11–20 of 96 posts
hacker news is a goldmine since you can't delete comments nor even delete your account. this site is a privacy nightmare, in a world where everyone is excited to cancel and dox for unpopular opinions (on this site that means anything to the right of bernie sanders).
This just in; posting ridiculous amounts of personal information on the internet can lead to you being profiled correctly. Wild stuff.
> Simon Willison is a British software developer, blogger, and open-source advocate, best known for…
My first full time job (early 2000s) was working for a firm that did online cybersecurity related investigations for Fortune 500 companies (generally via a 3rd party law firm they had retained).
A big part of this was running investigations into people running "pump and dump" stock schemes on Yahoo message boards. We would generally start by scraping all of the posts for a user who had instigated one of these and then handing off the posts to an analyst.
It's amazing:
a. how much info people give out even when they think they are being careful
b. related to a, how even small tidbits combined over time can build a pretty accurate picture of who someone is.
e.g. they post "oh man, the Cubs lost", then a year later "went for a walk on Lakeshore drive", another year later, there was a fire at my local subway stop etc etc and you pretty quickly narrow down the rough neighborhood where they live in Chicago.
Combined with tools like Lexis Nexus and you get a list of people that you can narrow down by age, sex, occupation etc and we could narrow it down to Then you fold in their posting patterns and it's pretty obvious who is at work (posting 9 to 5pm) vs home (posting 7pm to 1am).
Again, you keep adding constraints and the intersection of the Venn diagrams gets smaller and smaller.
This was all in the early 2000s before we had cellphones that tracked your location and ad infrastructure that followed you around the internet.
Not doubting the method works in general, but Simon Willison is a public-enough figure so the baseline level of info is higher than just HN comments. If you turn off Claude’s web search: > Simon Willison is a British software developer, blogger, and open-source advocate, best known for…
hacker news is a goldmine since you can't delete comments nor even delete your account. this site is a privacy nightmare, in a world where everyone is excited to cancel and dox for unpopular opinions (on this site that means anything to the right of bernie sanders).
This just in; posting ridiculous amounts of personal information on the internet can lead to you being profiled correctly. Wild stuff.
We all know this, but in the past someone probably wasn't going to go through thousands of your comments unless you've really pissed them off. It's worth realising how much lower the activation energy is these days.
This just in; posting ridiculous amounts of personal information on the internet can lead to you being profiled correctly. Wild stuff.
Not doubting the method works in general, but Simon Willison is a public-enough figure so the baseline level of info is higher than just HN comments. If you turn off Claude’s web search: > Simon Willison is a British software developer, blogger, and open-source advocate, best known for…
I'm pretty sure Claude hasn't picked up my fondness of kākāpō parrots yet.
This just in; posting ridiculous amounts of personal information on the internet can lead to you being profiled correctly. Wild stuff.
There was an Irish mafia guy who was caught because his anonymous restaurant review profile got linked to him.