cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/10899106
AI Can Now Easily Unmask Your Secret Online Life for $4
A new research paper from ETH Zurich, Anthropic, and MATS demonstrates that Large Language Models can automatically de-anonymize users across platforms like Reddit and Hacker News.
The AI acts like a digital detective using a method called ESRC (Extract, Search, Reason, Calibrate). It scans a user’s post history for subtle clues (hobbies, writing style, locations), searches the wider internet (LinkedIn, other forums) for matches, and uses complex reasoning to confirm the identity.
The terrifying results:
- It correctly linked secret Hacker News usernames to real people 67% of the time (with 90% accuracy when it made a firm guess).
- It successfully matched a person’s separate Reddit accounts from different years 68% of the time.
- The entire automated process costs only $4 per target.
“Practical obscurity”-the idea that you’re safe online because it takes too much human effort to connect your digital breadcrumbs-is dead. Anyone with a few dollars and an LLM API can now mass-dox thousands of pseudonymous accounts in minutes.
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This is pretty much the only place I post anymore, but there’s other ways to comb through metadata and figure it out. If there’s the will and the resources, then nobody is completely anonymous online.
lol good luck identifying me, Adam Friedland, host of the Adam Friedland show podcast show, from my online posting - or my wife Nicole Mullen- former abortion addiction advocate
67
How can it easily unmask my secrets if I have nothing to hide? Take the mask away and there’s nothing there.
kind of sad that you have to lie and obscure your identity for the sake of internet security and privacy. using your profile to connect to anyone makes your identity opaque so to be safe meaning we have to be as disconnected as possible :-l
This is why your “secret online name” should be a meme that literally millions of people use and absolutely not something unique that can be identified across multiple services.
i live on liberal mountain and i am an ardent lover of neoliberalism, hillary clinton, bill clinton, and obama
Omg me too!
there’s no shot this doesn’t give a fuck ton of false positives. especially for anyone who just occasionally sneaks a lie into their posts
This is why I make a new account for every comment I post.
Those 200 accounts that keep getting created on a daily basis starts to look a little suspicious. I think we got her.
Among other good advice in this thread: lie and be inconsistent about personal interests and anything else identifiable.
My hobbies include stealing from hobby stores and setting canisters of LPG on fire
Okg me too
If you know how many children I have, and what their ages are, it’s about 50-50 I’ve met you in person. If you know all of their gender identities, it’s more like 90-10. The rest is made up.
I will stay a nebulous person of dubious identity and any one else saying anything else are lying. I’m from everywhere all at once.
Once again, the early Internet opsec of “Assume that everyone on the internet wants to track you down, and don’t ever post your name, specific age, employer, or city in a publicly accessible online place” gives you an ample amount of protection.
post your name, specific age, employer, or city in a publicly accessible online place
Okay if you say so
Name: Kurox Ppi
Specific age: 23 years, 7 months and 9 days
Employer: Mars Inc
City: New York, USASpecifically, I work in the product design team which was responsible for putting the dick vein on the Snickers, a popular peanut and chocolate bar
This information is all true and current to the best of my knowledge. Please do not use it to triangulate my identity based on other online and offline activity.
Edit: peanut, caramel and chocolate bar
Edit edit: peanut, caramel, nougat and chocolate bar
Mmm I love the Snickers dick vein.
We did extensive customer research and found out that the dick vein is where the flavor is
My full name is actually
Lady Caj Asca, so I’m using my middle name as my nickname because being called Lady is… well, actually who cares? You know what, call me anything, as long as I know it’s connected to this account on a leftist forum. My parents at birth named me Lady and Caj Asca is actually from a long line of Caj Ascas in Manila of the Filipinos with the sole purpose of shitposting since the arrival of humans in the islands.
My age is permanently 21 years, 6 months and 9 days because I’m stuck in an unknown purgatory of sorts where I only know the current date and time through the computer, and I don’t seem to age, starve or get thirsty, though I find random bottles of suspicious pink liquid on the ground and drink them, I don’t know what it does, but it does taste sweet…
My employer? Oh of course the great CPC, and MSS, they transfer me Xi bucks to my bank account that I exchange for internet connection, as somehow that’s still not free.
I hope this isn’t used to track wherever I am, I’m perfectly content here in this room that only has a PC to post in the internet… Though, sometimes I do hope I find a way out… because the internet’s still bad here still and I find myself with nothing to do in these gray floors… And I’ve got nothing to do whenever Hexbear goes down…
post your name, specific age, employer, or city in a publicly accessible online place
My real name is Donald John Hoxha, age 80 years old, not counting the dead ones. My employer is Deng Daping, leader of the Shanghai liberals, but I’m actually a remote volunteer all the way from Dongjing province.
That would be a little less creepy if my middle name wasn’t John too.
Woah so they can know that I live in Berlin, Germany because I wrote equations like this:
$50 / $1.500 = 3,33%
Crazy. They infer based on my cues like a champ. Heckin awesome bro.
Genial !
Just like how I personally, myself, Chana, count on my hands starting with my thumb. As all Deutsche would.
I can’t count using fingers on my hands because I don’t have fingers, or hands. My hands got blown off by an IED serving in my first tour of Iraq.
Damn, my hands got blown off in my third tour of Iraq. I am posting with my mouth rn.
I got blown off with a mouth during my fourth tour.
I toured in Afghanistan and the same thing happened to me, except I was left with one finger that I now use for peck typing. I guess I should count my blessings, which luckily is 1.
As a staunch conservative I thank you for your service.
Thank you for thanking me for my service
Yes of course, I hold up my thumb, my index finger, and my middle finger to say “3”.
Drei is such a good number, same as the number of world wars we won’t start!
Feel like the “writing style” one is pretty hard to nail down when every redditor anne frankly did nazi that coming
THIS. Take my updoot.
le bacon barhops bat bidnight
This is going to empower all the worst Kiwifarms types.
I would make a joke that it’s going to put them out of business, AI’s come to take their jobs too.
This is gonna be really unfortunate for the federal agent that unmasks my real identity, and unearths hundreds of pics of me going hog out all over the place in sex clubs 30 years ago.
