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Maigret: Collect a dossier on a person by username from thousands of sites

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Re: Maigret: Collect a dossier on a person by username from thousands of sites

#3
post #2

I'm a big use-different-username-for-every-website enthusiast. It makes some things difficult but for me it's worth it.

But people are commonly lazy, and you'd find that most people who don't even consider resistance to deanonymization as a concern will just use the same name on many sites.

Re: Maigret: Collect a dossier on a person by username from thousands of sites

#5
post #3
post #2

I'm a big use-different-username-for-every-website enthusiast. It makes some things difficult but for me it's worth it.

But people are commonly lazy, and you'd find that most people who don't even consider resistance to deanonymization as a concern will just use the same name on many sites.

Use the battery horse staple tool to generate usernames.

Or don’t, I’m not your mom.

Re: Maigret: Collect a dossier on a person by username from thousands of sites

#7
post #3
post #2

I'm a big use-different-username-for-every-website enthusiast. It makes some things difficult but for me it's worth it.

But people are commonly lazy, and you'd find that most people who don't even consider resistance to deanonymization as a concern will just use the same name on many sites.

Speaking personally, I kind of want people to know I'm the same person in different places. I do realize this is a terrible idea from a privacy perspective, and probably a lot of other perspectives. But I think a bunch of people want to use the net this way.

Re: Maigret: Collect a dossier on a person by username from thousands of sites

#8
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But people are commonly lazy, and you'd find that most people who don't even consider resistance to deanonymization as a concern will just use the same name on many sites.

Speaking personally, I kind of want people to know I'm the same person in different places. I do realize this is a terrible idea from a privacy perspective, and probably a lot of other perspectives. But I think a bunch of people want to use the net this way.

Agree. There's a possibly flawed but possibly real notion of reputation or brand or eminence. Patio11 of course comes to mind :).

Re: Maigret: Collect a dossier on a person by username from thousands of sites

#9
This is technologically impressive, but I was disappointed (but not particularly surprised) to see no mention of the ethics involved in using this sort of project - in either the GitHub issues or the README/docs.

This seems like a great tool for stalking people; particularly the recursive functionality (for tying identifiers together).

I'm not saying the world is worse-off due to the release of software like this - indeed, you could argue that publishing these sorts of OSINT tools allow folks to take a proactive and protective view of their own information and e.g. make changes to their own profiles/privacy settings.

But the question of ethics seems like something all-too-often glossed over in the infosec world. Software doesn't exist in a vacuum.

Re: Maigret: Collect a dossier on a person by username from thousands of sites

#10
Well, that is creepy as hell, but I guess it is obvious that such a tool could exist, and it is better not to have it exclusively in the hands of data-brokers, etc.

I wonder how hard it would be to add the functionality: go back to the email address that has registered these accounts, find any other names they've registered, and search off those. (EDIT: err, wait, I bet that's the "recursive" functionality they mention).

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