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.
Okay if you say so
Name: Kurox Ppi
Specific age: 23 years, 7 months and 9 days
Employer: Mars Inc
City: New York, USA
Specifically, 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