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Find a person's profile across 350 social media sites

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Re: Find a person's profile across 350 social media sites

#7
post #2

I’m not a fan. Kinda creepy.

Wait until you find out how HackerNews harvests your data, uses services that use data lakes of bulk collection to confirm your identity, and sell what you generate without your permission.

I'm still waiting to find out about that. Maybe you'd be kind enough to elaborate.

Re: Find a person's profile across 350 social media sites

#8
Hmmm...

I like this idea!

It's sort of like a "social media site" (if the broadest possible definition of one is permitted!) that "aggregates all other social media sites"... (how meta!)...

But, I like this idea a lot!

If I were creating such a thing -- I'd add the ability for a person (once their identity is verified) to remove their results from one or more social media sites.

That is, standard opt-in and opt-out.

This would permit the shown functionalities for people that desire such functionalities, while also preserving opt-out, aka, "the right to be forgotten" -- for other people that desired that, specifically...

Re: Find a person's profile across 350 social media sites

#9
I think that anyone developing a social media app for the 2020s will need to make a conscious decision to not let users pick their own unique identifiers. You can't expect users to protect themselves, because you don't know what dangers might exist in the future for them that do not exist today.

The other thing you can do is not allow your API to iterate over the set of all users by user-set identifier. It's an extreme flaw of the telephone numbering system. You would think by the 2020s we'd have learned to use a unique UUID designation for every user for any public facing APIs. If users want to link to it on their public pages, that would be on them.

Re: Find a person's profile across 350 social media sites

#10

> This project is "currently used by some law enforcement agencies in countries where resources are limited". Pretty troubling statement. Does this tool help repressive governments track people across accounts? That’s sure what it looks like.

Any openly available tool can be used by anyone for any purpose. The idea that we can pick and choose is ridiculous, and with the exception of rare cases, avoidance of building generally useful tools for the chance that bad actors will also use them is a losing proposition.
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