4 ms·
nice. here is my idea.... i was online from my pre teens time. i actually had to wait a 'few' years to get my own email address. back then, there was no "socia
by 2Gkashmiri 4y ago
nice. here is my idea....
i was online from my pre teens time. i actually had to wait a 'few' years to get my own email address. back then, there was no "social media", no algorithm and you were taught to not give your real "A/S/L" because people could track you down and hurt you and all that. oh the days.
i adopted this randomuser handle, not linking my accounts from one service with another, not reusing handles, not having google/FB/apple accounts, it takes time and energy.
anonymity on the internet is a wonderful thing really. forget the abusers and stuff, moderation is for that. when you consider the real problem of doxing, you appreciate the benefits of using anoymous handles.
>Everyone knows, abstractly, that the internet is not real life. But you can’t picture it, not really, until you sit across from the real people behind the screen. Even the darkest online personalities are just people on their phones. It is oddly disappointing to meet the “worst person on the internet” and find that they are nothing at all.
we call if "AFK" and not "IRL"
- FeistySkink 4y agoHow do you avoid being doxxed based on your writing style?
- mnky9800n 4y agoI have a terminal application that i wrote that rewrites all text that i plan to write to have a neutral tone. so i type the comment, put it into the terminal application, it rewrites the comment, and then i post that instead.
- causi 4y agoSomeone could use my writing style to link my online identities together. How does that help them doxx me when there is nothing written under my real name?
- throwaway32433 4y agohttps://stylometry.net/user?username=causi https://stylometry.net/user?username=causi You don't need to give out your name and address to be doxxed, there's enough information from your comments across your accounts to reasonably identify you if someone wanted. MIT did a study on 'anonymised' data and found out it only took something like 2 data points to identify someone.
- dbspin 4y agoPerhaps, but the site above doesn't seem particularly effective. I have an alt for reasons of convenience I use about equally regularly to my main. It's not even listed on the set of likely candidates. Meanwhile I've five spurious correlations above .6.
- buildsjets 4y agoStylometry does not identify any of my alternate accounts. I ain't skeered.
- costco 4y agoIt might have if I had used an algorithm that wasn’t the easiest to implement on stylometry.net. Unless you are varying your writing style across accounts a more sophisticated algorithm could very likely figure out your alts given enough comments. Which is not to say that you should give up everything and stop posting on HN but just something to consider depending on who your adversaries are.
- causi 4y agoThat's kind of ignoring my original point that it doesn't matter how many of your accounts they ID if you never put your personal details on the internet.
- 2Gkashmiri 4y agoWow. Interesting question. I don't have a second account so I checked stylometry and it gave me bunch of names that I know are not me. Maybe I will try with a new second account and confirm. Second, stylometry can dox me how? My current handle is not attached to anywhere else on internet and even if someone did HN/reddit/twitter stylometry analysis, how will that reach my home and or identity of my passport? Its not like I post anything online in my own name. Haven't in actual years. So assuming an adversary was trying to find me and did see my reddit or active twitter account, so... What? Short of breaking into it and checking the 2fa number (which I avoid at all costs) how ? Maybe amazon but I don't write reviews so ..... How would you go about this?
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago<< stylometry can dox me how? By themselves, none of the things we discuss are inherently bad. They are just tools. I open with this, because it is important to understand that stylometry by itself uncovers only a small facet of your online persona, by possibly identifying your footprint and allowing for ingestion and analysis for OTHER identifying information. Using your example your passport may not be online, but lets say you link self-hosted project, your website may be registered to your company and, depending on how you set it up, your information may be relatively trivial to run against information broker database ( LX, TR ). It is surprisingly easy to slip even if you are privacy conscious of it and it really only takes one time since internet does remember ( and it is saved somewhere ). I guess what I am saying is I would not dismiss it outright, but at the very least I would check the link parent added; it actually is kinda amazing.
- mechanical_bear 4y agoUse different slang on different accounts. Don’t bother with capitalisation on some. Use British English on some. Etc. The speaking style aligns with the username.