Large-Scale Online Deanonymization with LLMs

>I have had some paranoid thoughts as to what if I get into controversy later on in life because of some things I do in my teen years

I have a relevant anecdote, from back in halcyon 2008. Maybe it will help you when it comes to believing your friend, or at least it will temper your paranoia, which I think is well meaning in small doses.

When I was 13 or 14 years old I got suspended from high school because a friend posted a link to the Anarchist's Cookbook, which I had never heard of, on my Facebook wall. Some of my classmates got very scared and called the headmaster saying I had made a bomb threat against the school.

When the principal pulled me in to talk to me about this, it became very clear I had no idea what they were talking about. We talked for much longer than I think anyone in the room expected, maybe for three hours about existentialism, Zappfe's essay The Last Messiah which I had read the night before, whether I thought I was a victim of bullying (I didn't), what I thought of the school (excellent, a welcome refuge from a very turbulent home), thoughts on Cicero's speeches, the books we were reading in English class at the time.

I got "suspended" for a week and my parents took me to a therapist for several months afterward. I had thought after this for the rest of high school that my chances of ever going to college were totally shot, because a suspension appears on your permanent record. However, when it came time for me to actually apply to colleges, I found out no such record of the week at home ever existed. There appeared to have been a miscommunication all those years ago; I had actually been put on some kind of medical leave.

Now of course going through all of high school thinking that no college in the country will accept you now no matter how hard you do is going to change your incentives a bit. Ironically the very thinkers I had been reading at the time helped me quickly conclude that I wanted to do my level best anyway, even if there was going to be no payoff at the end of the road at all for me. In some ways it let me take more risks than my other classmates. I became the earliest person in my class to take our infamously hard physics course, and I walked out with top marks on both kinematics and electromagnetism. I don't think I would have taken that risk if I thought I had to optimize my GPA.

I trust you to think about this story and come to your own conclusions on how it moves your needle.

The US defense budget is about $1T dollars. They can't spend it all on surveillance, but let's say tech companies + gov spends about this amount per year on surveillance in total. If we can raise the cost to surveil the average person to over $10K/yr, they just lose. This is very doable.

Every little precaution you take will raise the cost, probably more than you think. Every open-source project that aims to anonymize and decentralize is an arrow in their knee. They're hoping that you'll get cynical and stop trying because they don't stand a chance otherwise.

For a few years now I have been telling people how unprepared the world is for this change. Not understanding how this is possible will lead to people outright deifying AI that has the capability to do things like this. It will seem like omniscience.

I think the main protection we have in a world where you cannot effectively hide, is that anyone who abuses this ability will be operating under the same system. You can use it to your advantage, but not without getting caught.

Stylometry can match not only people, but ethnic groups. No LLM required.