> All of a sudden all the developers discovered simultaneously that a lawyer from the film studio Warner Bros. had visited their professional LinkedIn pages.
Are there any details about how the Warner Bros. lawyer was able to find the developers?
Sounds like a story of it's own, bigger than this one.
Just because Warner Bros is old and stodgy doesn't mean that they don't have access to people with advanced technical skill. In England there have even been P.I. shops used by the wealthy that were shut down for hacking and that was 5+ years ago.
I have always used a pseudonym on GIT, and all other sites. I tell people, who need to see my work/me, my pseudonym. I guess if I was actively looking for a job I wouldn't be able to be anonymous?
I use pseudonyms when I wish to speak freely to a larger internet-only community, away from scrutiny by people who know me in real life but may not understand the context of the community in which a discussion takes place. I suppose I would construct an alter ego on Github if I were working on something illegal in my country.
Anything targeted at people who know you should be under the name they know you by. It's not as if pseudonymity defeats Big Data - all they care about is which ads you're likely to click on, whether there is a correct name associated with that profile is of no consequence. And of course anything not done through Tor can still be traced through your ISP's subscriber records. Using a pseudonym on, say, Facebook mostly just inconveniences people. I suppose it could be a reasonable countermeasure against a stalker, but locked-down privacy settings (or just not using Facebook) are probably safer bets.
I think the key word you're overlooking is "most", as in "most of the core team" took steps to be anonymous, not all (steps that, for all we know, may never have worked).
"– We do not know how, but he had managed to track us. We were quite unsettled. We thought it was a scare tactic. And we were frightened. None of us were anonymous anymore. They knew where we worked, where we lived."
I'm just saying, I imagine they wouldn't be scared about it if it was a big net fishing for info. Could be sensationalism for the story though.
Whilst I'm not all about the ethics of multinationals, there is a strong presumption that those 'anonymous' members were anywhere near as thorough as they say or thought they were in not leaving breadcrumbs (witness DPR and Silk Road).
You set your prefs to show you as anon when you click others' profiles.
Edit: I obviously don't know specifics about what they did to be "anonymous" and how they were deanonymized. But whatever, if they were deanonymized, they didn't properly assess threats, and employ adequate OPSEC. In other words, they were sloppy.