by Travis McCullough
Online drug forums like Bluelight act as a sort of online refuge–a place to ask questions, share experiences, and access information without worrying about the stigma and judgment that is associated with drug use.
The overall efficacy of places like Bluelight relies on having an active community of members sharing information freely with each other while feeling it is safe to do so. The problem lies in the stigma that is associated with drug use, which compels most members to remain anonymous. The view of drug use strictly as a criminal matter has diminished significantly since the inception of the US War on Drugs in the 1970s and the creation of mandatory minimum sentencing through the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986. Thankfully, many constituencies (e.g., Portugal) are coming around to the idea that drug use is a public health issue instead of a criminal matter. But the world still has a long way to go in fully shedding this stigma, which makes privacy and anonymity paramount for online drug communities.
Doxing is a term that refers to revealing one’s personally identifiable information (PII) online. This can include your IP address, physical location, name, employer, or any number of other pieces of data that can reveal who you are. While sometimes malicious, doxing can also happen unintentionally, especially in harm reduction spaces where people may share sensitive experiences while seeking help. In a world where stigma, surveillance, and prosecution still haunt people who use drugs, the consequences of oversharing can be severe.
Why Should We Care About Online Privacy & Anonymity?
True online privacy is something that becomes more of a myth as we steamroll our way further into the information age. Social media and our human need to form connections make it nearly impossible for anyone to stay anonymous online. The only way we could attempt to stay fully anonymous is to not use the internet at all, but for most of us, this isn’t a realistic way to live.
Places like Bluelight can’t exist in a world that stigmatizes drug use if online privacy doesn’t exist. Not all of us are fortunate to live in a country with relaxed drug laws or have a job where drug use isn’t scrutinized. And more often than not, it’s places that punish people who use drugs with the harshest penalties that are in the most need of freely flowing information to combat stigma and other forms of harm.
While doxing can be used as a tool to harm another person, more often than not, we are the ones unintentionally revealing our own identity online. Whether you live in a country with very strict laws surrounding drug use, work for the government, or just generally aren’t comfortable with the world knowing what you do in your personal time, it’s always good to think twice about posting anything online.
Common Ways That People Dox Themselves
Believe it or not, you have probably doxed yourself at one point or another. It’s much easier to do than you might think. For entities with enough motivation and resources (like government agencies), it isn’t going to be hard to find the average internet user’s identity, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t some things you should be doing to protect your online anonymity.
Oversharing Details
Oversharing is one of the easiest ways to let your identity slip online, given the ways in which many of us use social media. In a way, we have been trained to overshare details that should probably stay private. So what does this look like on a site like Bluelight?
- Location
- Job/Profession
- Drug Sources
- Timestamps
Any of these pieces of data alone may be useless for identifying an individual, but when you combine them, they give you a unique fingerprint that can easily reveal your identity. This is one of many reasons why places like Bluelight and Reddit tend to prohibit sharing locations when talking about drugs.
In addition to doxing yourself, sharing the wrong details can open you up to legal troubles as well as violating a website’s terms of service and user agreement. User agreements are put in place to protect the site from potential legal ramifications, and in turn, they end up protecting the user by outlining what they can and cannot do while using the website. They exist for very good reasons, so make sure you always educate yourself on the user agreement and terms of service for any online drug forum that you use.
You may want to think twice before posting an image of yourself using an illegal substance with a description that reads, “I love ketamine!” or “Found the best 2-CB at a warehouse party in Detroit last weekend!” Not only are you oversharing details that tend to catch the attention of law enforcement, but you would most likely be violating the site’s user agreement.
Many online harm reduction communities don’t allow any images of illicit substances at all. This includes Bluelight’s channels that are hosted on Reddit (r/Bluelight), Telegram, Discord, or any other social media platform you can imagine. In the end, the practice of oversharing images leads to unwanted scrutiny from site hosts, law enforcement, and nosy employers alike.
Photos & Metadata
Always assume your laptop or smartphone is collecting more information on you than you want to give away. When we upload files like images to the internet, they are full of identifying pieces of metadata that usually need to be stripped if any kind of anonymity is to be preserved. Every time you snap a selfie of you and your buddies smoking a joint, your phone is documenting much more than meets the eye, and when you upload this image to the internet, you are broadcasting this info for everyone to see. Common examples of metadata attached to images are:
- Smartphone model
- Shutter speed
- ISO
- Timestamp
- File type & size
- Geolocation/GPS coordinates
By default, the operating system (OS) on your smartphone is most likely collecting all of this data. The process for removing this data is quick and painless, so from this day forward, all of the images you upload to the internet should be squeaky clean.
Reusing Usernames & Passwords
Using similar usernames throughout all of your favorite platforms is commonplace, but it’s a bad idea to do so, especially if you have a professional online presence (e.g., LinkedIn). If you use the same username across your email, Instagram, Reddit, Bluelight, and Spotify accounts, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out if all of the accounts likely belong to the same person. The more platforms you recycle usernames across, the easier it is to find your online presence and everything you have shared. You should treat usernames like passwords and leave no link between your accounts that exist on online drug use forums and your other accounts.
Using Unsecured Networks
By now, almost everyone has heard of things like VPNs or onion-routing browsers like Tor. But not everyone is aware that they are useful for everyday internet use, not just making purchases on the dark web.
You can think of your IP address as a digital form of your home address. Every time you browse the internet or post something online, you are giving away your location to your internet service provider (ISP) and anyone with minimal technical know-how. This goes for public wifi networks as well. That free Starbucks hotspot is like a goldmine for anyone looking to snoop on what others are doing.
Best Practices for Protecting Your Identity
Even if you aren’t a cybersecurity wizard, practicing proper digital hygiene, or operational security (OPSEC), really isn’t a hard habit to get into.
Keep Your Usernames & Identities Separate
It’s always nice to be able to use the same username across gaming and social platforms, but you need to break this habit. Don’t use the same handle for gaming on Steam that you are going to use on Bluelight or r/opiates on Reddit. Don’t get lazy and recycle email addresses either. This means using separate email addresses when signing up for any online drug forum or social platform.
A great way to handle this problem is by compartmentalizing your internet activity into two categories: platforms that deal with drug use and those that don’t. Creating separate usernames or pseudonyms for your professional and extracurricular activities is an easy way to keep yourself out of trouble. Your reputation, site activity, and networks stay intact between platforms, while your actual identity remains separate and a mystery.
Strip Your Media
Don’t ever forget to scrub the metadata clean from any videos or pictures you plan to upload to the internet. There are plenty of free tools available by searching “remove EXIF data from images” on Google. Blurring your face out of an image doesn’t do much when the images you just uploaded contain the GPS coordinates and timestamp of where and when the photo was taken.
There are tons of different ways to strip this data from your photos (Google “how to remove metadata from my photos”) through third-party apps, but the safest way to do this is to manually remove it yourself or to set up your phone to never collect this data in the first place. There’s nothing wrong with using a third-party service to do this, but finding a service that is trustworthy can be time-consuming.
The exact steps you will take are going to vary depending on your OS and your default photo gallery application, but the following article outlines the general steps you will need to take to scrub the EXIF data from images on Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS: ‘How to Remove Metadata from Photos?’
Think Before You Post
Every time you post online, you’re leaving a puzzle piece out there for law enforcement or employers (present and future) to find. Before posting, take a moment and think. Ask yourself how easy it would be for someone else to connect your identity to your next post.
Tools & Technologies That Help Protect Your Identity
One of the upsides to living in a time where online privacy is dying is that there are plenty of easy-to-use, privacy-friendly tools that are widely available for anyone who takes the time to look.
In a world where companies thrive on selling your data and government agencies love to lock up people who use drugs, we should all be taking extra steps to protect our privacy.
These tools aren’t necessarily foolproof, but if you’re a privacy-minded individual, they’re a good way to cover your bases when accessing drug-related content online.
VPNs (Virtual Private Networks)
These are an absolute must. A solid VPN is going to encrypt your internet traffic and simultaneously hide your real IP address. No one will know what you are up to or where you are doing it from. That goes for your ISP, law enforcement, and nosy strangers alike.
There are a million different VPN services out there to choose from; some offer more than others, but there are a few things you need to consider before putting your trust in one.
- Stay away from free VPNs – they are slow, riddled with ads, and are most certainly tracking your online activity. If it’s free, you are the product.
- No-log VPNs – These services claim not to log your activity, which is paramount because a physical log of your internet activity would defeat the purpose of a VPN in the first place.
- Provider Location – It’s best to pick a country that doesn’t require VPNs to log their users’ information, because a company can’t hand over information that it doesn’t keep, even when subpoenaed. This goes for the country where the company is based out of, as well as the countries where the servers physically reside.
- Many countries either make VPNs outright illegal or require the VPN service to keep meticulous logs of your information and browsing history (ultimately making the service useless). Countries including (but not limited to) India, China, Vietnam, Russia, Egypt, and the UAE all have unfavorable laws surrounding VPN use and data privacy.
- Countries like Panama, Switzerland, Sweden, the British Virgin Islands, Romania, and Iceland have more VPN-friendly legislation in place.
- Who owns the service? – Some VPNs are owned by larger parent companies that profit from mass data collection.
- How does the service handle requests from government agencies? – It’s worth checking whether the service has a history of cooperating with law enforcement in your country, and if so, weighing up whether future cooperation could pose a risk to your privacy.
Privacy-First Browsers
Choosing an internet browser that advocates for privacy is always the way to go. None of them are perfect, but they are a free way to help protect your identity.
- Mullvad – The VPN provider also offers a free and open-source browser that is built around blocking third-party cookies, tracking scripts, and browser fingerprinting.
- Tor – Bounces your traffic through multiple nodes to obfuscate its origin. Slower than a typical browser, but worth it if security is your top priority. (Note, however, that the use of Tor is illegal or restricted in some countries that also don’t allow VPN use, such as China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela.)
Secure Operating Systems
If you are very serious about protecting your privacy, then using an OS like Tails is the way to go. There’s a reason that every guide to using dark net markets recommends using it. Tails is part of the Tor Project, so Tor Browser works seamlessly within it.
Email Encryption
It’s no secret that email providers like Gmail and Yahoo scan the content of your messages in order to profit from your data, which means there is nothing stopping them from handing your communications over to law enforcement either. Regardless of your email provider’s intentions, privacy-based email providers like ProtonMail and Tuta offer end-to-end encryption, shielding any prying eyes from intercepting your sensitive emails.
Browser Add-ons
You pick up cookies, scripts, and trackers all over the internet, so it’s important to use browser extensions like uBlock Origin to help keep them from latching onto you and creating a unique fingerprint as you browse. Combine these tools with smart habits and a healthy amount of paranoia, and you’ve got yourself a decent digital cloak.
The Role of the Community in Protecting Each Other
Online communities are nothing without their users, and they thrive on trust. This is especially true for harm reduction communities like Bluelight. We are here to learn and teach each other about our respective areas of expertise as they relate to harm reduction. Users of online drug forums like Bluelight should hold themselves to a higher standard because misinformation can lead to potentially life-threatening situations. There are some easy steps we can all take to make Bluelight and other online harm reduction communities more privacy-conscious.
Normalize Proper OPSEC
When you see someone posting something potentially revealing, skip shaming them and point out their error so they can learn from their mistake. Shooting them a friendly DM or flagging the post to a moderator is a simple way to protect another person’s privacy if they slip up.
Support Moderators
Online forums don’t run themselves; they rely on teams of volunteers to help out. Mods have to deal with spam, trolls, emergencies, and making tough calls on a daily basis. They are responsible for making sure the rest of the community follows the rules of the site. Websites can always use more informed people to help out. If you believe in a site’s mission statement, volunteering to moderate is a great way to help out.
Closing Thoughts
Harm reduction isn’t just about naloxone and testing kits. It’s about creating spaces where people can ask for help without fear, and protecting that is on all of us. At the end of the day, communities like Bluelight only work if people feel safe enough to speak up. The beauty of online drug forums, sub-reddits, and Discord servers is that they allow for open, honest, and judgment-free discussion in a world that still loves to criminalize, stigmatize, or outright ignore people who use drugs. This kind of openness can only survive if we all treat privacy and anonymity as essential harm reduction tools in their own right.
Doxing isn’t always a dramatic or malicious act. More often than not, it’s just a breadcrumb trail we didn’t realize we were leaving behind. But in an era where surveillance is baked into our tech and stigma still defines drug policy in many parts of the world, that breadcrumb trail can have real-life consequences.
Declaration of interest: I have no relevant interests to declare for this particular content.
Travis McCullough is a copywriter born and raised in Colorado. He has a BS in natural resources management and has worked with various government organizations related to outdoor conservation. Today he spends his time pursuing his passion for teaching those around him about the outdoors and how it can help with issues surrounding addiction.
Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only and is not intended as legal, medical, or professional advice. Always seek the guidance of a qualified health professional regarding any questions you may have about drug use, harm reduction, or your health. Laws regarding drug use and online activity vary by location—ensure you understand the laws applicable to you before taking any action. Views expressed in the article are the author’s, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Bluelight Communities Ltd.