It took a TikToker barely 30 minutes to doxx me

In 30 minutes or less, TikToker and Chicago-based server Kristen Sotakoun can probably find your birth date. She’s not a cybersecurity expert, despite what some of her followers suspect, but has found a hobby in what she calls “consensual doxxing.”

“My first thing is to be entertaining. My second thing is to show you cracks in your social media, which was the totally accidental thing that I became on TikTok,” Sotakoun, who goes by @notkahnjunior, told me.

It’s not quite doxxing, which usually refers to making private information publicly available with malicious intent. Instead, it’s known in the cybersecurity field as open-source intelligence, or OSINT. People unknowingly spell out private details about their lives as a bread crumb trail across social media platforms that, when gathered together, paint a picture of their age, families, embarrassing childhood memories and more. In malicious cases, hackers gather information based on what you or your loved ones have published on the web to get into your accounts, commit fraud, or even socially engineer a user to fall for a scam.

Sotakoun mostly just tracks down an anonymous volunteer's birth date. She doesn’t have malicious intent or interest in a security career, she said she just likes to solve logic puzzles. Before TikTok, that was spending a ride home from a friend’s birthday dinner at Medieval Times discovering the day job of their “knight.” Sotakoun just happened to eventually go viral for her skills.

So, to show me her process, I let Sotakoun “consensually doxx” me. She found my Twitter pretty quickly, but because I keep it pretty locked down, it wasn’t super helpful. Information in author bios from my past jobs, however, helped her figure out where I went to college.

My name plus where I studied led her to my Facebook account, another profile that didn’t reveal much. It did, however, lead her to my sister, who had commented on my cover photo nine years ago. She figured out it was my sister because we shared a last name, and we’re listed as sisters on her Facebook. That’s important to note because I don’t actually share a last name with most of my other siblings, which could’ve been an additional roadblock.

My sister and I have pretty common names though, so Sotakoun also found my stepmom on my sister’s profile. By searching my stepmom’s much more unique name on Instagram, it helped lead Sotakoun to mine and my sister’s Instagram accounts, as opposed to one of the many other Malones online.

Still, my Instagram account is private. So, it was my sister’s Instagram account – that she took off “private” for a Wawa giveaway that ultimately won her a t-shirt – featuring years-old birthday posts that led Sotakoun to the day I was born. That took a ton of scrolling and, to correct for the fact that a birthday post could come a day late or early, Sotakoun relied on the fact that my sister once shared that my birthday coincided with World Penguin Day, April 25.