Staying anonymous on social media has become almost impossible

Privacy became a common concern less than a decade ago, long after most people joined social networks. Today, in many cases, users still believe they have protected profiles, especially when these are almost entirely anonymous and therefore difficult to trace back to a real identity. However, this is often underestimated. This is particularly noticeable when watching videos published on TikTok by those who engage in consensual doxxing. The most famous is the U.S. content creator Kristen Sotakoun, known as Notkahnjunior. People challenge her to discover the year they were born, using only data available online. Sotakoun uses only the information found on Google, Instagram, X, and Facebook, just like anyone could with a bit of caution and creativity. This is the point: the challenge is to identify the user’s age without accessing online registries or relying on more advanced search engine functionalities. Sotakoun has no formal training or specific knowledge of cybersecurity: she clarified that she began consensual doxxing simply because she has always enjoyed solving puzzles. She started a bit by chance, following a trend on TikTok. Initially, she had just a few dozen followers, while today she has 1.2 million. In recent years, her content has become very popular and appreciated, to the point where she was able to quit her job as a waitress in Chicago and support herself financially as a content creator – also thanks to collaborations with companies involved in privacy. Sotakoun usually takes on a couple of challenges a day from her followers: she claims to manage to find people’s ages in about 80% of cases, typically within half an hour. Most of the time, she selects deliberately complex challenges, such as subjects who do not use the same nickname on any other social network or users who keep their profiles private.

Consensual doxxing in practice

The techniques and strategies employed by Sotakoun are indeed very interesting to follow. The same goes for Yassin En Naimi, known as Yakinop, an Italian content creator who, among other things, tracks down precise locations starting from simple photographs – in some cases even family photos. Recently, En Naimi found the exact location where a photo was taken by following, among other things, the personal information – available on social networks – of the user who had challenged him. Sotakoun, on the other hand, once managed to identify the birthdate of a person who had never posted anything on their profile. She succeeded by identifying a relative among the people they followed, tracking them down on Facebook, and checking if any of the relatives wore glasses similar to those in their TikTok profile picture – which had a filter applied. Once found, their birthdate was visible on their Facebook profile. In almost all cases, Sotakoun uses the profiles of friends or relatives, who usually pay less attention to online privacy issues, to complete these challenges. What her videos demonstrate is that, in the end, it’s usually family members who make an individual's anonymity vulnerable on the Internet. Some have accused Sotakoun of teaching thousands of people how to easily track someone online: but she believes she is rather showing how important and at the same time underestimated privacy on social networks is. For example, it often happens to see people posting pictures of their car, where the license plate is clearly visible, as well as their plane tickets, containing sensitive information that could potentially be reused for scams. Such carelessness can also be seen on Facebook Marketplace, where some users naively specify their residence. The same goes for those posting ads on real estate portals. For this reason, several cybersecurity experts have supported the educational work that Sotakoun carries out – sometimes unintentionally – with her content, showing how potentially simple it can be to track down information online that theoretically pertains to a person’s private sphere.