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Comment by ranger_danger | Hacker News Reader

Only if said users happen to commit OPSEC failures themselves. LLMs aren't magic...

If someone can figure out who I am or what city I live in just by this username or my comments (with proof), I'll personally send you 500,000 JPY. I'm quite confident that's not going to happen though.

The paper referenced in the article does not even explain their exact testing methodology (such as the tools or exact prompts used) because they claim it would be misused for evil. In other words, "trust me bro."

Also see the previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47139716

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Anyone who says that they can maintain perfect opsec over an extended period of time is seriously mistaken. A sufficiently motivated investigator with enough resources will join the dots eventually. The would-be evader has to be lucky every time whereas the investigator only has to be lucky once.

You live on Earth. Now that I won let’s go double or nothing. I bet I can guess where you got dem shoes at.

He got them on his feet? He got them on the street?

I skimmed some of your comments, You seem to be in the US, at least mid30s, you bought a .dev domain and run your own email? I would think those are possible leads. You really don't think you slipped up once or twice in 5 years of posting? I think an llm would go through all your posts and context of the posts to get. and that would be easier to check if you used any other social media with the same name and see if the accounts have similarities.

Everyone commits opsec failures eventually. With LLMs linking anonymous accounts it just makes it even more likely to be caught.

I'm pretty sure they can use the meta data the pull from your various interactions with search and the text you post online. These services build fingerprints of your habits using these techniques to follow you everywhere. At some point in the chain they could easily connect this fingerprint to your identity as soon as you log into and account that contains a piece of identifying information about you. The threat is real. I can foresee someone programming a terminal or app that obfuscates online behavior to avoid this fingerprinting in the future.

Unless I am misreading something. Take a look at surveillance capitalism to see what's possible right now. It's going to be 100x worse as LLMs become more advanced.

It's not the things you post online, it's the nuances behind the way you type and other ways to determine behavior that allows them to be able to build these kinds of profiles.

Who is they? Which services?

From what I can tell, the article/paper in question does not appear to utilize any of the techniques you mention, but I'd be interested to learn more about it.

> it's the nuances behind the way you type

I found this paper which talks about some of those methods.

https://www.audiolabs-erlangen.de/content/04_fraunhofer/assi...

For example the "Text" section on page 91.

The big companies that sell prediction products to advertisers. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Meta... all of them are involved. I didn't read the paper but this is a known method they have been using for awhile to track people across sites of many types from social networking to online shopping sites

With low precision, you're in Japan. But I don't need the JPY. of course that could be obfuscation.

The currency is not related to my location, I picked a random one, but thanks anyway :)

They said low precision. That might mean Spain, the US, etc

They refer to JP and language often enough in their search history and they state they are an american, and on 5G internet. I think working beyond this is doxxing. They could be anywhere.

You are ranger_danger

40 year old software dev in Detroit Michigan?

Not that I care, and that could be wildly off, but opsec is a wide term… and Claude one shot that… so safe out there bro, AI is wild

I think Claude is guessing (educatedly - northern midwest does seem plausible). There's probably enough for the feds to track them down, but not me or an LLM.

You are American, although you've discussed Ryanair before, which isn't exactly American. You have a number of comments and posts about Japan, which is strange, although you do drive a Japanese car.

A JDM car, probably, to be precise. I think they lived in Japan for at least a little while, e.g.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44679406#44686142

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