This is bad, and I’ve already given up on being anonymous on the internet.

But maybe we get to have some fun and doxx the baddies too?

  • Llituro [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    32
    ·
    1 month ago

    you should assume that to sufficiently motivated megacorps, palantir, and the u.s. federal government, your best attempts at online anonymity can probably be circumvented by one failure point or another. i’ve taken relative pains to separate my username from my real life, and i know it’s still not really meaningfully anonymous if the right company wants to figure it out. if they want ya, they got ya. everyone should post accordingly.

  • BountifulEggnog [it/its, she/her]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    15
    ·
    1 month ago

    I wondered about this and had an idea for a (similar but worse) pipeline, very interesting paper.

    Wonder when this will be on github and every nerd has a copy running on their computer.

    • BountifulEggnog [it/its, she/her]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      10
      ·
      edit-2
      1 month ago

      The paper has several different datasets and explains how they got them, but for their test data they already knew the link existed. I think this one is probably the most relevant for actual attacks. They split accounts, giving a one year gap in their post history to simulate an abandoned account etc and added some fake profiles that didn’t have a match.

      If you mean running this yourself, you can’t, they didn’t post prompts or anything. Just an overview of their pipeline. Sorry at first I thought you meant how could they validate that the users were the same person.

      • TankieTanuki [he/him]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        11
        ·
        1 month ago

        Oh I see, they stripped the usernames and matched the comments. I thought they were claiming to have matched usernames to legal identities.

        • BountifulEggnog [it/its, she/her]@hexbear.net
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          12
          ·
          1 month ago

          They did that too, with hackernews and linkedin accounts, as well as some anthropic interviewees. I’m less sure how impressive that is, because the accounts were linked by the owner. So they obviously don’t care about opsec, so they’re probably less careful then they otherwise would be. The paper isn’t a super hard read if you’re interested. Guess we’ll all have to see how well this works in practice.

  • quarrk [he/him]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    10
    ·
    1 month ago

    Even if it’s possible, don’t make it easy. Too many people post here hyper specific details like “my grandfather with <rareDisease> has an adopted daughter from Bangladesh who became a rural doctor”

    Don’t make things too personal here, even if most of us are friendly