4 ms·
For the last 2 decades, reddit and its ilk have been pseudonymous. You might mostly be careful not to give too much context about your daily life, but every on
by bsimpson 1y ago
For the last 2 decades, reddit and its ilk have been pseudonymous. You might mostly be careful not to give too much context about your daily life, but every once in a while, maybe you leak a little detail. Unless you run for President, nobody is going to bother reading through your thousands of comments to stitch together your identity.
As these models are trained on every piece of content ever written online, there are going to be a whole bunch of identity cracks, the equivalent of brute forcing a password.
AIs are going to make judgments about your character and personality based on everything you've ever written.
Guesses are going to come out about which burner accounts you've used, because the same password was used on otherwise unrelated accounts.
Essays you wrote in high school are going to resurface and be connected to your adult persona.
There was a time when an 8 character password was the state of the art, and now it can be cracked instantly. In the same way, sleuthing that would have been an impractical amount of work until recently is going to pierce the privacy veil of the internet in ways that could be really uncomfortable for people who have spent 3 decades assuming the internet is an anonymous place.
- SchemaLoad 1y agoDon't even need to match passwords. You can find alt accounts by just matching word usage frequency and other language style. Anyone can do this with just the public comments. It's going to be awful.
- flashblaze 1y agoYeah, I believe it is called Stylometry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylometry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylometry
- whatnow37373 1y agoTrigram count can be enough. I saw a demo of that on HN users to look for alt account a year or two ago. Worked great. Found all my alts.
- flashblaze 1y agoWas it this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016
- johnisgood 1y agoSadly I cannot access https://stylometry.net/ https://stylometry.net/. :( I really want to know what it would have said about me. Edit: https://antirez.com/hnstyle https://antirez.com/hnstyle does work though!
- flashblaze 1y agoOh yeah! I remember someone mentioning that on Twitter as well. Bookmarked
- littlestymaar 1y agoThere's a big flaw with the algorithm that was detecting similarly between users: it only works if your different accounts discusses the same topics.
- SchemaLoad 1y agoIt doesn't though. It was going off usage of very common words like "its", "he", "and" rather than topic specific ones. Just that alone seems to work shockingly well. If you combined it with a few more data points like timestamps and topics of interest it would get even more accurate.
- littlestymaar 1y agoI can guarantee you it doesn't work in practice. If you put aside my former account, it mostly matches the current one with other rust developers and absolutely not with my alt (which doesn't discuss Rust at all). I'm not questioning what would theoretically be possible to do, but the one that I saw failed the test.
- pona-a 1y agoPreviously on HN: Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting 325 points | 35 days ago | 155 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43705632 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43705632
- littlestymaar 1y ago> Unless you run for President, nobody is going to bother reading through your thousands of comments to stitch together your identity This comment feels a lot like what someone would say in the early internet, but for the past decade the targeted ads business has been doing that in real time with all the data you give it. And it has spread out of ads, insurance and credit companies are now buying this kind of info too. You have more to hide than you believe.
- mixmastamyk 1y agoReminds me of a 10-15 year old post on Ubuntu forums, loudly proclaiming that no one will ever need an outbound firewall on Linux. How quickly circumstances change.
- littlestymaar 1y agoWhy do I need a firewall on Linux though?
- mixmastamyk 1y agoThese days lots of (younger?) developers see nothing wrong with invasive telemetry collection, knowing no other world. Sometimes sketchy companies buy a project outright, desiring “monetization.” Merely using FLOSS software is no longer a complete solution—firewalls and other sandboxes are needed to enforce the user’s wishes. Why they’re built into flatpak etc. Reputable distros are trustworthy but might overlook something occasionally.
- SketchySeaBeast 1y agoWhich is horrifying, but also extremely questionable. Reddit Ads as of late have been trying to sell me things I am in no way interested in, like miniature piano keyboards, ray-bans, and romance novels about a sheriff who is also a shape shifting bear. These advertisers are supposed to have incredibly insight into our very souls but they are constantly whiffing. Although, I wonder if it's more terrifying for everyone to have belief in such a flawed system, what do we do when the "omniscient" AI starts continually gets things wrong?
- fragmede 1y ago> Unless you run for President, nobody is going to bother reading through your thousands of comments to stitch together your identity Lol. I've pissed people off enough when I've been in a shitposting mood here that they've mined my comment history (I've been here for a bit) and my linked blog on my profile to dig up random details about me to use against me, and that's just from dissatisfaction with some text by a stranger.
- pixl97 1y agoYea, it sounds like something someone says about 5 minutes before they pissed off 4chan and their entire life ends up on the national news the next day. Most people have no idea how much information they leak online and how it can be stitched together to figure out who you are.
- sumtechguy 1y agoIt is also one of the key tools people use for swatting. Just the style of my writing gives me away. Even if that method just gets you down to 5 people it is way easier to go thru 5 peoples information than thousands. Even something as simple as which browser you use and what the thing emits can identify you. https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/
- pixl97 1y agoYep, and if it's a site where users can post links and get you to click them they may have a server they can capture that browser information. Couple that in with ISP IP address information this can quite often shrink the identity to a few city blocks.
- Vinnl 1y agoI always tell people about how I used to upload photos to Facebook because I was fine with it showing it to my friends, not knowing that years later, they'd have the ability to find me in other photos other people had uploaded. I've since updated my threat model to include future possibilities. Which basically comes down to: if it's feasible to avoid data being shared, I better do so, because I have no idea what will be possible in the future.