Comment by alexpotato | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alexpotato | Hacker News Reader

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Story time:

My first full time job (early 2000s) was working for a firm that did online cybersecurity related investigations for Fortune 500 companies (generally via a 3rd party law firm they had retained).

A big part of this was running investigations into people running "pump and dump" stock schemes on Yahoo message boards. We would generally start by scraping all of the posts for a user who had instigated one of these and then handing off the posts to an analyst.

It's amazing:

a. how much info people give out even when they think they are being careful

b. related to a, how even small tidbits combined over time can build a pretty accurate picture of who someone is.

e.g. they post "oh man, the Cubs lost", then a year later "went for a walk on Lakeshore drive", another year later, there was a fire at my local subway stop etc etc and you pretty quickly narrow down the rough neighborhood where they live in Chicago.

Combined with tools like Lexis Nexus and you get a list of people that you can narrow down by age, sex, occupation etc and we could narrow it down to <20 people based on other info they had shared.

Then you fold in their posting patterns and it's pretty obvious who is at work (posting 9 to 5pm) vs home (posting 7pm to 1am).

Again, you keep adding constraints and the intersection of the Venn diagrams gets smaller and smaller.

This was all in the early 2000s before we had cellphones that tracked your location and ad infrastructure that followed you around the internet.

So how do you think this situation will change now that LexisNexis, Oracle, Palantir, Clearview and others are all converging with our four frontier LLM models (plus military contracts) or directly with their own AI?

What used to require a little work is now instant. And we're much further into the predictive part than most will admit.

I thought I had deja vu when reading your comment so I searched and found that you wrote something very similar 6 years ago, then 4 months ago and then 3 comments within the last month.

Out of curiosity and without meaning it to sound like an accusation, did you write such similar posts by hand or do you use some form of automation for commenting?

It’s funny because someone asked me about this on Twitter too. Specifically, how was I able to reply to tweets of other people with a relevant Twitter thread I had already written.

It’s all manual and I guess just how my brain works. My wife actually calls it “the database” because I can quickly access stories and I apparently tell them in a very similar way.

I’m just as impressed that you noticed and had the Déjà vu.

Out of curiosity, did you come from a family where older generations were storytellers? E.g. parents, extended, or grandparents?

In the sense that there were stories you heard retold (sometimes by the same person) over the years, mutating a bit in each retelling?

I think some brains get wired so that oral (or at least reproductive in some medium) story transmission is effortless, but affinity does seem to differ person-by-person.

> In the sense that there were stories you heard retold (sometimes by the same person) over the years, mutating a bit in each retelling?

It's funny you mention this b/c "yes". Both of my parents are big storytellers.

Never realized this so thanks for pointing it out!

if it's a good story, it is worth retelling. my personal approach is to try to link to the old post or at least mention that i told this before. i don't know if that is better or not though. but certainly if the story fits, then it should be posted, and here it fits.

> my personal approach is to try to link to the old post or at least mention that i told this before. i don't know if that is better or not though

I do this on Twitter.

Specifically, I'll retweet the thread or tweet I already have written on the topic.

Retweeting is, IMHO, the best part of twitter as it lets you "weave" a narrative of old tweets and threads. It's also why I think articles are dumb b/c you can't like to the specific part of an article like you can with a tweet thread.

Thanks for the reply.

> reply to tweets of other people with a relevant Twitter thread I had already written

I noticed I also have topics I talk about regularly and this would be really nice. Some things only need one high-effort explanation and then linking to that.

Using LLMs would in theory save some effort by rephrasing to it doesn't look copy pasted but I am strongly opposed to the mild reality distortion they are prone to doing (like hallucinating random tidbits which never happened, using "A big part of this" as a rhetorical device instead of an actual quantity, etc.) in addition to flat out lying and other mis-generation (I don't call it hallucinations since this is normal operation, not something exceptional).

> Some things only need one high-effort explanation and then linking to that.

I mentioned in a sibling thread that I do this on Twitter (and it's a lot of fun to get to re-use old threads for new audiences).

> Using LLMs would in theory save some effort by rephrasing to it doesn't look copy pasted but I am strongly opposed to the mild reality distortion they are prone to doing

Same thoughts from me. There is also a bit of "John Henry" [0] in that I want to keep my brain strong in this skill versus letting the machines take it away.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_(folklore)

Think about browser fingerprinting. Every little bit of info is literally one more bit, so by the time you get to 32 bits you’ve narrowed it down to one in four billion. An oversimplification but that’s the idea.

Being strongly private online requires spy tradecraft levels of precaution.

Or just making certain topics verboten. Different pieces of information can be order of magnitude more or less useful.

People search engines do a lot of the heavy lifting and can give you that data on a platter for a few dollars. I pay for a service that employs people to periodically do data removal requests with them. It's not great that _they_ have a bunch of data about me, but I'd rather it be in one place that tries to safeguard it than in a bunch of places all over the Internet. (There are A LOT of people search engines.)

As for using clues to discover people's whereabouts and such: lots of police/detective shows have turned "finding where people are through Instagram photos" into a meme. Most people don't think about cybersecurity outside of "oh, I need to change my password now."

> I pay for a service that employs people to periodically do data removal requests with them.

Curious about any recommendations from you or others.

> Most people don't think about cybersecurity outside of "oh, I need to change my password now."

Cyber anonymity is a concept that most people don't think about at all, especially post-Facebook normalization of real names ~10s.

In many ways, it feels like Eternal September talking to younger people who never used a pseudonym online.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/10Vi38ZtHTyR0_LFEz-ON...

Data might be a bit stale, but a helpful resource imho.

I use justdelete.me. $120/year, deletes all your info from 400+ people search engines. Works pretty well.

> b. related to a, how even small tidbits combined over time can build a pretty accurate picture of who someone is.

that's basically why clickstream analytics is so powerful

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