Hong Kong privacy watchdog wants more power to battle doxxing with online platforms reluctant to cooperate
- Privacy commissioner Stephen Wong wants more teeth after struggling to convince overseas websites to act
- Wong says he has written 95 letters to 14 online platforms about more than 1,600 links that broke the law in the city
Hong Kong’s privacy commissioner wants greater power to combat doxxing after one online platform only agreed to remove a tenth of links the watchdog had asked it to take down.
Stephen Wong Kai-yi, the privacy commissioner for personal data, said as of Tuesday he had sent 95 letters to 14 online platforms asking them to remove more than 1,600 links that were breaking the law in the city.
Against the background of the anti-government protests sweeping the city, cases of doxxing, which is the posting of an individual’s personal details on the internet for malicious purposes, have increased rapidly, as has cyber bullying.
But Wong noted most of the 14 social media platforms used were not operated or registered in Hong Kong. After local authorities successfully made some websites on doxxing stop running with the help of foreign bodies, the sites used another domain names in other territories to revive themselves.
“One platform has more than 1,000 links that are breaching the law … but in the end, it only agreed to take down 127 links, just 12 per cent,” he said.
Wong wants an amendment to the Personal Data (Privacy) Ordinance to give the watchdog more power, amid claims he is nothing more than a “toothless tiger”.
