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.
My name is Yoshikage Kira. I’m 33 years old. My house is in the northeast section of Morioh, where all the villas are, and I am not married. I work as an employee for the Kame Yu department stores, and I get home every day by 8 PM at the latest. I don’t smoke, but I occasionally drink. I’m in bed by 11 PM, and make sure I get eight hours of sleep, no matter what. After having a glass of warm milk and doing about twenty minutes of stretches before going to bed, I usually have no problems sleeping until morning. Just like a baby, I wake up without any fatigue or stress in the morning. I was told there were no issues at my last check-up. I’m trying to explain that I’m a person who wishes to live a very quiet life. I take care not to trouble myself with any enemies, like winning and losing, that would cause me to lose sleep at night. That is how I deal with society, and I know that is what brings me happiness. Although, if I were to fight I wouldn’t lose to anyone.