Digital Harassment Self-Defense
Harassment’s Purpose: Individual and Collective Harms
It’s easy to mistake coordinated harassment as a problem affecting only individuals, since the immediate purpose of these attacks is to silence, humiliate, and isolate individual researchers.
But the larger goal of harassment campaigns is to undermine and delegitimize higher education and public trust in academic expertise, with a particular focus on “high prestige” institutions.
Attacks on Academic Freedom: Understanding the Current Landscape
America’s Censored Classrooms 2024: Refining the Art of Censorship.
A report from PEN America, October 2024
Manufacturing Backlash: Right-Wing Think Tanks and Legislative Attacks on Higher Education,
Isaac Kamola. A report from the AAUP’s Center for Academic Freedom, May 2024.
Against the Common Sense: Academic Freedom as a Collective Right
E. Cherniavsky, Journal of Academic Freedom. 2021
Academic freedom itself is often viewed as an individual right – the right of individual faculty to speak freely. But Cherniavsky usefully reframes academic freedom as the collective right of the faculty of a department, discipline, and/or institution to set academic standards, determine the quality of one another’s academic work, define the boundaries of a discipline, determine what academic topics are taught, and more.
For more journalism, research, and essays, see the section Understanding Harassment, below.
Doxing Self-Defense
Find What's Out There
Google your name. Google your name + “address.” Google your name + “phone number.”
Then try those searches with a non-tracking search engine like DuckDuckGo, Startpage, Brave Search, or Qwant
Search for your old handles, usernames, social media profiles.
Search for yourself in a facial recognition database. You will need to update a photo of yourself. But this is really worth doing.
Repeat for close family members, or others you want to protect.
Clean Up What You Can
Remove Your Data from Public-Facing Broker Sites
DIY
Yael Grauer's Big Ass Data Broker Opt Out List
Data Removal Guide from Michael Bazzell
Hiring a Service
DeleteMe
First, review Services That Delete Your Data from People-Search Sites Don't Work Very Well, Study Finds (Consumer Reports, Aug. 24, 2024)
Control Your Social Media Content
Decide what to keep, and what to delete.
Bulk delete, and back up old tweets (and soon other social media content) with the free tool Cyd. You can also plan to delete them on an automatic schedule. Many customization options. Save a spreadsheet of your old tweets for personal archiving, if you want.
Use the Block Party app to review all privacy settings for multiple social media platforms, and activate useful tools on multiple platforms, such as proactive blocking of known bad actors, and quarantining of harassing messages.
Finally
Do you want your office address available on the campus website? Photo?
Contact social media friends and ask them to untag you, or take down info.
Consider leaving some old information up if it is useful for misdirection and poses no harm.
Some Stuff You Can't Delete
Sites like Canary Mission, Professor Watchlist, and Keywiki exist in order to make it easier for harassers to target faculty. Generally, there's no way to have your information removed from these websites, but you can request that Google remove search results from these sites in its rankings. Results of these requests may vary, but it's worth a try.
Another way to push down harasser-created results is to make sure there is plenty of good, recent information out there about you on high-quality websites. In other words, you don't want to disappear from the web. Examples include: well-curated social media profiles, your Cornell faculty page, news articles and press releases. Work with your Cornell university relations contact to help.
Remember that you do not control any data about your digital activities and communication that is created on an employer-owned device, or with employer-licensed software, such as Zoom, Box, Microsoft 365, etc.
Background Reading on Data Brokers
Public-Facing Data Brokers
I Shared My Phone Number. I Learned I Shouldn't Have. (B. Chen, NYTimes. Aug. 15, 2019.)
On the Failures of "Anonymized" Data
Where Even the Children Are Being Tracked (C. Warzel & S. Thompson, NYTimes. Dec. 21, 2019)
Phone Apps
The Loophole That Turns Your Apps Into Spies (C. Warzel, NYTimes. Sept. 24, 2019)
Who Is Policing the Location Data Industry? (A. Ng & J. Keegan,,The Markup. Feb. 24, 2022)
How Your Data Gets Passed Around
Play the Data Dealer Game
Secure Your Accounts
Ideally, each of your accounts will have a unique, hard-to-guess password. Creation and storage of most of these passwords are best left to a password manager.
But for your most important accounts, you may want to create your own memorable, strong passwords, and keep them out of your password manager. You may also want to enable two-factor authentication for these most important accounts.
Don't forget to create a strong, memorable password for your password manager itself!
Create Strong Passwords
How to Create Strong Passwords, Electronic Freedom Foundation (2021)
Choose and Maintain a Password Manager
Why You Need a Password Manager. Yes, You., A. Cunningham (2021). Wirecutter: The New York Times
Have I Been Pwned? A safe, free tool that allows you to see if your email address(es) has been a username in any known credential hacks.
Choose a password manager, and install it on all your devices. Here are three easy-to-use options:
Bitwarden
Pros Open source. Well-designed and easy to use. Free for individuals.
Cons: Slightly less user-friendly than 1Password
Cost Free for up to 2 individuals. $40/year for families.
1Password
Pros: The absolute simplest to use, in our opinion.
Cons: No free tier
Cost: $36/yr for individuals, $60/yr for families
Enable Multi-Factor Authentication
For your most important or most sensitive accounts, consider enabling two-factor authentication (2FA) with an authenticator app, a hardware token -- or both, which lets each act as a backup for the other.
The easiest and often default 2FA method is plain text SMS. But this is also the least secure method, as a determined adversary can spoof your phone number if they know it, and intercept plain SMS texts. That's why we recommend an authenticator app or hardware token.
Authenticator Apps
Authenticator apps are free for individual end users (like you) because their profit comes from the tech companies that pay for them to be compatible with their sites, and by enterprise customers (like Cornell).
Authenticator apps explained: There's a Better Way to Protect Yourself from Hackers and Identity Thieves, S. Morrison (2021). Vox recode.
You probably already use one authenticator app -- Duo Mobile -- to access your Cornell account. Follow these instructions to add additional third-party accounts to Duo Mobile.
Authy is another free and trustworthy authenticator app.
Some 3rd-party password managers also offer authenicator apps.
Authentication with a Hardware Token
A hardware token is the most secure form of 2FA. It's a small physical item that looks slightly like a thumb drive. Keep it with you -- on your keychain, for example -- and plug it into your device's USB or Lightning drive when you need authentication. It's particularly useful if you need 2FA access when you don't have reliable cellular service, or if you use burner phones.
Hardware tokens explained: Simplify and Secure Your Online Accounts with a Yubikey, J Colt (2018). WIRED.
The Yubikey is the most popular brand of authenticator hardware token
Personal Websites
If you maintain a personal website, use a contact form rather than publishing your personal email address.
If you have a personal website, be sure to keep security patches updated. Or, build your site using a static site generator; static sites are more resistant to denial-of-service attacks and other attempts to cause harm. Talk to Digital CoLab staff for help with building a static site.
Your Academic Work
Be aware that your email correspondence with colleagues at state universities may be obtained and published via public records requests.
If you maintain a profile on a third-party host of preprints/postprints, be cautious with commercial surveillance sites such as Academia and ResearchGate. Instead, consider repositories and networks built, owned, and maintained by scholarly communities, such as OrcID, ArXiv, Humanities Commons, eCommons, or others in your field.
When a library database vendor pushes you to create an account while using it, avoid doing so, unless you have a specific reason for wanting to do so.
Consider adding a copyright statement to your syllabus that prohibits students' posting course materials publicly. This Faculty Senate page offers suggested language. If you find your work posted on third party sites, you can request removal. Cornell Library Copyright Services offers a guide for finding re-posted course material and requesting its removal.
Early Warning System
Set up a Google alert for your name, so that you will have a heads-up if you become a target.
Proactively request colleagues and family not share your contact information, schedule, or other personal details with cold callers or e-mailers. Speak with:
- Departmental faculty and staff
- Anyone who is connected with your name in your academic work
- Anyone (usually family members or roommates) who you find linked to you in data-broker records
Plan in Advance:
How To Respond in the Event of an Attack
Is there a friend you would trust to screen your email for you, so that you don't have to read the messages in the moment? Talk to them in advance.
Who in your personal or professional networks could you tap to report social media abuse? Threatening posts have a better chance of being taken down if reported by someone other than the target.
Will you want to save abusive materials in order to have documentation later?
Consider starting a conversation with colleagues in your unit or department about the collective harm of targeted and network harassment. As a group, consider how you might respond collectively, or not, to cases of sustained and severe harassment.
Consider contacting Cornell Health's Victim Advocacy Program for mental health and other support.
Collective Harms & Collective Responses
It's important to remember that, while the largest burden of targeted or networked harassment is borne by individuals, the goal of such harassment is to discredit and delegitimize higher education, the academy, the research process, academic freedom, and academic institutions collectively.
Therefore, the problem can never be solved by individual responses alone. Here are some resources to consider if you are planning collective defenses with your department, professional organization, or other group.
The American Association of University Professors (AAUP), informed by years of research and practice, recommends clear and forceful condemnations of harassment and intimidation from institutions, boards, and faculties, individually and collectively.
How Should Administrators Respond to a Campus Reform Story? I. Kamola, Faculty First Responders Project
"Academic Outrage: When the Culture Wars Go Digital" [blog post], T. MacMillan Cottom, 2017.
A Model Public Message in Support of Targeted Faculty Member , Syracuse University, Sept. 2021
Against the Common Sense: Academic Freedom as a Collective Right E. Cherniavsky, Journal of Academic Freedom. 2021
Understanding Harassment
A collection of essays, research, and journalism.
First-person Accounts by Targeted Academics
Confronting Anti-Asian Racism: A Statement on (In)visibility and Online Targeted Harassment, R. Esmail (2021), Up//root.
A Statement Concerning My Public Talks This Week, K. Taylor, posted on Facebook by Haymarket Books, 2017.
"Are You Willing to Die For This Work?" Public Targeted Online Harassment in Higher Education: SWS [Sociologists for Women in Society] Presidential Address, A. L. Ferber (2018), Gender & Society 32(3).
US-based Far-right
Data Snapshot: Whom Does Campus Reform Target and What Are the Effects? H. Tiede, et.al., American Association of University Professors Reports & Publications. Spring 2021
The Conservative Dark-Money Groups Infiltrating Campus Politics P. Vogel, Media Matters for America, 2017
Sensationalized Surveillance: Campus Reform and the Targeted Harassment of Faculty S. McCarthy & I. Kamola, New Political Science. Nov. 2021
A Billionaire-Funded Website with Ties to the Far-Right Is Trying to "Cancel" University Professors A. Speri, The Intercept. April 2021
Guide: Faculty First Responders: Understand Right Wing Attacks on Faculty, from political scientist Isaac Karmola
Science-denialism
In the Line of Fire C. O'Grady, Science, March 2022
On the networked harassment of scientists, particularly those working on COVID-19 research.
Foreign Affairs
Under Fire from Hindu Nationalist Groups, U.S.-based Scholars of South Asia Worry About Academic Freedom N. Masih, The Washington Post, Oct. 3, 2021
"They Don't Understand the Fear We Have": How China's Long Reach of Repression Undermines Academic Freedom at Australia's Universities Human Rights Watch, June 30, 2021
Guide: Hindutva Harassment Field Manual, from the South Asia Scholar Activist Collective
Get Help
Have questions about any of the above? We're here to collaborate as you plan, implement, and troubleshoot. Email us anytime: DigitalCoLab at cornell.edu