Ask HN: What are the implications of Hacker News alt accounts being revealed?
This post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016 shows that many HN alt accounts have been exposed, not through hacking but stylistic analysis.
HM famously does not permit deletion of previous accounts or comments.
So for some people who assumed anonymity this could be anything from unimportant to awkward to a real problem.
Presumably now people will routinely search for alt accounts of any HN commenter and bring what they find into the discussion.
It’s not a hack, but in many ways the implications are similar to those of a hack.
How do you feel about this?
@dang what do you think?
50 comments
[ 36.5 ms ] story [ 879 ms ] thread+ give users a way to delete their profile once posted. If not whole comment history, at least remove their username from the db.
Everyone has a particular style of writing, and the only way of hiding it I can think of is not writing anything at all.
Use short sentences ? Use newspeak ? Copy the features of other users ?
I also talk to ppl from various backgrounds. I could prove you why you need to vote for any candidate, thanks to the logics of coworkers. I used to copy the style of MS documentations to refactor code, so that juniors could get started right away. Before that, I used to learn English. My patterns and word usage where just a medley of recently viewed content.
I'm sure it can be achieved.
You just need to read enough, or be exposed to so much content than you can choose your patterns.
Would only work if enough people did it. Otherwise all your accounts will stand out as being "the newspeak person"
Thanks, Obama
(is talking in memes sustainable ?)
tho (You) sneed to be perspicaciously circumspect in celebrating teh diversity of communities that u eBaum your MaiMais from. If Not, sekrit bsns liek whether ur gebaseerd 「kink memes」 are fr0m at least 100 years ago or $PRESENT_DAY_PRESENT_TIME will soon™ accidentally a pattern here, and you can rest assured that your FBI agent will have no doubts as to what kind of sussy you really are. )))
Be aware that it's almost impossible to defeat it, and act accordingly. More exactly, if you think that a tech-capable state actor is coming after you then you should be outside the reach of where said state actor holds its monopoly of power. Real text-anonymity is gone for good.
To make a crude analogy, what if I punched you in the face to demonstrate that you should consider learning kung fu? Or perhaps to indicate that, if a corporation wanted to, they could hire people to assault you and there would be little you could do about it? At the end of the day you’ve got a busted nose either way. Are you really better off?
OP and creator assume that attempts at creating privacy online are always under active attack. The threat environment already exists. Publication of this tool does not meaningfully change the threat environment.
Some more analogous situations might be:
* Publicizing that police do not quickly respond to 911 calls for assault or break and entry in certain neighborhoods * Selling lockpicks and publicizing how to pick standard tumbler locks * Publicizing which bike locks can be cut with hand tools
The real fundamental disagreement is on the assumption of if your privacy is already under attack by competent actors.
If that's the case, then that was a bad assumption, IMHO.
I don't assume anonymity. I assume pseudonymity.
Then again, I don't use alt accounts either. And, interestingly, the closest "match" for me is 0.51 on the site you mentioned.
Which, I guess, is both good and bad. Good in the sense that I'm expressing myself as me. And bad in that if folks were to use this dataset to compare to other sites where I also post, my activities on multiple sites could be correlated. Which would probably annoy me, but not for the reasons you may think.
First, only obsessive or crazy people will do that, or maybe journalists. It'll show up occasionally in discussions, but I don't think it'll be 'routine', and I think most commenters will avoid subthreads with those sorts of shenanigans.
But more importantly, these static analysis tools are only probabilistic. They find likely matches, but in most cases there'll be a factor of plausible deniability.
The system doesn't predict alts, just gives a list of nearest matches and highlights the entries that are symmetrical within the number of matches given. I have no alts but still get the same number of "predictions" as sillysaurusx, who says he's had 10-ish.
So the accuracy of any given prediction is going to be by definition tiny at 19 per user. After all, most users have no or few alts in the first place. sillysaurusx is an extreme example, and even that leaves overall accuracy at 50-60%. Across all users I'd be shocked if it was better than 2 in 19. Probably it's < 1.
This isn't the first time someone posted site like this by the way, nothing bad came of it.
B. How do you manage the posting and accounts? Just manually?
* Deniability - dang has matches that are close but probably not him, you can just say it isn't you
The bottom line I guess is: if you did that, your choice is basically to never post at all or to create an account where you practice some kind of opsec to try to disconnect it from your previous account (e.g run it through a service that rewrites the text).
Perhaps we should just iterate. What does this post reveal about HN? Discuss.
Btw, how is having an account system without any option to close or delete the account - and which might contain your real name as username - compatible with the GDPR?
There are false positives.
Maybe I should be friends with these people then?
https://stylometry.net/user?username=cableshaft
EDIT: Did a quick cursory glance at the top five on my list, and despite pretty different subjects they talked about I can kind of see the stylistic similarities.
I can't predict whether editing out highly diverse voices would increase or decrease signal to noise. Editing out low diversity voices would turn this into a stranger place.
I'm #20 on your list and you are #1 on my list. :)