4 ms·

The secret is not scraping PII in the first place (which is not really difficult, though it requires some planning)

seydor 4y ago
not sure if it can ever be possible. i can ask chatGPT to do stylography analysis on our comments, find our other accounts and go from there. I'm pretty sure most pieces of human-generated data is identifiable at this point
- raverbashing 4y ago
  This is not how it works, (unless of course you're pretending and collecting all these 'auxiliary data' on purpose) and even if it was, there's still plenty of non-PII data around
  - seydor 4y ago
    It hasn't been long that someone applied a basic, cosine similarity to HN comments to find alternate accounts. It worked quite well afaik https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016
    - raverbashing 4y ago
      Yes, and? If you're worried about being identified from alt-accounts you're much more likely to be tracked via reuse of emails or some other information that you have slipped (see multitude of cases) Simple text is not PII, laws are not interpreted like technical discussions are https://xkcd.com/1494/ https://xkcd.com/1494/
  - pixl97 4y ago
    It would be really interesting to raise a human only on non-PII data and see exactly how screwed up and weird they'd be. The Golem-Class model behaves in a 'humanlike' manner because it's trained on actual real data like we'd experience in the world. What you're suggesting is some insane psychology test that we'd never allow to happen to a human.
brookst 4y ago
“Not that difficult”? Can you elaborate? Because I think it’s nearly insurmountable. Is the sentence “Meagan Smith graduated magma cum laude from Northwestern’s business program in 2004” PII? How about if another part of the corpus says “M. Smith had a promising career in business after graduating with honors from a prestigious school, but an unplanned pregnancy caused her to quit her job in 2006”? Does it matter if it’s from fiction? What if the fiction it comes from uses real people? Or if there might be both real and fictional Meagan Smiths? And how so you process that kind of thing at the scale of billions of documents? This is a very hard problem, especially at scale.
- raverbashing 4y ago
  Where are you scraping this data from? This is the main question > “M. Smith had a promising career in business after graduating with honors from a prestigious school, but an unplanned pregnancy caused her to quit her job in 2006” The main issue is how that statement ended up there in the first place. Even then how many "M. Smith" have studied in prestigious schools? By itself that phrase wouldn't be PII Now if you have a db entry with "M Smith" and entries for biographical data that's definitely PII

not sure if it can ever be possible. i can ask chatGPT to do stylography analysis on our comments, find our other accounts and go from there. I'm pretty sure most pieces of human-generated data is identifiable at this point

raverbashing 4y ago
This is not how it works, (unless of course you're pretending and collecting all these 'auxiliary data' on purpose) and even if it was, there's still plenty of non-PII data around
- seydor 4y ago
  It hasn't been long that someone applied a basic, cosine similarity to HN comments to find alternate accounts. It worked quite well afaik https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016
  - raverbashing 4y ago
    Yes, and? If you're worried about being identified from alt-accounts you're much more likely to be tracked via reuse of emails or some other information that you have slipped (see multitude of cases) Simple text is not PII, laws are not interpreted like technical discussions are https://xkcd.com/1494/ https://xkcd.com/1494/
- pixl97 4y ago
  It would be really interesting to raise a human only on non-PII data and see exactly how screwed up and weird they'd be. The Golem-Class model behaves in a 'humanlike' manner because it's trained on actual real data like we'd experience in the world. What you're suggesting is some insane psychology test that we'd never allow to happen to a human.

brookst 4y ago

“Not that difficult”? Can you elaborate? Because I think it’s nearly insurmountable. Is the sentence “Meagan Smith graduated magma cum laude from Northwestern’s business program in 2004” PII? How about if another part of the corpus says “M. Smith had a promising career in business after graduating with honors from a prestigious school, but an unplanned pregnancy caused her to quit her job in 2006”? Does it matter if it’s from fiction? What if the fiction it comes from uses real people? Or if there might be both real and fictional Meagan Smiths? And how so you process that kind of thing at the scale of billions of documents? This is a very hard problem, especially at scale.

raverbashing 4y ago
Where are you scraping this data from? This is the main question > “M. Smith had a promising career in business after graduating with honors from a prestigious school, but an unplanned pregnancy caused her to quit her job in 2006” The main issue is how that statement ended up there in the first place. Even then how many "M. Smith" have studied in prestigious schools? By itself that phrase wouldn't be PII Now if you have a db entry with "M Smith" and entries for biographical data that's definitely PII