LLMs can unmask anonymous internet users for $1–4 each, matching 67% of pseudonymous Hacker News accounts to real LinkedIn profiles at 90% precision

https://lemmy.world/post/43902414

LLMs can unmask anonymous internet users for $1–4 each, matching 67% of pseudonymous Hacker News accounts to real LinkedIn profiles at 90% precision - Lemmy.World

Lemmy

This headline sucks.

They made a model of accounts that willingly linked their hackernews profiles to their linked-ins and made a model base on that (n= approx 990)

They could “deanonymise” about 67% of those accounts from that n=990 candidate pool (alpha=.1) using their model (they already knew who they were, otherwise how could they verify a correct match?).

When they threw in a bunch of accounts that had nothing to do with those first accounts (89k total accounts) accuracy dropped to around 55%-45% depending on choice of technique.

  • first thing, those hn accts they trained on weren’t trying to be anonymous. They linked to their linked in profile. So, lie on the internet I guess

  • this is just a starting point anyway, cheap and fast. That’s what to worry about. $1-$4 per account you’re trying to doxx like this.

  • Just an interesting paper.