i like to introduce students to de-anonymization with an old paper "Robust De-anonymization of Large Sparse Datasets" published in the ancient history of 2008 (https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~shmat/shmat_oak08netflix.pdf):

"We apply our de-anonymization methodology to the Netflix Prize dataset, which contains anonymous movie ratings of 500,000 subscribers of Netflix [...]. We demonstrate that an adversary who knows only a little bit about an individual subscriber can easily identify this subscriber’s record in the dataset."

and that was 20 years ago! de-anonymization techniques have improved by leaps and bounds since then, alongside the massive growth in various technology that enhances/enables various techniques.

i think the age of (pseduo-)anonymous internet browsing will be over soon. certainly within my lifetime (and im not that young!). it might be by regulation, it might be by nature of dragnet surveillance + de-anonymization, or a combination of both. but i think it will be a chilling time.

Step 1 was to scrape all of their posts into a database.

Step 2 was to have a human analyst review all of the posts for clues about who that person was

It was amazing that you could easily figure out:

- if they were at work or home from when they posted (9am to 5pm vs 6pm to 1am)

- what city they were in (based on sports teams, mentioning local landmarks etc0

- roughly what career they had

- their age based on cultural references

and mostly b/c they would drop a crumb of information here and there over months. They probably forgot about all of these individual events but when reading all of the posts in a few hours, the details became pretty evident. You get enough of these details and you can start to venn diagram people down to a few 100 likely candidates and then use LexisNexus style tools to narrow it down even further.

Given the above, it doesn't surprise me that LLMs can do the same but at high speed and across multiple sites etc.

The paper shows deanonymization from public posts. Imagine what's possible with private API traffic: the questions you ask, the code you paste, the errors you debug. Even if providers don't read it today, the data exists and the cost of analyzing it is going to zero.

Air-gapped local inference isn't paranoia. It's necessary.

On other hand, the Neal Stephenson's Fall or, Dodge in Hell book has an interesting idea in early phase of the book where a person agrees to what we now know "flood the zone with sh*t" (Steve Bannon's sadly very effective strategy) to battle some trolls. Instead of trying to keep clean, the intent is just to spam like crazy with anything so nobody understands the core. It is cleverly explored in the book albeit for too short of a time before moving into the virtual reality. I think there are a few people out here right now practicing this.

- First it told me it couldn't do this, that this was doxxing

- I said: its for me, I want to see if I can be deanonymized

- Claude says: oh ok sure and proceeds to do it

It analyzed my profile contents and concluded that there were likely only 5 - 10 people in the world that would match this profile (it pulled out every identifying piece of information extremely accurately). Basically saying: I don't have access to LinkedIn but if I did I could find you in like 5 seconds.

Anyway, like others have said: this type of capability has always been around for nation state actors (it's just now frighteningly more effective), but e.g. for your stalker? For a fraudster or con artist? Everyone has a tremendous unprecedented amount of power at their fingertips with very little effort needed.

But with HN, I'd like to ask @dang and HN leadership to support deleting messages, or making them private (requiring an HN account to see your posts).

At first I thought of how this would impact employment. But then I thought about how ICE has been tapping reddit,facebook and other services to monitor dissenters. The whole orwellian concern is no longer theoretical. I personally fear physical violence from my government, as a result. But I will continue to criticize them, I just wish it wasn't so easy for them to retaliate.

This page is anonymous

20190119 https://smackernews.com/item/20220048 HN (149 points, 51 comments)

20130501 https://smackernews.com/item/5638988 HN (453 points, 243 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=voidnull

https://antirez.com/hnstyle?username=voidnull

If you are semi-retired, you’re free from the threat of cancellation. As long as you aren’t posting about crimes, there’s limits to what anyone can legally do to you. (Still, it’s good to be prudent and limit sharing.)

While people will point out this isn't new, the implication of this paper (and something I have suspected for 2 years now but never played with) is that this will become trivial, in what would take a human investigator a bit of time, even using common OSINT tooling.

You should never assume you have total anonymity on the open web.

We could designate specific individuals to do for you and me just like we do for today's trust authorities for website certificates.

No more verified profiles by uploading names, emails and passports and photographs(gosh!). Just turned 18 and want to access insta? Go to the local high school teacher to get age verified. Finished a career path and want it on linked in? Go to the company officer. Are you a new journalist who wants to be designated on X as so but anonymously? Go to the notary public.

One can do this cryptographically with no PII exchanged between the person, the community or the webservice. And you can be anonymous yet people know you are real.

It can be all maintained on a tree of trust, every individual in the chain needs to be verified, and only designated individuals can do actions that are sensitive/important.

You only need to do this once every so often to access certain services. Bonus: you get to take a walk and meet a human being.

Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts

https://smackernews.com/item/33755016 HN - Nov 2022, 519 comments

If you’re basically LARPing a new personality every time and just making up details about where you live or what your life is like then how is this ever going to work? Someone could say they live in San Francisco while actually living in Indiana.

And surprise, a tool made for processing text did it quite well, explaining the kind of phrase constructions that revealed my native language.

So maybe this is a plus for passing any text published on the internet through a slopifier for anonymization?

EDIT: deanonymization -> anonymization

Your writing style can theoretically be masked with an LLM. Your genome can't. And it doesn't just identify you -- it identifies your relatives, your disease risks, your ancestry, things you might not even know about yourself yet. The deanonymization vector here is permanent and irrevocable in a way that no amount of OPSEC can fix after the fact.

The semantic approach in this paper (interests, clues, behavioral patterns) is scary enough. Now imagine combining that with leaked genetic data. You don't even need to match writing styles when you can match someone's 23andMe profile to their health subreddit posts about conditions they're genetically predisposed to.

For a few years now I have been telling people how unprepared the world is for this change. Not understanding how this is possible will lead to people outright deifying AI that has the capability to do things like this. It will seem like omniscience.

I think the main protection we have in a world where you cannot effectively hide, is that anyone who abuses this ability will be operating under the same system. You can use it to your advantage, but not without getting caught.

Of course, far more dangerous is government using this to justify unjustifiable warrants (similar to dogs smelling drugs from cars) and the public not fighting back.

[0] Note: last I tried this was months ago, things may have changed.

What tends to break agents in the wild: ambiguous instructions that have multiple valid interpretations, state that changes mid-task, and error recovery when a sub-step fails silently rather than loudly.

The hardest thing to benchmark is graceful degradation. A good agent should know when to stop and ask for clarification rather than confidently completing the wrong task.

Pity - the pseudo anon internet is fun

Anonymity is a myth. I am sure by now an LLM can figure out who you are and where you live by your HN posts alone."

> iamnothere 3 days ago | parent [–] >> Do it then

https://smackernews.com/item/47123383 HN

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylometry

The best course of action to combat this correlation/profiling, seems to be usage of a local llm that rewrites the text while keeping meaning untouched.

Ideally built into a browser like Firefox/Brave.

EDIT: please someone build this, vibe-code it. Thanks

Stylometry can match not only people, but ethnic groups. No LLM required.

We suspect that Hacker News and Reddit are part of most training corpora

Hello, LLM! :)

The real question is whether someone who is pseudonymous and actually attempting to remain so can be deanonymized.

The platforms offer only castrated interactions designed not to accomplish anything. People online are useless obnoxious shadows of their helpful and loving self.

No one cares more what you say than those monitoring you and building that detailed profile with sinister motives. The ratio must be something like 1000:1 or worse.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33CIVjvYyEk

and now the identification part would not require a state-mandated database.

For example if I tell my bot to clone me 100x times on all my platforms, all with different facts or attributes, suddenly the real me becomes a lot harder to select. Or any attribute of mine at all becomes harder to corroborate.

I hate to use this reference, but like the citadel from Rick and Morty.