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.
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!