4 ms·

Someone 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 ago
  https://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 ago
    Perhaps, 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 ago
    Stylometry does not identify any of my alternate accounts. I ain't skeered.
    • costco 4y ago
      It 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 ago
        That'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.
  • causi 4y ago
    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. Oh, if a comment needs a personal detail it's randomized. Sometimes I'm married, sometimes I'm straight, sometimes I'm American, etc.
• 2Gkashmiri 4y ago
  Yeah, my question too
• pixl97 4y ago
  See, here's the problem with the internet, you have to assume your data is out there forever. You may have fastidiously ensured that your personal information has been posted as of today, but it doesn't matter, one mistake tomorrow and the entire house of cards collapses. Lets say you borrow your dads computer to post and it's logged in under his name. You log into a site with an incognito browser and post a message in Chrome and then close it out. Well due to a bug in that version of Chrome the full path of user folder Chrome was in was added to the request logs on the server 'C:\users\ronald.t.devito\appdata\....'. This gets put in the servers logs with your username. That server had bad security and the logs leaked to everyone on the internet. A hacker realizes that 'belli' is also use 'causi', and a few other profiles. They see that username is pretty unique to a 54 year old male from the west coast, but the writing style is of a much younger, likely male, person which points at Ronald's son Jonny. You are at risk of being disclosed/doxx on the internet because of security issues everywhere in the stack and its exceptionally difficult to cover all the bases.
  • sverona 4y ago
    That's at least two mistakes and a shocking number of inferences which are all but impossible without prior knowledge.