UK to make ‘doxxing’ a criminal offense

LONDON — The U.K. government plans to update the Online Safety Act to clamp down on so-called “doxxing”— publicly sharing private or personal information about a person online without their consent — following the harassment of volunteers at a charity which helps people at sea, Digital Secretary Lisa Nandy said.

“We’re certainly going to be tightening up the law to make sure that where people’s addresses are being published online, that is an offense, and action has to be taken swiftly,” Nandy said on BBC Breakfast on Wednesday.

Nandy met with social media platforms on Tuesday to discuss a recent wave of online abuse targeting Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) volunteers and workers after they helped a boat carrying migrants land in Portsmouth.

Nandy said the companies disclosed inconsistent approaches to removing names and addresses of people shared online — and accused Elon Musk’s X of “contempt” for failing to send a representative to the meeting. X did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

More broadly, Nandy said the U.K. government would be “moving at pace to make sure that we keep people safe and we clean up our online space, which has been left to the private sector to police for far too long.”

“Our government intends to be more interventionist in this area,” she said.

In a separate interview on Wednesday, Nandy said the government wanted to see regulator Ofcom enforcing the Online Safety Act “more robustly and more quickly.”

A review of Ofcom’s resources and enforcement powers is ongoing, with the regulator set to soon take on additional responsibilities to enforce a social media ban for under-16s.