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> I try to hide my real name whenever possible, out of an > abundance of caution. You can still find it if you search > carefully, but in today's hostile in
by jmillikin 4y ago
> I try to hide my real name whenever possible, out of an
> abundance of caution. You can still find it if you search
> carefully, but in today's hostile internet I see this kind
> of soft pseudonymity as my digital personal space, and expect
> to have it respected.
Without judging whether the goal is good or not, I will gently point out that your current approach doesn't seem to be effective. A Google search for "BoppreH" turned up several results on the first page with what appears to be your full name, along with other results linking to various emails that have been associated with that name. Results include Github commits, mailing list archives, and third-party code that cited your Github account as "work by $NAME".
As a purely practical matter -- again, not going into whether this is how things should be, merely how they do be -- it is futile to want the internet as a whole to have a concept of privacy, or to respect the concept of a "digital personal space". If your phone number or other PII has ever been associated with your identity, that association will be in place indefinitely and is probably available on multiple data broker sites.
The best way to be anonymous on the internet is to be anonymous, which means posting without any name or identifier at all. If that isn't practical, then using a non-meaningful pseudonym and not posting anything personally identifiable is recommended.
- mpeg 4y agoRight? This whole thread feels like a joke when the author just removed their full name from their public, open source code 3 hours ago (and only from one of their repos, their name is fully visible in all the other LICENSE.txt files)
- unreal37 4y agoSearching his "globally unique name" yields 4800 results. Good luck with that.
- hash9 4y agoGetting 5580 results now oops. He's got a domain with exact username with his resume which has full name and more, is he serious haha.
- MichaelZuo 4y agoIf that is truly the case then the original post does seem like trolling. I highly doubt anyone would ever honestly describe several thousand as 'globally unique'.
- BoppreH 4y agoIt's one thing for someone to see my username on a gaming forum, search for it, find my github, pick a repo, click on the license, and find my name there. I'm ok with that, I feel like it's a high enough barrier for casual trolls and bots. It's another different thing for my name to be auto-completed by the most popular, publicly available language model. That I'm less ok with, and I'm sure other people will find absolutely despicable. We have GDPR and Right to Be Forgotten for a reason.
- olalonde 4y agoWhat prompt did you use on GPT-3? I tried a few and it never revealed your actual name.
- nmstoker 4y agoBut it looks like it's in all sorts of places - how do you think the language model ended up thinking that was a good autocomplete? There appears to be a name on a YouTube channel too that doesn't even need any additional steps (ie the jumping into repos and then licence files you mention above) Putting that aside, why is this such a concern? it's just a label. It would be another thing if you had something more meaningful being revealed (eg current physical address) but username / real name alone is generally not that big a deal and it's plausibly deniable (ie there could be plenty of other username / real name pairings that are valid) Anyway, this comes across rather like the Streisand Effect
- notwedtm 4y agoHow do you know it's your name? Maybe it's someone else with the same name as you?
- BoppreH 4y agoBecause of my home country naming standards, I have two unusual last names. There's no one else with the same name as me.
- dmix 4y agoyour username contain part of your actual name?… …Not to reveal information here (counter to your goals) but there was no way this thread wouldn’t motivate people to see how hard it is to find your name. But I was surprised to see the username contained a word from your real name considering you’re concerned about revealing personal information. Making a new online identity is pretty standard practice these days if you’re worried about this sort of this. Especially if you read Grugq’s stuff about modern opsec (just google his name).
- Beldin 4y agoThis is victim blaming. Whether or not he could have been more careful is not an excuse for GPT-3. Illegal behaviour still should be (1) illegal even if the victim could have done more. (1) I seem to remember a court case somewhere on the planet in the last months where lack of resistance was deemed indicative of consensual intercourse. Which is not even remotely acceptable. But I digress.
- lanterk 4y agoWhat illegal behaviour? GPT-3 is only spitting out public data. Its like blaming someone taking photo of a road for the photo including some random person.
- Beldin 4y agoTo the best of my knowledge: GDPR has no exception for public data. If you have PII, you need a reason. Consent is a reason; "needed for the requested business" (eg. home address for online shops) is a reason. "Having fun with autogenerating sentences"... doesn't seem like one.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- BoppreH 4y ago> A Google search for "BoppreH" turned up several results on the first page Not for me. It took until page 3 for just my first name to appear. If somebody is looking at past Github commits, that's already a high enough barrier for me. I only partially agree with your conclusion. Asking people to maintain total anonymity always, with any slips punishable by permanent publication of that PII, might be the current status quo, but is not where we as society want to head.
- unreal37 4y agoI see your name in like the sixth Google result on page 1. You can't "put the genie back in the bottle". It's out there, the Internet remembers forever.
- jmillikin 4y ago> Asking people to maintain total anonymity always, with any > slips punishable by permanent publication of that PII, might > be the current status quo, but is not where we as society > want to head. ‘Sea,’ cried Canute, ‘I command you to come no farther! Waves, stop your rolling, and do not dare to touch my feet!’
- BoppreH 4y agoThe Google results are almost entirely from places that I control, directly or indirectly. I can delete the repos, retract my papers, ask moderators to remove my comments. For more serious cases there are courts and laws. There's no reason why language models should be immune from what is standard expected behavior in society. I'm not raging against the sea, I'm raging against a bulldozer operator who has plugged their ears.
- dahart 4y agoWhy should AI have different privacy standards than google? The papers you referred too in the top comment have been talking about the ability for AI to infer PII from anonymous data. But that’s not what happened here. You are complaining about AI returning non-anonymous data with easily findable results via other mechanisms. I’m not sure I understand why AI should be expected to understand and filter out information that is otherwise public?
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y agoI gave up anonymity. I just learned to lean into taking control of my ID. Some time ago, I realized that there's no way for me to participate online, without things being attributed to me. I learned this, by setting up a Disqus ID. I wanted to comment on a blog post, and started to set up an account. After I started the process, it came back, with a list of random posts, from around the Internet (and some, very old), and said "Are these yours? If so, would you like to associate them with your account?" I freaked. Many of them were outright troll comments (I was not always the haloed saint that you see before you) that I had sworn were done anonymously. They came from many different places (including DejaNews). I have no idea how Disqus found them. Every single one of them was mine. Many, were ones that I had sworn were dead and buried in a deep grave in the mountains. Needless to say, I do not have a Disqus ID. Being non-anonymous means that I need to behave myself, online. I come across as a bit of a stuffy bore, but I suspect my IRL persona is that way, as well. That's OK.
- pmichaud 4y agoThis is also my strategy for similar reasons. I don't ever want to be confused that the future is watching what I do online, so I post using my name.
- sovnade 4y agoDon't forget the other part - being non-anonymous online makes it easy for stalkers and other bad actors to take it to the extreme. We need anonymity for lots of reasons.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y agoI have ... interesting ... friends. I'll bet I know scarier people IRL, than I'll find online. Also, what impressed me about the Disqus incident, was how fast it came back with that list. In the US, at least, true anonymity takes a lot of work. For example, if you own a house, people can use tax records to find out who you are, unless you do what rich people do, and use shell companies. I also own a couple of [small] companies. I maintain a UPS box, because they get a lot of junk mail (and some business junk mail comes to my home address, anyway). That's just one of hundreds of ways we can be found. Many predate teh Internets Tubes. My mailbox gets stuffed with junk mail. Some of it is quite specific. They use these mechanisms, and have been, for decades. I have known folks in the collections industry. They can find people surprisingly easily. There was one guy who used to be a skip tracer, and he wrote a book called How to Disappear[0]. It's a fairly sobering read (and probably quaintly anachronistic, these days). The Unabomber actually did it correctly. He only got nailed, once he posted something publicly. [0] https://www.amazon.com/How-Disappear-Digital-Footprint-Without/dp/1493045288 https://www.amazon.com/How-Disappear-Digital-Footprint-Witho...
- permo-w 4y agoit certainly is not futile. it's futile to try and hide. what's not futile is to spray out false information that muddies the real stuff. if OP wants to obfuscate his real name, he can associate his username with 3 different false identities, a throwaway phone number, a false nationality, etc. obviously it's a little paranoid and arrogant to assume that anyone cares enough to go through my comments, but occasionally, on websites like this and reddit, I will just outright lie about where I'm from, or what my age or gender or ethnicity or sexuality is
- bebrws 4y agoI believe in the following sentences very much. However, I believe the value of the internet for any person could possibly be directly correlated with the amount of PII they are willing to share which to me makes this, if, a question of morality, a personal decision. The sentences that stuck out to me are: “If your phone number or other PII has ever been associated with your identity, that association will be in place indefinitely and is probably available on multiple data broker sites. The best way to be anonymous on the internet is to be anonymous, which means posting without any name or identifier at all. If that isn't practical, then using a non-meaningful pseudonym and not posting anything personally identifiable is recommended.”
- chaostheory 4y agoIf you want search engine privacy, you can’t go wrong with YC’s Optery https://www.optery.com/ https://www.optery.com/ I’m a satisfied customer
- brysonreece 4y agoMy general belief is that I, and others, should often treat the internet as a public forum like the local town square. Of course people can show up in a physical space, hiding their identities and screaming obscenities at bystanders, but I know I’m not that type of person. As a result, the principle I usually post things under is “conduct myself online as I would in person.” Of course this doesn’t account for “the crazies” that could potentially harass me into my physical life at an easier rate simply because they’re mad I won an online game or the like. Thankfully I haven’t had to deal with such a situation, but I also believe that may be a consequence of avoiding inflammatory back-and-forths or highly-political discussions since anonymity is reduced, which may invite those attacks.
- araneae 4y ago> The best way to be anonymous on the internet is to be anonymous, which means posting without any name or identifier at all. If that isn't practical, then using a non-meaningful pseudonym and not posting anything personally identifiable is recommended. A third approach is using a word that means something and thus is not unique at all. Unique strings for usernames means lots of accurate hits. If you google mine, there will be lots of hits but none are me.
- gtirloni 4y ago> merely how they do be Going on a tangent here but I've started seeing more "do be" used lately. However, it doesn't seem right for some reason I can't pinpoint (English is not my first language). Is it from a dialect?
- Jeaye 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitual_be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitual_be It's an African American idiom which has bled into Gen Z vernacular, from what I've seen.
- mst 4y agoHabitual be is IMO a fantastically useful linguistic innovation (and I say this as a nearly forty english white dude).
- jrm4 4y agoThe only way to fix this now is through collective, not individual, action. Policy, for example.
- xwolfi 4y agoYes one of his mistake is to use the same username everywhere. He just needs a few links and he's burned. It's better to use a username you copied from someone else also, like that if people find links, they find someone else entirely.