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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

#21

Post by majkinetor »

cirno wrote: post #18

> API, CLI & Web App for analyzing & finding a person's profile across +300 social media websites > could help in investigating profiles related to suspicious or malicious activities such as cyberbullying, cybergrooming, cyberstalking, and spreading misinformation. It will much more likely be used to aid cyberbullying and cyberstalking. Those types love digging for more information by finding their targets' profiles…

Exactly.

BUT, this may bring awareness to regular folks. You can also use it to remove your own stuff from said networks because people do not catalogue their online activity and it can be hard to remove your digital footprint.

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

#22

Post by uh_uh »

pca006132 wrote: post #15
alex_young wrote: post #5

> 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.

But this is not a problem with the tool, this is a problem with those platforms. Even if this tool is not published, bad actors can still make their own tools. I think we should rather demand the platforms to enforce better measures against this kind of usage, rather than blaming this tool.

Maybe we should do both.

I take an issue with the argument that bad actors can make their own tools. Bad actors can also build their own nuclear weapons, genetically engineer their own deadly diseases but there's certainly value in not making this any easier. If you take the time, money and effort away from bad actors by forcing them to reinvent the wheel, that's a good thing.

Granted, this logic can't be viably applied to most things, but there are projects where you can assume that most of the use-cases will be shady.

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

#23

Post by PartiallyTyped »

pca006132 wrote: post #15
alex_young wrote: post #5

> 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.

But this is not a problem with the tool, this is a problem with those platforms. Even if this tool is not published, bad actors can still make their own tools. I think we should rather demand the platforms to enforce better measures against this kind of usage, rather than blaming this tool.

While I don't disagree with the latter statement, perhaps we shouldn't be giving tools to bad actors in a silver plate or perhaps a git repo.

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

#24

Post by pruski »

vmception wrote: post #3

Cycling usernames is one thing But remember to break your social graph on occasion with a new phone number and email address, and never sharing your number or stored contacts with the social media network. not that hard just something to be conscious of.

Storing contact list by any service should be illegal. You might try to not share your data, but if anyone has you on their contact list, it’s out of your hands

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

#25

Post by codetrotter »

f38zf5vdt wrote: post #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 extre…

I think that the idea of not allowing users to pick their own identifiers is not compatible with how a lot of people use social media.

It’s a heck of a lot easier for me to tell my GitHub username to someone, than it would be to tell them a random UUID like 3ffdf0d2-b9a5-4fff-9f38-75afae67dbea.

Even a shorter random-looking username like the one that you have chosen as your HN username, is difficult to relate to for me and I suspect for a lot of people.

And even if you made a human readable version that would hand out usernames like “magnificentwalrus”, it would be generating usernames that most users weren’t identifying with. As much as I like walruses I don’t have a personal connection to them, and any other random name is likely to fare the same. Sure you could let users generate names until they come across one that they do like, but mostly I think that would be a lot of hassle. And there is no guarantee for how long it takes before you find a good name that way. Perhaps even never, as adjective + noun or whatever else the site uses as rule for generating names might not be a rule that the user likes.

Names matter a lot to a lot of people.

Aside from this I think it’s also only a matter of time before similar services to the one in the OP show up but where instead of trying to cross-reference usernames it would work similar to Google Reverse Image Search, and would be able to link accounts across different social media platforms based on the facial features in the photos and/or videos that people post, even when the images and videos are not the same ones but are depicting the same person.

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

#26

Post by ClumsyPilot »

orasis wrote: post #16
narak wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Building a tool is an ethical choice. Technology has no inherent right to exist. This is a bad project.

Anyone who has capacity to harm you, luke governments, alreafy has tools and a fat budget.

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

#27

Post by vmception »

pruski wrote: post #24
vmception wrote: post #3

Cycling usernames is one thing But remember to break your social graph on occasion with a new phone number and email address, and never sharing your number or stored contacts with the social media network. not that hard just something to be conscious of.

Storing contact list by any service should be illegal. You might try to not share your data, but if anyone has you on their contact list, it’s out of your hands

Which is why you also dont tell the service your phone number or reuse an email address

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

#30

Post by majkinetor »

orasis wrote: post #16
narak wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Building a tool is an ethical choice. Technology has no inherent right to exist. This is a bad project.

This is invalid thinking.

Bad actors can make such tool themselves (if they can't, they are not really that good) and have incentive to do that, so non existence will only slow them down. I don't care about analyzing other people for any purpose so I don't. Having this tool readily available lets me analyze myself and people I care about to protect them from bad actors and educate them in the process.

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