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Comment by MerelyMortal | Hacker News Reader

Then for the threads to be preserved, the content should remain, but the associated username should just be changed.

I imagine if HN created an account with the username "DELETED" or similar, that a script could just change comment ownership from the account to be deleted to the special "deleted" account - that would be the easiest to implement as well as keep thread continuity.

(Don't delete the comment just delete the connection to the user.)

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I don't have a good suggestion here, but I have to point out that that does not fully address OP's stated concern about the use of text analysis techniques to figure out who wrote what, even if the username is different.

(It does probably make those techniques more difficult since it would mix comments together from multiple authors under the "deleted" username, but it doesn't fully remove the danger.)

If you took all the sentences out of all of the books in a library, and mixed the sentences together under one fake author name, I think it would be impossible to correctly attribute 99.99+% of the sentences to a correct author.

I think that is sufficient.

But we're not going to delete everybody's account and mix them all together, are we?

If I took a bunch of "minor" writing and mixed it together under one fake name name, but some of it was written by a famous author under a pen-name, then yes, in theory it could be possible to identify those.

Okay, 1% of the library. I see threads here every-so-often asking about deletion, and I imagine there are more people who would like the opportunity but already know the answer and doesn't ask.

Curious what happens when an HN user inevitably wants their dead-name changed but retain their history, and whether that would be a harder path to march than being deleted for privacy reasons.

I don't understand the question.

Edit: Thank you for the clarification (reply), I was not aware of the term "dead-name" refering to that. I still am not exactly sure what you are asking though. If a replier wrote the original username in an old reply that was written before the name change? In that extremely rare case, it might cause some confusion if a third person reads the old thread, in which case perhaps the user initiating the name change could use the search function for any instances of that, and then email the HN admin?

There is a high incidence of transgender people in our community. Often, names are changed, the old name is referred to as a dead-name. Addressing someone by this deprecated title is the height of disrespect.

If you email hn@ycombinator.com, they'll change your username for you. (Near the bottom of https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

All of those comments were written from the perspective of a person who no longer 'exists' tangibly as they've transitioned.

Then perhaps what the transitioning person is looking for, is just creating a new account to go with their new self?

I'm not one of those who are affected, so unfortunately I'm without a sound rebuttal. You do raise a good point. Given that I'm not, someone who is may have more perspective that'd support one assertion vs the other.

That's a very theoretical problem though, isn't it? Individual comments don't have the length of books, and usually don't individually contain enough text to be unique. Once the account-relationship is gone, it's essentially like splitting all the books up into paragraphs and trying to attribute individual paragraphs. Unless you're Wittgenstein or someone with a similar interest in exploring how long sentences can be, I doubt there's enough there.

Of course, all of that is hardly useful, since HN is very open and lots of people have copies of all comments.

For a few years now I've imagined an AI that can ingest all my writing across platforms, figure out it's me via this type of analysis, find any information I leak, and archive that data in perpetuity. Then it could be used to judge me for whatever purpose its owner deems worthy; which given my age will probably mean selling me boner pills in a decade or two.

It feels like we killed god and then re-invented him. And I think that if you don't want his gaze and judgement to fall on you, then your only option is not to participate in online discussion, and probably not even read it because you can probably learn a lot about someone just from passively tracking the things they follow online.

It does if you can't determine the accounts are the same. Right now HN does nothing to address these concerns. It is ridiculous anyone finds this acceptable.

Really good point. You could estimate if a [deleted] comment might be from [account X], but you'd only have that one comment to compare. The rest might be from other accounts.

So yea, you'd probably end up with a pile of comments that are more likely linked to [account X], but many of them wouldn't actually be. It would add a ton of noise into the system.

You would get some hints. There have been situations where someone said "like AnimalMuppet said upthread..." or something like that. But they weren't very common. Maybe 1% of my comments could be definitely identified like that.

Is that enough to define a "style" to determine the rest of my comments? Is it enough to doxx me from the comments where someone else names my nick?

I think it would decrease the Signal to Noise ratio sufficiently.

That would be different if responses hardcoded mentions of the username.

If all deleted accounts' usernames were replaced with "[deleted]", that would hypothetically do a pretty decent job of defeating text analysis techniques. A single post isn't really enough to characterize someone's writing style, and a sufficiently large pool of deleted accounts would make it quite difficult to reliably pick individuals out of the slush pile and group their comments together.

That said, HN is being archived and mirrored in I-don't-know-how-many-places, and I'm not sure how feasible it is to track all those places down and get them to expunge your userid, too. And this is all assuming nobody comes up with a new de-anonymization technique that deals with it well. That is a rather big assumption considering new ones are being developed all the time.

I imagine the same analysis can be performed on other networks like reddit, twitter, github, linkedin etc to find matches amongst them all, [deleted] is a signal as well. If there’s a strong match across one or more of those and a deleted one here, or vice verse to rule out possible matches, and the others are not anonymized [well enough], then it could probably deanonymonize quite a few deleted accounts here.

I’m sure something like this is available to recruiters or other HR/business admin, I remember seeing browser extensions/SaaSes years ago that were trying to tie together social media identities.

It should not be ONE account, or it wouldn't be possible to distinguish individual users in a conversational thread from one another:

DELETED_USER: I agree.

DELETED_USER: No, that's BS.

DELETED_USER: He has his point.

Better would be:

DELETED_USER_1: I agree.

DELETED_USER_2: No, that's BS.

DELETED_USER_3: He has his point.

Then someone might use an archived version from the trivially scrapable API to recover the information. This is a site for hackers after all.

Probably web.archive has indexed one of your posts _before_ your account name changed to DELETED, so your change will be useless.

The internet never forgets.

Possibly, it doesn't hurt to try to reduce the attack surface though.

A lot of the stuff I wrote on old popular, public websites (that still exist) can no longer be found via search engine, and I did not take any action, it just disappeared on its own.

You can take the possibility out of it when you look at Google's big data. It's not a question of "if it exists out there" or "how often it is updated if it exists out there."

https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/details/y-combi... is updated daily.

There is no guarantee that copy will always be available or that they won't remove data.

Just because there happens to be a copy already, doesn't mean that the original can't be removed to prevent others from making copies in the future.

Then you send them GDPR right to be forgotten requests next. Alternatively, HN can force them to delist to the content.

It does actually. At least once a month I go on an multiple hours long quest to find an old thing, and frequently I can't find it.

4chan, that's usually fully anonymous, has on some boards threads IDs. You can see that this is the same perso in that thread, but can't link it to another person in another thread.

So long as the account is permanently locked from ever participating again in any way, I think renaming is great. Otherwise it needs to be left as-is.

But the comments need to remained owned by the account that created them, so that we can consider the history of each commenter when reviewing their comments in the future. Merging them all into DELETED inappropriately coalesces those histories.

I feel for those who are just now realizing that they can be located by their stylistic tendencies. It’s Dejanews all over again.

That still doesn’t account for the stylometry.

Yes it does, not everyone gets a unique "deleted" account. Everyone's comment gets attributed to a single special "deleted" account.

The problem still remains: HN’s “API” is incredibly simple and people have full datasets downloaded locally for every comment. In this case, the OP is already out of luck if he’s looking for anonymity against a hostile entity.

That problem seems like an extreme outlier. Such user protection would prevent "crimes of opportunity". The average person is not going to have a constant backup of HN in case one day they might want to spy on someone's past.

And if they do, they're likely to start with Twitter or Facebook - something useful against more of the population. HN users are still very much a minority.

The problem doesn’t appear to be that much of an extreme outlier, the thread poster is concerned about a specific tool. That tool has already downloaded the complete data set, he’s already lost.

And there's no guarantee that service will stay around, or that they won't accept requests. I still think it's worthwhile to reduce the attack surface.

Nothing going forward can help in that case, but we can still weigh impact on other threat models going forward.

"We refuse to help because it's a mild inconvenience to us and we'll justify it by assuming that it won't help without knowing for a fact that it won't."

That's a fascinating stance that you've outlined and that others have parroted. A stance that HN has implied with the reply to OP.

I’m not in charge of anything at HN, so how can my statement say HN won’t do something?

Not completely. For example, if the analyst has a large corpus from someone's main account to build up a profile, it seems plausible to me that they could identify individual comments under the "deleted" user as being written by the same person using a throwaway account, especially if they have a distinctive writing style.

I doubt a single post provides a sufficient amount of information for that.

Or a different deleted_user_<random or hash of post> for every post.

But as the sibling post says... it doesn't solve anything.

So you run the stylometric analysis on each comment to cluster them into inferred user profiles.

I'm okay with someone attempting to do that. I imagine it would be extremely fuzzy and not successful.

It does if the content from ALL deleted users gets merged under the same metauser. Stylometric average of all deleted users' comments is pretty useless.

I disagree.

If a user asks for their comment to be deleted, then the right thing to do is to delete them. Period.

I respectfully disagree that it's always the right thing to do. Outside of issues of safety, I think the balance shifts.

Safety issues are a different matter of course

What makes it the right thing to do?

Just imagine yourself in the position having something to be deleted posted by an earlier you and/or about yourself.

If people ask nicely, can confirm ownership/authorship of the record/data in question, then why would you be in a position to deny such a request?

You imply that the (unconfirmed) harm to the individual is more important to avoid than the harm to the society done by removing potentially insightful comment thread. Why is that?

Not sure - but your question implies that there is harm to the society done, and from your first part of the sentence, isn't that also unconfirmed?

I think it's clear that removing discussions from HN harms everyone, because there are many interesting ideas here.

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