This week on TikTok: The Last Woman on Vine and Consensual Doxxing
A couple of days ago, a TikTok user named Madison made an amazing discovery: an old tablet with a deactivated Google Play account that still had access to Vine. Since Vine is dead, she posted a TikTok about it.
Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
Vine was a video-sharing app owned by Twitter had an incredibly short lifespan, but an outsized influence on the culture considering; it was officially released in January 2013, and the ability to upload new videos was removed in early 2017. Some popular Vine users went on to have careers in entertainment, while many just migrated to TikTok. Part of Vine’s success, from a user’s perspective, was the six-second limit on videos that ensured easily memeable one-liners proliferated and spread like wildfire across the internet.
What Madison is doing is seeing Vine as it was on the last day she used it on that tablet, sometime in 2015. All of the videos on her feed were already downloaded to the cache on her tablet, and without a connection to a valid Google Play store account, automatic app updates didn’t kick in and remove the app or its contents.
This means that she can’t search for specific content, despite the many requests she’s received. Those who miss Vine will just have to content themselves with POV videos of her feed as it was the last day used Vine.
Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
Per Twitter, “As of 2019, the full Vine archive is no longer available. Content that remains on Vine can only be located by using the unique URL of the Vine account, or Tweet URL if the Vine was shared to Twitter, if it has not been deleted or removed.”
If you know the person’s Vine username, you can still view their Vines on the web by visiting https://vine.co/TheirUserName. For example, famous Vine creator Christine Sydelko’s page is still accessible via the web.
Many commenters pointed out the similarities with the Flappy Bird saga: a developer created an incredibly successful mobile game, became overwhelmed by its success, and quickly took it off all mobile app stores. Many copycats cropped up in its place, and rumours circled of people dropping genuine cash on devices that still had Flappy Bird installed. Some even suggested Madison attempt to sell her tablet, citing Flappy Bird as proof of demand, but the cache issue means it’s relatively worthless, not to mention the continued ability to access Vines via the web and endless YouTube compilations.
I still enjoyed these videos as a sort of time capsule of the internet in 2015, which already feels markedly different to the internet in 2022. Will TikTok learn from Vine’s mistakes and still be the dominant video-based social media platform in 2029? The fact that it’s already outlasted Vine (factoring in its original iteration as Musical.ly) suggests maybe, but increasing scrutiny regarding parent company’s connections to the Chinese government may see a competitor emerge and try to take Tiktok’s crown.
Jane didn’t realise it, but when she uploaded a video earlier this month challenging users to guess her age based on a fern she had in her lounge room, she triggered another TikTok user’s competitive streak.
Notkahnjunior took Jane’s tongue-in-cheek challenge seriously, and stitched her video explaining how she figured out Jane’s age by studying her social media accounts.
Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
Anyone under the age of 40 (or thereabouts) is familiar with this kind of online sleuthing, which was paid tribute to in a 2020 Chaser sketch about COVID-19 contact tracing, “Contact Tracys”.
If you grew up with the internet, this kind of sleuthing, or as Kahn calls it, “consensual doxxing”, comes fairly naturally, but to have every step laid out the way Kahn does is kind of intense.
Jane’s Instagram was posted on her TikTok profile
If you go to her Instagram and check her tagged photos, there’s a Throwback Thursday photo from a friend of her group of friends in formal dresses
Kahn assumes the photo is from a sorority event because the friend who posted it is from Florida and the location is tagged as Montgomery, Alabama
How does she know the friend is from Florida? In 2012 she posted a photo of her broken driver’s license, lamenting its demise. While she covered most of her birthday with her thumb, she didn’t cover up the ‘92’ successfully
So if Jane went to college in Alabama with this Floridian friend she’d be around the same age as her, making her 30 or 31
This kicked off a series of consensual doxxing videos where commenters challenge Kahn to see what information she can find out about them. I would feel bad for the woman who is supposedly paying to keep her information off the internet but who tags her husband in all of her TikToks while her husband’s TikTok username includes his full name and what state he lives in, but that just kind of seems like an oversight on her part.
Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
(If she really cares about keeping her info off the web, might I suggest moving to Europe and invoking the right to be forgotten? No need to pay services that largely just bury existing Google results if companies are required by law to delete your personal data. Also maybe let your husband know he’s blowing up your spot.)
Anyway, Kahn’s having fun, and I’m having fun watching her prove everyone who thinks their personal information is actually private wrong. Win-win!
Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
Another user, shay.nanigans87, has been simultaneously engaging in her own, slightly more concerning form of consensual doxxing: finding people’s homes based on what they’ve shared on social media.
Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
Let’s walk through the steps taken in one of her most popular videos.
She found the asker’s street name on a prescription she spotted in a video she posted
She then matched a round window she saw in a photo of the asker’s son with a house on the street in question using Google Street View
Using a photo of the asker and her partner, she was able to match the house in the background and the lamp at the front of the house, again using Street View
Shay makes an effort to warn people against doing things that make it easy for them to be found, like linking to Cash App or Venmo accounts that use full names. Once again, husbands often seem to be the weak link. Everybody teach your husbands about internet safety!
Both of these series on consensual doxxing demonstrate, to me, just how much personal information people put out there without even trying, even when they think they’re relatively anonymous online. Hopefully these videos motivate people concerned about their privacy to be more cautious about what they post online, but the urge to share often seems to be too strong to resist.