Dheva Suprayoga (Twitter @DhevaSuprayoga)

“My name is Dheva Suprayoga,” a young man in a red T-shirt and jeans said straight into the camera. “I want to straighten out and clarify that I have not travelled anywhere since yesterday and that I attended Friday prayers at the Darussalam Mosque in Kebumen.”

“I can assure you that the person in the video is not me, and I support the efforts of the National Police to catch the perpetrator and resolve this case as soon as possible,” he continued.

Dheva Suprayoga, a resident of Kebumen, Central Java, recorded the video following accusations that he had threatened President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo during a rally held by supporters of Gerindra Party chairman Prabowo Subianto in front of the Elections Supervisory Agency (Bawaslu) headquarters in Central Jakarta.

A viral video allegedly taken at the rally shows a man, dressed in a peci (cimless black cap) and brown jacket, saying: “We from Poso [Central Sulawesi] are ready to behead Jokowi. Insya Allah, Allahu Akbar [God willing, God is the greatest], we will behead him. Jokowi, get ready, [because] we from Poso will behead you in God’s name.”

Former journalist and vocal Jokowi supporter Ulin Yusron posted pictures of two men he said may be the man in the video, along with their personal information, including their ID card number, date of birth and home address.

Dheva is one of the men Ulin put in the spotlight in a practice called “doxxing” — publishing an individual’s personal or identifying information on the internet.

Ulin eventually deleted both pictures and apologized for misidentifying Dheva, though not for posting the personal information in the first place.

Dheva’s case is not a unique one — a number of high-profile doxxing cases have occurred in the past couple of years, most of them related to the increasingly polarized political scene following Jakarta’s heated 2017 gubernatorial election.

In January 2018, 32-year-old Jakarta resident Dina Rahmawati was a victim of doxxing when she was mistakenly identified as the administrator of the @SuaraAnies Twitter account, an account run by supporters of Jakarta Governor Anies Baswedan.

An anonymous account with the handle @digembok, which has since been deleted, tweeted out a photo supposedly showing the people behind the @SuaraAnies account.

The photo showed a woman wearing a black hijab and tagged Dina’s Twitter account @dinadimu, insinuating that he knew her address and phone number.

“Just asking. Is the [woman] circled @dinadimu?” a tweet read. “It’s okay if you don’t answer. I’ll just call you and pay you a visit at your house.”

Dina first realized that she was targeted when she received hundreds of Twitter notifications from irate Jokowi supporters who felt that @SuaraAnies had insulted the President.

“People were tagging me and tweeting insults at me, like ‘oh no wonder, with a face like that you have nothing better to do’,” she told The Jakarta Post recently.

Dina said she was not the woman encircled in the photo but that she had attended the event depicted, though not as an Anies supporter.

“I was invited to attend a meet-up with Anies as a member of a gardening community,” she said. “I actually supported AHY [Agus Harimurti Yudhoyono] in the gubernatorial election, because I thought he was handsome.”

Initially, Dina wanted to put the whole incident behind her, but at her husband’s urging she sent a legal notice to the person behind @digembok, but got no response.

“After that I thought, what’s the use of chasing him, it’s like chasing a ghost,” she said.

In another case, 29-year-old film director Kennedy Jennifer was targeted for reportedly being a supporter of former Jakarta governor Basuki “Ahok” Tjahaja Purnama.

In April 2018, shortly after announcing her intention to film a documentary about Ahok, Kennedy started receiving calls and messages on her smartphone from men asking for a “massage service” and other sexual favors.

She filed a report with the police, who eventually arrested Malang resident Lalu Ahmad Multazam. Lalu admitted that he had created fake chat app accounts using Kennedy’s and another woman’s phone numbers because of their apparent support for Ahok.

“I made a mistake. I went too far in attacking supporters of [Ahok]. I am very sorry,” Lalu said at the first hearing in his trial last month.

Dheva, Dina and Kennedy all have legal recourse against the people who shared their personal data, but the vast number of laws on the issue makes the process confusing.

Nabillah Saputra, a researcher for the Southeast Asia Freedom of Expression Network (SAFEnet), said that Ulin, for example, could be charged under the 2013 Citizenship Administration Law, which forbids the misuse of administrative information, such as ID card numbers.

Another possibility is using the Electronic Information and Transactions (ITE) Law, under which Lalu was charged with data theft. Article 26 of the ITE Law also criminalizes defamation conducted through electronic channels.

However, Nabillah said that Indonesia still lacked a proper regulatory and social system to combat doxxing effectively.

“As a society, we do not really understand the importance of privacy. We easily give out our ID cards and ID card numbers for any number of reasons,” she said. “We need to fix that in addition to creating a comprehensive data protection law.”

A private data protection bill is currently in the works, and the government has said it aims to pass it before the end of the 2014-2019 legislative term in September.

“Both the public and the government should be more aware of the importance of data protection,” Nabillah said.

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