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Find a person's profile across 350 social media sites

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Re: Find a person's profile across 350 social media sites

#141

Post by wmeredith »

pca006132 wrote: post #15
alex_young wrote: post #5

> This project is "currently used by some law enforcement agencies in countries where resources are limited". Pretty troubling statement. Does this tool help repressive governments track people across accounts? That’s sure what it looks like.

But this is not a problem with the tool, this is a problem with those platforms. Even if this tool is not published, bad actors can still make their own tools. I think we should rather demand the platforms to enforce better measures against this kind of usage, rather than blaming this tool.

> But this is not a problem with the tool, this is a problem with those platforms.

Well said. If a saw blade is sharp and you can cut yourself with it, you build safety systems around that. You don't blunt the saw–render it useless.

Re: Find a person's profile across 350 social media sites

#143

Post by mahathu »

psyc wrote: post #122
c7DJTLrn wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can get much creepier. It's possible to reverse image search a person's profile picture from one site to find out where else they have profiles - given that they reuse their profile picture - which many do.

I’ve been wondering when we’ll see a service that lets you upload a headshot from the company directory or Facebook, and returns every nude of that person that ever found its way onto the internet.

there is such a service already, sort of. it's called pimeyes.com

Re: Find a person's profile across 350 social media sites

#144

Post by psyc »

mahathu wrote: post #143
psyc wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been wondering when we’ll see a service that lets you upload a headshot from the company directory or Facebook, and returns every nude of that person that ever found its way onto the internet.

there is such a service already, sort of. it's called pimeyes.com

Interesting. I haven’t tried it, but there’s a really specific set of sites it would need to crawl in order to achieve maximum chaos.

Re: Find a person's profile across 350 social media sites

#145

Post by anticensor »

Wxc2jjJmST9XWWL wrote: post #116

Regarding the criticism: How is it different from any pentesting tool, portscanner, meta search engine, shodan.io (which you could use to try to find unprotected babycams and whatnot), et cetera, on principle? I know it's creepy, but obviously this is portraying a serious and widespread flaw in how we treat privacy on the net, and for that flaw to be fixed, proclaiming the tool as evil doesn't do it, and actually is…

> shodan.io (which you could use to try to find unprotected babycams and whatnot)

Unlike shodan, this can be run locally, making doxing trivial, and with little to no consequences when done seldom enough.

Re: Find a person's profile across 350 social media sites

#146

Post by OrderlyTiamat »

BlueGh0st wrote: post #133
19h wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC you can just email the admins (check the FAQ) and they’ll help you out.

>just email the admins If this were any other website, it'd be decried as a dark pattern

I would like to point out that in my experience the hn admins respond much faster and friendlier than I had ever expected. I think in this case it is very nice thar "just email the admins" leads to experience like that, although I have no idea how they manage that for a site at this scale.

Re: Find a person's profile across 350 social media sites

#147

Post by fireattack »

OrderlyTiamat wrote: post #146
BlueGh0st wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>just email the admins If this were any other website, it'd be decried as a dark pattern

I would like to point out that in my experience the hn admins respond much faster and friendlier than I had ever expected. I think in this case it is very nice thar "just email the admins" leads to experience like that, although I have no idea how they manage that for a site at this scale.

Being inconvenient can be a dark pattern on its own, not necessarily needs them to ignore your request.

Like, if I email them and say "hey, I want to remove these 340 comments I made out of 2000", and I do it every other day, would they still be as responsive? Even if they do, collecting and emailing all these links is still a big hassle compared to just clicking "delete" as I go through my own timeline like other social media platforms.

Re: Find a person's profile across 350 social media sites

#148

Post by naebother »

MauroIksem wrote: post #74

I'm so sick of morons open sourcing abuse tools under the guise of "helping". This tool will be misused to abuse and harass more than anything else. Making these tools available to masses is dangerous.

Yes, only governments and private companies should be allowed to have these tools. They are notably less powerful than the dangerous masses. They have never abused or harassed anyone. They also wear some of the most tasty boots.

Re: Find a person's profile across 350 social media sites

#149

Post by scarlac »

Enough people have voiced their opinion on this tool but I just tried it.

The results were underwhelming. It fails to find obvious links between sites, makes completely incorrect correlations while claiming 100% matches, and has no way of figuring out if it's the same person. The "useful" features seem to be username generator based on your original input, e.g. you input "john doe" and it suggests usernames like "jdoe", "johndoe", etc.

Re: Find a person's profile across 350 social media sites

#150

Post by badsectoracula »

samstave wrote: post #114
badsectoracula wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tool is running locally, how are you going to collect the IPs?

I was thinking a modification such that the system will report where its run from and if the reported IP is recognized as a government agency, display it - else drop it.

But the system can simply be modified to not report the IP.
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