Comment by Nadya | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Nadya | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

>I would like to find a white hat site that prepares a report on what they can find about you.

This would be difficult to start as it would require trust. I already do exactly this ("white hat doxing") but do you trust that that is actually what I'm doing? Maybe it would be easier as an established corporation with an explicit privacy policy.

>I've been wondering if it is possible to dox my Reddit account.

You can make it much more time consuming and more difficult (read: but not impossible) to do so by using this userscript as frequently as possible: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/10380-reddit-overwrite

I personally run it for all posts older than 2~3 weeks (when activity/relevance of the post is nearly equivalent to "0").

Some sites still archive posts w/o updating for any future edits, there is web cache, etc. But those are far harder to search and tie together than simply browsing your comments on your profile. Note that some subreddits may ban you for using it and you'll get a bunch of AutoModerator posts asking you not to do that because of thread integrity and blah blah blah.

I hate it when people use these scripts and do have a rule against deleting posts that have replies in one subreddit I moderate. There are two kinds of things harmed by this behavior:

* In communities where people buy and sell things, or offer pay for services (e.g. /r/forhire), a glance at someone's account history provides some insight into their likely reliability. It's not much to go on, but that's inherent to doing business with strangers online.

* In many communities, previous discussions are full of useful information for future readers. Removing half of a conversation often ruins that utility.

>In communities where people buy and sell things, or offer pay for services (e.g. /r/forhire), a glance at someone's account history provides some insight into their likely reliability. It's not much to go on, but that's inherent to doing business with strangers online.

Trivially solvable with an alias used exclusively for such dealings where you don't scrub history. Also, as mentioned, it isn't necessarily that good of a rule anyway. Better than nothing but not necessarily by much.

>In many communities, previous discussions are full of useful information for future readers. Removing half of a conversation often ruins that utility.

I value my personal privacy (and time) more than any use my conversations will have for future readers. I don't have the time to selectively edit/delete hundreds of posts. One argument against this would be to "post less" but then many of those "useful posts" may not have ever been made to begin with so there isn't a net difference.

Also - quoting the most relevant bits of a post in your own post helps retain at least some context. Even if you were to edit/remove your post now - I have two pieces of it quoted that a future reader would at least have some context as to our conversation.

I'll grant this for that technique: while your website linked to your username here made it easy to guess your reddit username, 5 minutes of looking did not recover your deleted comments.

It's a little difficult for me to wrap my head around the mindset though: if you're concerned about privacy, why would you post anything sensitive to reddit? If you haven't posted anything sensitive, why delete it? I'll admit, I've never been the victim or perpetrator of doxxing, so I may be missing something.

>I'll admit, I've never been the victim or perpetrator of doxxing, so I may be missing something.

Most people leak information constantly and each bit or byte of information by itself is not important. However, in aggregate, people leak enough information about themselves to have it become sensitive information. What can be seen as harmless on its own can lead to more sensitive/"harmful" information being gathered.

For an example, let's say you share a photograph of yourself somewhere in London. Maybe you went on vacation, a business trip, a family visit, a honeymoon, etc. There are plenty of reasons to be in London one time! Now over the period of 10 years you've shared a few dozen photos of yourself in various places of London. What are the chances you live in London? Would you say the chances are higher than if you had only shared a single photograph?

Likewise, information that doesn't seem sensitive on its own can become incriminating when combined with other evidence. Scrubbing everything therefore is the best way to ensure you aren't leaving anything behind. It's also a lot easier to scrub everything than to read over years of post history to see if you've ever shared anything you maybe shouldn't have.

I fear we're slowly stepping into paranoia levels of privacy protection. This is my personal belief, I'm aware many people here don't think that way, but here it is: it is literally impossible to live a life in a society without radiating such information all the time. This applies both to physical and digital realms; and as most people spend more and more time with digital services, the two start to blend into one.

So I guess my opinion is: radiating that information is not really an issue, and any problems arising from it are best solved elsewhere, and not by becoming a digital hermit.

I'm strongly with 'Zak here; there's little I hate more in the domain of Internet conversations than people deleting things their wrote. In fact, I believe there is a strong community interest in all (not killed by moderation) comments remaining up as long as the whole discussion exists. I don't mind if someone unlinks their post by e.g. deleting account; I care less about who wrote something than about what was written. Deleting posts ruins the discussion for those who come later.

These scripts are why I'm surprised Reddit doesn't have sub specific edit permissions. I mean, on traditional forums, we avoid these issues by simply blocking the edit function after a certain time limit. Or limiting who can remove content.

Not sure I'd want to see a community where people removed useful content on a whim because they were that worried others would use it against them.

I just delete accounts every ~3 months.

Used to, when I really used reddit. Now I basically have a different account in each device to upvote/downvote.

Is that going to help against checking with the Internet Archive? I've used the Internet Archive to read versions of reddit comments when they were deleted (but not to dox people).

Not always - but the idea is to make linking separate posts more difficult and time consuming. Not making reading an individual post impossible.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com