⚠️ Educational Purpose
This section explains adversary capabilities so you can defend against them. The goal is your own threat modeling and self-OSINT: understanding what someone could find about you, then reducing it. Nothing here is a how-to for targeting other people. Techniques are described at the level needed to defend, and always link to primary sources.
💰 Resources can buy up a tier
These tiers describe a baseline, not a ceiling. Money moves an adversary up the ladder: a funded harassment group can buy the same people-search data a corporation sells, a wealthy individual can hire investigators, and criminal groups have bought nation-state spyware. When you model your threat, ask not just who is interested in you, but how much they can spend.
The Individual
A single motivated person: an ex-partner, a stalker, a doxxer, an online harasser, or a scammer. They work with free, public tools, but persistence and knowing where to look go a long way.
The Individual: What One Person Can Find
What a lone person can uncover from your public profiles, photos, and usernames, plus how to look yourself up first and shrink your footprint.
Know This Adversary →Social Media OSINT
What investigators, employers, and stalkers extract from public social profiles.
Read →Audit Your Own Footprint
Step-by-step self-OSINT: see what a stranger can find, then remove it.
Read Guide →The Organized Group
Coordinated actors: private-investigator networks, organized harassment and doxxing collectives, criminal and scam rings, and stalkerware operators. Manpower, money, and paid databases let them do what one person cannot.
The Organized Group: Coordinated Targeting
How groups pool findings, buy investigative databases, and use breach data and stalkerware to sustain pressure, and how to defend.
Know This Adversary →Surveillance-Resistant Life
Compartmentalization and OPSEC for sustained, coordinated threats.
Read Guide →The Corporation
Data brokers, ad-tech, people-search companies, camera networks, insurers, employers, and facial-recognition firms. They aggregate data at industrial scale, then sell that capability to every other tier.
The Corporation: Industrial-Scale Aggregation
How data brokers build thousand-point profiles, who they sell to, and how to opt out and reduce what they can collect.
Know This Adversary →How Data Brokers Profile You
The pipeline that turns public records and purchases into a dossier.
Read →People-Search Opt-Out List
Remove yourself from 75+ people-search sites and data brokers.
Read Guide →The Nation-State
Law enforcement, intelligence agencies, and immigration enforcement. Legal compulsion, classified capabilities, signals intelligence, and effectively unlimited budgets put them at the top of the ladder, including buying corporate tools and compelling corporate data.
The Nation-State: Compulsion and Reach
What legal powers, spyware, and data purchases add over a corporation, plus realistic defenses for high-risk people.
Know This Adversary →Check Surveillance Databases
Find out whether you are in facial-recognition and watchlist systems.
Read Guide →