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Comment by altantiprocrast | Hacker News Reader

> One would think it’s basically impossible to get millennials and zoomers into covert jobs. The youngest of this bunch of young people have spent their entire lives online, some since their parents blasted out their first ultrasound picture as a pregnancy announcement, before they’d even gained sentience.

> how exactly are you supposed to achieve this level of anonymity when you’ve flung untold reams of identifiable content across the digital world?

Assuming that that applies to every single Gen-Z or Millennial is the most "OK Boomer" stereotype ever

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Anecdotally my kids have their social media profiles set to "private" and don't have any motivation to make them public. In fact, most of their friends with a few exceptions have the same setup. They also regularly "wash" their profiles because they're kids and are constantly redefining themselves to their peers. Good luck finding any of that in a public archive.

Private, but likely with many friends and acquaintances. Everyone they allow has access to all they've shared. This is a good step, but this isn’t the level of protection some believe it is.

Yep, anecdodltally i ran an experiment on this. Trick is that ppl are in "networks". Find somebody you think is in your target network who got low followers to following ratio and send a request, do this 5ish times. Then go based on recommendations and ppl will see "oh that account follow these other ppl i know lemme accept a follow request".

Gen Z/Gen Alpha grew up in a world with social media being already established and so they are aware of the pitfalls.

Millenials are screwed because they starting using social media before fully understanding the ramifications(because most people did not know how this was going to play out in the early days).

Myspace and similar sites from that era disappeared pretty nicely, though.

yes, there's a curve here. My early online days were in the time of GeoCities, and later CollegeClub (anyone remember that?); I had pretty significant online presences then, but they're all gone. The Archive doesn't have them, and that was before everything was scraped. I'm fairly certain this is all gone. Then comes the intermediate period when everything was starting to be scraped, but nobody realized or cared; that's where today's younger millenials find themselves. And then the present, where we all know what's happening, and some people just don't care, and others go to great lengths to obscure...

I missed the CollegeClub days but I think I still have an old Neopets profile, although I don't think there's anything too dangerous on there I could be blackmailed with...

I've left the "I could be blackmailed"-days behind me. There was a time when I was worried about what of me people could find online. Nowadays, it's "yes, that was me. Have fun with it."

I think the old pages are still around although at some point mySpace locked down all the profiles by default so that they are not public anymore and you have to be logged in and friends with the person to view them.

Until they follow/friend an account to enter a contest, follow harrystylesfans, some influencer who's account is managed by an agency, or "sign in with <social>" somewhere and give too much access.

It's a pretty large attack surface that can be subject to a lot of very cheap automation.

I don't think the article was trying to state that's the case for every millenial or Gen-Z, just that it's true for a wide swath of them. I'd say that's generally accurate.

True for a wide swath of the visible ones, maybe...

Bog-standard confirmation bias, I'd call it.

If that was the case, wouldn't the CIA just hire those who aren't in that wide swath? Case closed according to the journalist I would think

It's not an "OK boomer" stereotype (which is rather an insult than a stereotype, by the way), it's a general point. It's obviously true that people putting their lives online may be an issue in that field of work (and also an advantage).

One would think that's a slightly lesser problem of the US government than for other countries, though, because essentially all platforms are American. So it's potentially easier for the US intelligence services to 'scrub' someone's online presence than it is for other countries' services.

For instance, they also need to be extremely careful of leaks of real identities because of this as these days these can be used for online scrapping in order to collect pictures and more details. This is taking into account that, if I remember correctly, the database of federal employees and their fingerprints was hacked a few years ago so that we may assume that China (since the finger was pointed at them regarding that hack) has a list of virtually all US Federal employees, on which they can let data scrapping farms work.

Can we cool it with the agephobic comments? Cia is going to have trouble finding enough such ppl who also meet agency requirements because they hire a lot of ppl and need more than 10 of them.

The fact that boomers are boomers is not agephobic.

Young people do not behave like old people, or vice versa.

But often old people think back to how they behaved when they were young, and are embarrassed.

Young people never seem to get that, though, until their turn comes around.

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