How much should we fear de-anonymisation ? A lot of discussion on the thread are over "how can we prevent this". I would like to know why should we not embrace this and similar technologies? The benefits in my view are large - online behaviour tracks back to real life - and epidemiology speaking the value of millions of test subjects across every question are invaluable - from traditional medicine to "mass psychology…
Fear it happening or fear its consequences? Doxxing already happens all the time, but the main tools are things like account names or image search, this sort of tool could take it to a new level. A simple experiment would be to run this same algorithm against another site (say Twitter or Reddit) and see if it can reliably pick out the same peoples' accounts there. Once anyone on the internet can quickly/easily draw that sort of connection it would require incredible diligence to avoid de-anonimyzation while still maintaining any sort of "real self" presence on the internet. How much we should fear the consequences probably depends a lot on how marginalized you are within your society, but since just revealing your gender is enough to invite harassment in many forums I'm not optimistic.