Could a premium upgrade protect a poster's id?
You seem to be under a very mistaken impression of what doxxing generally is, what hacking is, and what you can do to avoid being doxxed.
Doxxing is when someone manages to connect your real life and online identities. Being able to say 'XxUserGuyxX is John Smith from Anytown, Texas, USA. It can go deeper than that, finding family members, jobs, clubs, etc. Trolls can then take that info and use it to harrass that person, which is why doxxing is bad.
Doxxing
can be done via hacking. It generally isn't. If your email is breached and you have your real name set on it, or in any of the services you've used that email to sign up for, they've got your real name. If they manage to get access to your computer or cloud files, they might find your real name/address/identity info via tax returns or other documents. I stress - this is a rarity.
Much more commonly, all the details to doxx someone are provided by that person. Someone just takes an extensive walk through your post history. A year ago you mentioned where you live. A year and a half ago you mentioned being at an event in a specific city. Two years ago you mentioned you lived by a military base. You've mentioned your job several times in debates. You mentioned the schools you went to five years ago. You brought up your race in a thread about identity politics last November. Your birthday is on your profile. These are all corroborating details that can be used to confirm your identity once you make a big slip.
Big slips - maybe you mention an extremely niche event that had some minor publicity and had a public guest list. Maybe you let slip you work at niche job, one of those deals where the webpage has a convenient staff listing with images. Maybe don't scrub the EXIF data off of a phone image you post, and the GPS coordinates for your house are attached to it. Now someone takes that big slip and compares it against all the other data points. Does the owner of this house have a name that sounds like your race? Is that name on the rolls for the schools you mentioned? Which of these people has a birthday that matches?
This is all stuff that's publicly available, the doxxer is just putting in the legwork to piece together the clues to your identity. And the more you use a particular identity, the longer you use it and more sites you use it on, the more data this sort or person has to work with to try and doxx you. It doesn't require any hacking, there's no special programs to use to prevent it, software doesn't help.
If you want to practice information security and avoid being doxxed, don't talk about your life except in the broadest possible terms. Either don't make your birthday or other private info publicly available, don't enter it, or put in deliberately false values. When you sign up for new sites, use a new handle on each one. Don't reference the names of your accounts on other sites in discussion. Every year or two, ditch that account and make a new one, if the site allows.
