7 ms·
LLMs can unmask pseudonymous users at scale with surprising accuracy
- zppln 8mo agoThe internet is getting less interesting by the day.
- RiverCrochet 8mo agoThe future is offline.
- senectus1 8mo ago*selfhosted
- burningChrome 8mo ago*analog
- rissotorous 8mo ago*doomed
- nehal3m 8mo ago*short
- gregw2 8mo ago*timeless
- rich_sasha 8mo ago*infinitely nested
- rickydroll 8mo ago*lunch
- JKCalhoun 8mo agoHa ha, been moving to all three lately. (My hobby experiments have been a small analog computer these past 4 or so months.)
- RiverCrochet 8mo agoI mean literally offline. Computers were quite prevalent and useful before the notion of cloud computing, or the Internet. Before the public was unleashed upon the Internet in 1992-1994, there were methods of information storage, indexing, searching, and exchange that didn't rely on real-time communications mediums operated by third parties. Example: CD-ROMs looked promising, the early 90's was smack in the middle of the "Multimedia" hey-day and gobs and gobs of data on nearly any subject was available and browseable at your perusal. Of course it wasn't globally searchable, but there wasn't anything stopping anyone from making a master global index of CD-ROMs, selling it, and perodically updating it. Somebody (multiple somebodies) probably did. Libraries have been doing that for many decades. Replace chat with in-person meetups. Computer clubs were a thing in the 70s and 80s. DVDs still exist. DVD drives are $20 at my local Wal-Mart. SD cards are cheap and massive (1.5TB SD cards are a thing now). Operating systems didn't always support TCP/IP. It's still something you can just turn off on a few of them.
- newsy-combi 8mo agoPros and cons to this. It would re-centralize media again, stochastically dictating what we talk about. The Epstein case would have been sealed some five or so years ago without the onslaught of publicly visible interest in it.
- ohy333ah 8mo ago[dead]
- ranger_danger 8mo agoOnly if said users happen to commit OPSEC failures themselves. LLMs aren't magic... If someone can figure out who I am or what city I live in just by this username or my comments (with proof), I'll personally send you 500,000 JPY. I'm quite confident that's not going to happen though. The paper referenced in the article does not even explain their exact testing methodology (such as the tools or exact prompts used) because they claim it would be misused for evil. In other words, "trust me bro." Also see the previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47139716 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47139716
- ggm 8mo agoWith low precision, you're in Japan. But I don't need the JPY. of course that could be obfuscation.
- ranger_danger 8mo agoThe currency is not related to my location, I picked a random one, but thanks anyway :)
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- nprateem 8mo agoThey said low precision. That might mean Spain, the US, etc
- ggm 8mo agoThey refer to JP and language often enough in their search history and they state they are an american, and on 5G internet. I think working beyond this is doxxing. They could be anywhere.
- 8mo ago
- akssassin907 8mo ago[flagged]
- nprateem 8mo ago> If you request deletion of your Hacker News account, note that we reserve the right to refuse to (i) delete any of the submissions, favorites, or comments you posted on the Hacker News site Probably not GDPR-compliant then if comments can be deanonymised by LLMs.
- WalterGR 8mo agoMy understanding is that the GDPR “right to be forgotten” applies to personal data. Are publicly available comments considered personal data?
- Hamuko 8mo agoWell, the username attached to them would surely be.
- croes 8mo agoIf they can help to deanonymize you, they must contain something personal. Writing pattern are pretty personal, certain spelling errors too, or the choose of words.
- WalterGR 8mo agoAbsolutely anything relating to an anonymous person could help deanonymization, so that implies that anything relating to any person is personal data. Is that the GDPR’s position?
- moi2388 8mo agoFrom ico.org.uk: “ It is important to note that opinions and inferences are also personal data, maybe special category data, if they directly or indirectly relate to that individual” From gdpr-info.eu: “ Subjective information such as opinions, judgements or estimates can be personal data.” So yes. HN is in violation of the GDPR. I had already filed a complaint about this policy at my local GDPR authority.
- 8mo ago
- firefoxd 8mo agoThere was a tool shared here that could show which accounts belong to the same person based on the writing patterns. Can't remember the name, but it found my old accounts on HN pretty accurately.
- ElCapitanMarkla 8mo agoHnprofile.com which has since closed down - lettergram was the author - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17942981 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17942981
- eps 8mo agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016 Way simpler than hnprofile from the sibling comment. This one used cosine similarity between user vocs - https://web.archive.org/web/20221126225241/https://stylometry.net/about https://web.archive.org/web/20221126225241/https://stylometr...
- firefoxd 8mo agoOh yes, this is the one I was referring to. Too bad it's shutdown.
- bitbasher 8mo agoOne solution is to flood the network with LLM slop and hide among the noise.
- signa11 8mo agoslop-steganography is that a name || a verb ?
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- Lio 8mo agoTo state the obvious, we all need person, local tools to warn us when we’re making opsec errors.
- littlestymaar 8mo agoThere's a default Unix tool for that: https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/yes.1.html https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/yes.1.html (Above 99% accuracy)
- ChrisArchitect 8mo ago[dupe] Discussion on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47139716 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47139716
- kanemcgrath 8mo agoAnonymous account unmasking represents a new threat to anonymity. not just this technique with llms, but the earlier text similarity one. But I think it would be generally easier to counter in the same way. Use an llm or heuristics to pose as someone else. not only do you erase your traces, you add false positives in to the system which reduces the overall effectiveness of these techniques in the future. A bit of poisoning the well. I hope eventually an easy to use tool, with maybe a small local llm, can make it easy enough to do this, so that any future deanonymization attacks would be too untrustworthy to rely on
- notTooFarGone 8mo agoLike with browser fingerprinting, making it too unique is also an issue. It may actually be a fine line. You may be flagged as an LLM later if your style is too generic and identified if your style is too unique.
- Springtime 8mo agoI thought this would be more about stylometry but it's mostly about users literally posting the same identifiable information across multiple services, including in one example their age, dog name, profession. It's all classic dox profiling techniques. Even the things like spelling differences being regional signals and commonality to specific things being discussed. It's why one has to think about what is being posted to which community if using different identities, rather than posting the same things across all of them. Though any such effort would be a waste if reliant on some non-public info that later was exposed in a database breach which tied together previously unrelated profiles.
- setopt 8mo agoI’m curious if an LLM-based defense for this could be made. Like a browser plugin that warns you if you type identifiable information (like occupation) into a text field, and highlights turns of phrase that are “unusual” enough to be identifiable.
- everyday7732 8mo agoor something which just inserts random untrue details about you every now and again, like they do in Alaska, where I live.
- Neywiny 8mo agoAh yes I remember seeing you at the Alaskan local underwater basket weavers meetup, you know the one for our profession.
- user205738 8mo agoI'm afraid that if you do this, you won't just stand out among regular users, but you'll actually shine for such llm systems.
- petesergeant 8mo agoAs a 32 year old Ghanaian woman living in Luang Prabang and studying as an ophthalmologist, this gives me some food for thought!
- JKCalhoun 8mo agoMy dogs Lacey and Baxter say "Hi!"
- xtiansimon 8mo ago> “This is a pretty new capability; previous approaches on re-identification generally required structured data, and two datasets with a similar schema that could be linked together.” Right up there with Skynet, for me, has been the idea of disparate databases all being linked up by bad actors. It appears as though DOGE illegally obtained taxpayer data from the IRS. I don’t trust DOGE to safeguard anything. And the penalties do not seem to be very severe outside of HIPPA. https://democracyforward.org/news/press-releases/new-details-about-doge-access-to-sensitive-systems-at-irs-emerge-in-legal-filing/ https://democracyforward.org/news/press-releases/new-details...
- futune 8mo agoSo tell an LLM what you would like the post to say, and then post the output? LLM as the sickness and the cure...
- AreShoesFeet000 8mo agoThis is the first thing that comes to mind. However I wonder if not only the “general” vocabulary can be anonymized but also the underlying concepts and references, because they point to a particular place too.
- Balgair 8mo agoSo um, can an AI also inject enough noise at the internet for me to make it harder to unmask me? Should I like, just as Claude Code to come up with this idea this weekend?
- Bombthecat 8mo agoFigured this is going to happen. And it will just get worse. I can already see palantir as the new man in the middle. Telling services: this guy with the same IP just posted xxx on yyy
- laalshaitaan 8mo agoStylometry is just the most legible version of this. The harder-to-defend surface: posting time patterns, topic clusters, cross-platform phrase matching, interaction graphs. LLMs synthesize weak signals at scale in a way no single analyst could, which makes the threat model fundamentally larger than "change how you write." Most OPSEC advice is written for the pre-LLM world.