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

Post by BlueTemplar » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 11:35 AM UTC

daanlo wrote: post #125

BlueTemplar wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somewhat offtopic, I'm curious about this "nobody reads the 2nd page" meme... I find myself reading pages 2-5 quite often, because page 1 just didn't give enough results, and I doubt I'm that much in a minority ? (I'm talking about actual generalist searches, not people that use a global search engine as a replacement to bookmarks or directly searching, for instance, Wikipedia.)

Source: https://www.sistrix.com/blog/why-almost-everything-you-knew-... TLDR: on the second results page, each result gets So it‘s not nobody, but statistically speaking not very many.

Post by jhugo » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 12:15 PM UTC

lol768 wrote: post #18

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.

Yup; for common/short usernames it's all too common for other folks to register using the same identifier. The end result seems to be that this tool decides you're interested in "dating", "porn", "stocks" and tags you with a "ru" country code - despite not owning any of the accounts that the determination has been based off of. The README should come with a disclaimer really.

Post by jhugo » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 12:16 PM UTC

c7b wrote: post #140

smeagull wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

> You always need to balance Precision and Recall. For something like this, you want to be exhaustive. Respectfully disagree. You're right in principle if you build a tool like that for yourself. But since this is Open Source, you have to take into account that people who don't understand that will use the tool as well and then use that as "evidence" in whatever arguments they're having with someone.

Post by Karunamon » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 12:39 PM UTC

baxtr wrote: post #141

faeriechangling wrote: post #117

This is why I use many different usernames, I must have used maybe three dozen different ones by now. The only time I use the same username is for games because I want people to know what other games I play. My opsec is pretty awful but I at least try to not be "simply type in the username I always use into google or some tool on GitHub" bad. I at least want somebody to have to use a few hours or pay a data broker to…

Thai won’t be helpful going forward. The next gen of tools will analyze your writing style and make the connection through that.

Post by c7b » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 12:47 PM UTC

jhugo wrote: post #155

c7b wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You always need to balance Precision and Recall. For something like this, you want to be exhaustive. Respectfully disagree. You're right in principle if you build a tool like that for yourself. But since this is Open Source, you have to take into account that people who don't understand that will use the tool as well and then use that as "evidence" in whatever arguments they're having with someone.

Hopefully they read one sentence about what the tool does before using it. If they don't, their arguments will be weak due to their own sloppiness in research, which doesn't seem like a new problem.