
Now, as fun (and yes, confusing) as Kristen’s videos are, they do give a great lesson in privacy in the digital age, according to University of Colorado-Boulder Associate Professor of Information Science Casey Fiesler.
On Twitter, Fiesler wrote of Kristen’s videos: ‘This TikTok account of “consensual doxxing” is a gift for folks who teach about social media privacy to young people.’
Kristen’s sleuthing had her stumbling across one profile picture on Facebook with an uncanny resemblance to Knoughpe’s TikTok profile picture. Screengrab Credit: TikTok/@notkahnjunior
Fiesler noticed after watching a couple of Kristen’s videos that she was able to track down the accounts of people through three things: interactions with family and friends, shared usernames across platforms, and Facebook.
‘If you actually want to be anonymous on a social media platform, do not friend/interact with anyone you know (in real life), or at least make sure that they know you want to be anonymous and they need to be careful what they say in your comments,’ she said.
Fiesler said to ensure that there are no overlaps of details between social media profiles (if you want to stay anonymous, that is), and that includes posts, videos, photos, and the like.
‘(It’s) worth noting none of these videos ended with "When I found your real name I Googled it and found you on a data broker site." That's one that hopefully people know to look out for.’
‘But instead, it's like "Your high school friend wished you a happy 30th birthday on Instagram!"’ she observed.
‘I think the overarching lesson here is that it’s hard to have 100 per cent control over your privacy in any context (but especially social media) because of the ability of *other people* to reveal information about us.’
‘You should know this and plan accordingly.’
Doxxing still might seem like nothing but a vague, faraway threat, but it’s as much of a danger here in Australia as anywhere else.
In 2019, ABC journalist Osman Faruqi was the recipient of appalling racist abuse and harassment when a far-right activist leaked his personal mobile phone number online after he published a tweet criticising Australians for having ‘a collective delusion that they are laidback and forward thinking’.
Faruqi’s ordeal was made worse by the fact that he ‘hit a dead end’ with authorities and found that current laws were not enough to deal with the consequences of being doxxed.
Online privacy cannot be taken for granted. Remember that even though you may be behind the screen, someone may still be actively looking for you — and probably not with the best of intentions, as three unlucky Aussies found out the hard way.
Keep yourself safe, and stay vigilant!
So, what is your reaction to this story? Has it made you rethink how you behave and the information you share on social media?
Share your thoughts with us below!
Source: TikTok/@notkahnjunior
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Honestly, sometimes I look back at the ‘good old days’ and wish for their return. Whatever happened to simple communication means, like picking up the receiver on the home telephone when you want to chat with someone? At least we used to be able to remember most peoples’ numbers! If they weren’t at home, you just rang back later, no voicemails! Nowadays everything, and I mean literally (almost) everything is done on a mobile phone! Text messages, emails, electronic banking transactions, social media, … what are those animals??!! Yes, I do like to reminisce occasionally. Life seems to have become way too complicated … and scary! We never had to worry about identity theft then, or constantly updating or upgrading a ‘mobile’ phone. Ah! For the simpler days. 
