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In the old days of LiveJournal (decade ago) there was some brutal honesty meme which was supposed to be 100% anonymous. I made like 50 (exaggeration) different
by thorax 17y ago
In the old days of LiveJournal (decade ago) there was some brutal honesty meme which was supposed to be 100% anonymous. I made like 50 (exaggeration) different surveys and then made 50 different "private" posts of the link to each individual friend. Of course to everyone it looked just like a friends-only link and they assumed everybody was going to the same anonymous /aggregated survey.
I told them all pretty quickly afterwards about my silliness and put only mildly incriminating questions in the survey, just enough to make them worry about the other memes they'd been filling out.
Of course I also confirmed that one friend was head over heels in love with me. I so happen to be married to that darling girl nowadays.
Moral: If you're filling these out, don't assume it's 100% anonymous to the person you're writing about. They could be sneaky.
- stephencelis 17y agoNo sneakiness here! While we track visitors and users in order to look out for abuse, this data is not and will not be made available to profile users.
- thorax 17y agoI think you misunderstood the exploit for identifying the anonymous comments. It works with pretty much any survey where you can individualize communications: I create 20 accounts on your service. I put my picture on all of them. I send out a different link/profile to each one of my 20 friends and track which one went to which person. I then compare notes to see who said what. Note that it's also really easy to do this using a URL shortener service that keeps track of times clicked, user agents, referrers, and IP addresses: http://➨.ws/anonymous_survey http://➨.ws/anonymous_survey By using the timestamps you provide for the comments, I can tell which of my friends most likely made each comment.
- neilk 17y agoDoes this darling girl know that you did this? And was it an issue?
- thorax 17y agoYep. They all knew I did it because I told them a breakdown of what I discovered the next day. As I said, there was nothing sinister in the questions, and they all knew me well enough not to be surprised by a little surprise sneakiness.