Book Launch - Doxxed: How Privacy Abuse Harms

This event will share Dr Anderson's key findings and theoretical insights into the abuse of personal information through doxxing, and will outline the potential of informational autonomy for victim-survivors of privacy abuse. A roundtable with Dr Jessica Elias (Manchester Metropolitan University) and Sarah Simms (Privacy International) will bring insights from digital zemiology and privacy rights, followed by a Q&A session chaired by Professor Nicole Westmarland. Doxxed is now available for pre-order from Bristol University Press, and will be released on 19 February 2026.

What happens when your personal information is weaponized against you online? offers a novel examination of doxxing—the malicious sharing of private, identifiable and sensitive information—through a feminist and post-humanist lens. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 18 victim-survivors, Dr Briony Anderson reveals the deeply gendered harms of privacy abuse, from public shaming and reputational damage to the erosion of informational autonomy.Challenging conventional understandings of digital abuse, the book foregrounds the lived experiences of those affected and calls for urgent, victim-centred reforms and reimagines data rights in a digital world increasingly shaped by surveillance and control.

Bio:

Dr Briony Anderson is a Career Development Fellow (Criminology) in the Department of Sociology at Durham. She is a digital criminologist specialising in research on privacy abuse, gendered-harms, and technology-facilitated violence and abuse. Briony uses narrative, creative interviewing and critical techno-cultural discourse analysis to consider how technologies contour experiences of digital abuse, as well as the capacity to resist against them. Briony engages posthumanist and new materialist theoretical frameworks in her work with victim-survivors, and is interested in feminist and queer pedagogies of research and praxis. She also researches on police-perpetrated domestic and family violence, with a focus on the role of independent commissions of inquiry in addressing systemic violence.

Dr Jessica Elias is a Digital Zemiologist, Lecturer in Criminology at Manchester Metropolitan University and co-lead of the Digital Society Research Group (DISC). She is the co-lead of the AI Literacies and Digital Policy Observatory initiatives as part of DISC. Her research interrogates the intersection of digitalisation and harm production, investigating the implications of digitality for human identity, autonomy, and cognition. She is a theorist of digital power and harm, developing a framework of Digital Zemiology, and specialising in interdisciplinary research, bringing together Surveillance Studies, Postphenomenology, and Zemiology. Jessica’s current work explores the role of generative AI in the undermining and obstruction of human knowledge and autonomy, focusing on images of war and conflict, digital intimacies and personhood, and digitised identities.

Sarah Simms is a senior policy officer at Privacy International where she leads on PI's projects on 'health' and 'resisting authoritarian tech'. She has a LLM Human Rights and has worked across the public and NGO sector on various human rights issues. Previously she has worked at the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission where she worked on gender, access to reproductive healthcare and rights and domestic abuse. She also has worked in police oversight and on conflict related issues in Northern Ireland.

The event will take place in a hybrid format. Please select the relevant ticket option on the next page. If you choose to attend online, you will be sent the MS Teams link. Please check your spam/junk folder.

The in-person location is Room 454, Mill Hill Lane, Durham , DH1 3LB.

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Host or Publisher Department of Sociology, Durham University