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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

#21

Post by trinovantes »

Entinel wrote: post #12
shanusmagnus wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's only bad from a privacy perspective if you are sharing things you don't want linked together or are sharing things that can be unintentionally linked back to your real life. If you are the same username across multiple sites and you want those linked together then that's just branding.

Using the same username may allow you to manually poison your own profile to make your data less useful than a shadow profile generated through stylometry

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

#22

Post by JasonFruit »

bee_rider wrote: post #19
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #15

Seems incredibly prone to false positives. For example, I can guarantee that I'm not the AdmiralAsshat on Reddit, Gmail, or Twitter, because that username was already taken by the time I tried to sign up for them.

Some annoying people seem to have used my gmail to sign up for things like Twitch. I have all the three factor authentication stuff set up, so I don't think they can get in to click the "verify" links, but I wonder if this sort of tool would be able to verified that the account was... verified. Probably not.

I get email all the time for a Jason Fruit in Chicago who uses my email address as a dummy. I even called him once to ask him to stop. He didn't.

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

#23

Post by eek2121 »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #15

Seems incredibly prone to false positives. For example, I can guarantee that I'm not the AdmiralAsshat on Reddit, Gmail, or Twitter, because that username was already taken by the time I tried to sign up for them.

I intentionally steal nicknames I've seen. I'm an asshole as well, so sometimes it works out. I have 13 different nicknames so far that I use/have used since 1997, though I tend to rotate between all of them regularly. I DO hope they try to use "AI" to track me. That will be fun.

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

#24

Post by bee_rider »

JasonFruit wrote: post #22
bee_rider wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some annoying people seem to have used my gmail to sign up for things like Twitch. I have all the three factor authentication stuff set up, so I don't think they can get in to click the "verify" links, but I wonder if this sort of tool would be able to verified that the account was... verified. Probably not.

I get email all the time for a Jason Fruit in Chicago who uses my email address as a dummy. I even called him once to ask him to stop. He didn't.

The annoying this is, my email address is based on my name, which is fairly unique (no relation to my account name here), to the point where I'm nearly 100% certain that it is intentional (gotten from a leak of emails which have signed up for some service or another).

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

#25

Post by smeagull »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #15

Seems incredibly prone to false positives. For example, I can guarantee that I'm not the AdmiralAsshat on Reddit, Gmail, or Twitter, because that username was already taken by the time I tried to sign up for them.

You always need to balance Precision and Recall. For something like this, you want to be exhaustive.

I've worked on search engines, and depending on who is using them, that balance gets struck differently on the ROC curve. For legal matters, for example, they want every record that might match. For ad-hoc (google style) queries, nobody reads the second page so you care more about Precision @ 20 (or really, at 3)

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

#26

Post by smeagull »

eek2121 wrote: post #23
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #15

Seems incredibly prone to false positives. For example, I can guarantee that I'm not the AdmiralAsshat on Reddit, Gmail, or Twitter, because that username was already taken by the time I tried to sign up for them.

I intentionally steal nicknames I've seen. I'm an asshole as well, so sometimes it works out. I have 13 different nicknames so far that I use/have used since 1997, though I tend to rotate between all of them regularly. I DO hope they try to use "AI" to track me. That will be fun.

I have never used the same nickname on multiple sites. Often when I get a new device, I just make a new account. Especially for HN and Reddit.

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

#27

Post by dhosek »

bee_rider wrote: post #19
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #15

Seems incredibly prone to false positives. For example, I can guarantee that I'm not the AdmiralAsshat on Reddit, Gmail, or Twitter, because that username was already taken by the time I tried to sign up for them.

Some annoying people seem to have used my gmail to sign up for things like Twitch. I have all the three factor authentication stuff set up, so I don't think they can get in to click the "verify" links, but I wonder if this sort of tool would be able to verified that the account was... verified. Probably not.

My wife has a firstname@gmail.com account and she gets a lot of other peoples’ emails including some rather sensitive stuff (bank statements, employment info, etc.)

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

#28

Post by lol768 »

motoxpro wrote: post #20
lol768 wrote: post #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 - i…

As a commentary on the conundrum, not so much your post. I always think it’s strange when people make the argument that it’s good for harmful tools to be out in the open because people can/will change their behavior because of them. 99.999999% of people will never see this repo, never know things like this exist, and don’t visit sites like HN but can, and probably will be, affected by it in some way.

> I always think it’s strange when people make the argument that it’s good for harmful tools to be out in the open because people can/will change their behavior because of them.

> 99.999999% of people will never see this repo, never know things like this exist, and don’t visit sites like HN but can, and probably will be, affected by it in some way.

Yup, I do think you're right. And honestly, the folks who'd probably most benefit from being able to run one of these tools to empower themselves with data that can help them change their behaviour/privacy settings - they're probably actually the folks least likely to be able to install and run the tool.

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