so if they put their linkedin account on their HN account, we can figure out who they are.... genius stuff, AI really is changing the landscape all right
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.
Additionally, you can open up copilot.microsoft.com or w/e and ask it to summarize any reddit users (and presumably HN) posts. Not just the content, but their emotional state (without prompting).
[0] Note: last I tried this was months ago, things may have changed.
What this tells me is that major social media sites, some of which claim to be developing frontier models, have no excuse for a bots waging influence campaigns on their sites.
I'm not sure the practical implications are as dramatic as the paper suggests. Most adversaries who would want to deanonymize people at scale (governments, corporations) already have access to far more direct methods. The people most at risk from this are probably activists and whistleblowers in jurisdictions where those direct methods aren't available, not average users.
I remember their being a previous post about stylometry analysis of HN accounts. And people confirmed the top account correlations. It basically identified all the HN alt accounts
"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.
> Does privacy of Netflix ratings matter? The issue is not “Does the average Netflix subscriber care about the privacy of his movie viewing history?,” but “Are there any Netflix subscribers whose privacy can be compromised by analyzing the Netflix Prize dataset?”
We don't need everyone to be completely anonymous to state and corporate actors. We just need to make it so that they can't identify and surveil everyone at once, because it would be too expensive.
The US defense budget is about $1T dollars. They can't spend it all on surveillance, but let's say tech companies + gov spends about this amount per year on surveillance in total. If we can raise the cost to surveil the average person to over $10K/yr, they just lose. This is very doable.
Every little precaution you take will raise the cost, probably more than you think. Every open-source project that aims to anonymize and decentralize is an arrow in their knee. They're hoping that you'll get cynical and stop trying because they don't stand a chance otherwise.
The obvious retort is to just use an AI to rewrite everything you post, but this will open other attack vectors.
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.
As people will point out, the OSINT techniques described are nothing new - typically, in the past, you could de-anonymize based on writing style or niche topics/interests. Totally deanonymization can occur if any of these accounts link to profiles containing pictures of their faces, which can then be web-searched to link to a real identity. It's astounding how many people re-use handles on stuff like porn sites linked very easily to their IRL identity.
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.
I post under my real name here, pretty much the only place I post. It keeps me honest and straight in what I say when I choose to say it. I tried talking to my children about leaving as clean of a footprint on the internet as one can in anticipation of future people/systems taking that into consideration. I don't know what it will be but I would expect some adversarial stuff. Trying to keep clean is what I'd prefer for myself and my kids.
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.
I view posting online with a real name like getting a permanent tattoo.
My values or priorities may significantly change over decades, especially as a child, so why would I want to jeopardize the reputation of a potential future identity with something I may post today?
>I post under my real name here, pretty much the only place I post. It keeps me honest and straight in what I say when I choose to say it.
I do the same thing, and I think I'm a much better person for it. The Internet is not, in my final analysis, some indiscriminate dumping ground for my personal issues and moods. It's a place where I can relax and practice putting forward a more prosocial form of myself, even when what I actually have to say is uncomfortable.
While we can't predict how the adversary will read and respond to our moves, I suspect the easier marks are the people who choose to publicly drench everything they touch in negativity and cynicism. It's a sign of an already compromised social immune system.
Yes it's basically data poisoning. It reminds me of the approach the Adnauseum extension takes. It hides ads from you like traditional adblockers but under the hood it's actually selectively clicking them to fool advertisers. I don't know if it's smart enough to create a "profile" for you (e.g. "soccer mom from Michigan") but that seems like the logical next step. Instead of just "flooding the zone with shit" you'd be more selectively/consistently misleading
> Instead of trying to keep clean, the intent is just to spam like crazy with anything so nobody understands the core.
I don’t think this is humanly possible against machine learning. After all, it is specifically designed to weed through noisy data and identify patterns. It may delay discovery, but will at some point easily fall apart, by something as simple as a “filter out shitposting and deliberate pollution” prompt. Even more so when you guide it towards specific attributes.
Data poisoning your own online profile is all nice and well. But in a society that goes beyond itself to cram AI into about every imaginable system, it may not be smart at all. Already in early adopter phase the average person gives way too much authoritative weight to what LLM's come up with. If complex societal processes become basically AI-driven you may get into a world of hurt. "I am sorry, we can't give you that passport right now, until we investigate potentially fraudulent behavior our AI flagged us about".
Do you want culture to be frozen and instant digital communication with anyone else in the world to become a privilege of the few? Because that's where "clean" leads. And all you get is a little bit of temporary safety.
Here's a different vision for the future:
Let information filtering become each individual's own responsibility. We have LLMs now, and they'll get more efficient, so why not use them locally to filter incoming feeds according to each of our own preferences, but remove all of the filtering/moderation for posting info out. Build systems to decentralize and anonymize the Internet so that people can discover anyone and aren't afraid to post anything. Make it so that everyone can get a message out to the world and nobody can be arrested or assassinated for it. This will put an end to most violent conflict because they'd be replaced by online discourse.
Let the Internet be flooded with trash and gold at the same time. Let each individual decide what info is/isn't valuable to them. Let those individuals self-organize. Let ideas compete freely, so that the best ones may prevail.
I've come to a similar conclusion. I now almost exclusively post under my real name online, and before writing something, I ask myself whether it's something I'd say to a person's face and whether I'm comfortable being quoted on it. If not, I look for a more neutral, stronger version of the argument I'm trying to make (stronger, as in strong enough to stand without rhetorical devices or fallacies), or, I qualify the statement as an opinion or something I consider to be a possibility.
I feel like this is one of those products OpenAI et al are quietly perfecting. Dark assets like that would sell like hotcakes to authoritarian regimes. That would explain how they eventually plan to reach profitability.
Somebody I know irl has figured out I'm me here on Hackernews, based on the fact that my writing style here matches my verbal style. Fingerprinting people based on their words is one of the things I actually expect LLMs to be really absurdly good at.
78 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 69.9 ms ] threadhttps://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.
Hello, LLM! :)
[0] Note: last I tried this was months ago, things may have changed.
EDIT: please someone build this, vibe-code it. Thanks
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
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.
Well said.
The US defense budget is about $1T dollars. They can't spend it all on surveillance, but let's say tech companies + gov spends about this amount per year on surveillance in total. If we can raise the cost to surveil the average person to over $10K/yr, they just lose. This is very doable.
Every little precaution you take will raise the cost, probably more than you think. Every open-source project that aims to anonymize and decentralize is an arrow in their knee. They're hoping that you'll get cynical and stop trying because they don't stand a chance otherwise.
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.
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.
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.
My values or priorities may significantly change over decades, especially as a child, so why would I want to jeopardize the reputation of a potential future identity with something I may post today?
I do the same thing, and I think I'm a much better person for it. The Internet is not, in my final analysis, some indiscriminate dumping ground for my personal issues and moods. It's a place where I can relax and practice putting forward a more prosocial form of myself, even when what I actually have to say is uncomfortable.
While we can't predict how the adversary will read and respond to our moves, I suspect the easier marks are the people who choose to publicly drench everything they touch in negativity and cynicism. It's a sign of an already compromised social immune system.
I don’t think this is humanly possible against machine learning. After all, it is specifically designed to weed through noisy data and identify patterns. It may delay discovery, but will at some point easily fall apart, by something as simple as a “filter out shitposting and deliberate pollution” prompt. Even more so when you guide it towards specific attributes.
Here's a different vision for the future:
Let information filtering become each individual's own responsibility. We have LLMs now, and they'll get more efficient, so why not use them locally to filter incoming feeds according to each of our own preferences, but remove all of the filtering/moderation for posting info out. Build systems to decentralize and anonymize the Internet so that people can discover anyone and aren't afraid to post anything. Make it so that everyone can get a message out to the world and nobody can be arrested or assassinated for it. This will put an end to most violent conflict because they'd be replaced by online discourse.
Let the Internet be flooded with trash and gold at the same time. Let each individual decide what info is/isn't valuable to them. Let those individuals self-organize. Let ideas compete freely, so that the best ones may prevail.
Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016 - Nov 2022, 519 comments
20250415 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43705632 Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting (325 points, 159 comments)