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Ask HN: What are the implications of Hacker News alt accounts being revealed?

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Ask HN: What are the implications of Hacker News alt accounts being revealed?

#1

Post by throwawayhghcj »

This post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016 shows that many HN alt accounts have been exposed, not through hacking but stylistic analysis.

HM famously does not permit deletion of previous accounts or comments.

So for some people who assumed anonymity this could be anything from unimportant to awkward to a real problem.

Presumably now people will routinely search for alt accounts of any HN commenter and bring what they find into the discussion.

It’s not a hack, but in many ways the implications are similar to those of a hack.

How do you feel about this?

@dang what do you think?

Re: Ask HN: What are the implications of Hacker News alt accounts being revealed?

#2

Post by c22 »

I always assumed that some actors had this capability and acted accordingly. The existence of a publicly available tool merely democratizes this power. Anyone seeking complete and perpetual anonymity should have been practicing better opsec from the beginning.

Re: Ask HN: What are the implications of Hacker News alt accounts being revealed?

#3

Post by nobody9999 »

>So for some people who assumed anonymity this could be anything from unimportant to awkward to a real problem.

If that's the case, then that was a bad assumption, IMHO.

I don't assume anonymity. I assume pseudonymity.

Then again, I don't use alt accounts either. And, interestingly, the closest "match" for me is 0.51 on the site you mentioned.

Which, I guess, is both good and bad. Good in the sense that I'm expressing myself as me. And bad in that if folks were to use this dataset to compare to other sites where I also post, my activities on multiple sites could be correlated. Which would probably annoy me, but not for the reasons you may think.

Re: Ask HN: What are the implications of Hacker News alt accounts being revealed?

#4

Post by tjrowalway »

c22 wrote: post #2

I always assumed that some actors had this capability and acted accordingly. The existence of a publicly available tool merely democratizes this power. Anyone seeking complete and perpetual anonymity should have been practicing better opsec from the beginning.

HN should more to support privacy. Allow anonymous posts instead of forcing users into the pattern of throwaways that are linkable. Karma right now also makes it hard to use a throwaway per comment. getting downvoted on a first post might lock your account for some hours, so you are forced to build up karma with lots of posts.

+ give users a way to delete their profile once posted. If not whole comment history, at least remove their username from the db.

Re: Ask HN: What are the implications of Hacker News alt accounts being revealed?

#5

Post by bheadmaster »

c22 wrote: post #2

I always assumed that some actors had this capability and acted accordingly. The existence of a publicly available tool merely democratizes this power. Anyone seeking complete and perpetual anonymity should have been practicing better opsec from the beginning.

What opsec measures could one take against language analysis?

Everyone has a particular style of writing, and the only way of hiding it I can think of is not writing anything at all.

Re: Ask HN: What are the implications of Hacker News alt accounts being revealed?

#6

Post by kbelder »

>Presumably now people will routinely search for alt accounts of any HN commenter and bring what they find into the discussion.

First, only obsessive or crazy people will do that, or maybe journalists. It'll show up occasionally in discussions, but I don't think it'll be 'routine', and I think most commenters will avoid subthreads with those sorts of shenanigans.

But more importantly, these static analysis tools are only probabilistic. They find likely matches, but in most cases there'll be a factor of plausible deniability.

Re: Ask HN: What are the implications of Hacker News alt accounts being revealed?

#7

Post by theCrowing »

bheadmaster wrote: post #5
c22 wrote: post #2

I always assumed that some actors had this capability and acted accordingly. The existence of a publicly available tool merely democratizes this power. Anyone seeking complete and perpetual anonymity should have been practicing better opsec from the beginning.

What opsec measures could one take against language analysis? Everyone has a particular style of writing, and the only way of hiding it I can think of is not writing anything at all.

GPT3?

Re: Ask HN: What are the implications of Hacker News alt accounts being revealed?

#8

Post by cinntaile »

It seems awfully naive to assume that certain people on this forum wouldn't work with or utilize this kind of tech to try and identify alts. It's hard to tell if it's accurate or not without having knowledge of actual alts.

This isn't the first time someone posted site like this by the way, nothing bad came of it.

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