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Re: undefined

#31

Post by TFNA »

MostlyStable wrote: post #26
NDlurker wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All our accounts will eventually be linked by our writing style. I love having a really common name. Growing up, my neighbor down the road had the same name and we'd get each other mail sometimes. One time I even met a guy who had the same middle name as me. It's kind of funny, my name is so common you can't find me on Google, and my girlfriend's name is so unique that there's almost 100% certainty that nobody else i…

>All our accounts will eventually be linked by our writing style. I don't think this is true for most people. Unless you are a relatively prolific (probably top 1% or even 0.1% or less), you likely do not have enough long form writing online to create a unique style fingerprint. All of your accounts will be consistent with having been written by the same person, but absent other information, will not be enough on the…

You don't need much long-form writing for your idiolect to be identifiable. I recently returned to Reddit after a break and see that people generally don't write very long comments now, except for the autistic and others who can't follow social cues. But I already noticed that my short comments occasionally use turns of phrase that are fairly peculiar to me. Should be possible for a social media giant or nation-scale actor to deanonymize me. And some people give themselves away by outright posting in country or city subreddits.

Re: undefined

#32

Post by [deleted] »

chromacity wrote: post #30
alcazar wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand you don't mean this in bad faith and are just trying to protect the internet from slop. I just want to say that there is a human behind all of these articles. My intent is not to "spam," but to share what I think are the best practices for better privacy and security. I hope I am helping some people, at least.

No, come on. Have you really tested all VPNs in 2026 and picked the best one? You're posting 100% AI-slop articles and the internet is already overflowing with this content.

[deleted]

Re: undefined

#33

Post by AnimalMuppet »

alcazar wrote: post #12
ofjcihen wrote: post #3

I find that at least for the goofy “look up anyone and brace yourself” data hoovering companies having a super common name means my info gets muddled in with a ton of other people’s. Everyone legally change their name to the current most common name.

Being named John Smith is such an underappreciated superpower.

Nah, Smith stands out because everybody knows it's common. Cooper is better. It's one of the 10 most common last names in the US, but it doesn't give off "super common, might be fake" vibes.

Re: undefined

#34

Post by randallsquared »

nomel wrote: post #15
liotier wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everyone wants to wear a mask in public. Free speech requires anonymity and pseudonymity to remain a possibility, but most humans are just fine with a single all-purpose identity.

> Not everyone wants to wear a mask in public. Yet you'll find exactly nobody walking around, in public, with all of this information on their shirt. People seem to treat the internet as safer than real life public.

It is common to find all of those in real life "forums", like conferences and meetups: name and company on the badge are very common, and rough location is typically easily deducible.

Re: undefined

#35

Post by whateveracct »

I lie all the time online on my pseudonym accounts to obscure things. But also because it's fun to lie about personal things (opinions, career, etc) .. especially when you're trying to win an argument haha

Re: undefined

#36

Post by culi »

nomel wrote: post #7

Of course. This was the encouraged behavior in the early 2k. There were little PSA's about it online. You never put your real info online, because there are crazy people out there that will use it. I've tried to explain to friends and family that they shouldn't put their first, middle, and last name, all employment info, city, state, etc in their social media bio, and use the same headshot in all their accounts, but…

Most of us aren't paranoid about other "crazy" individuals. We're paranoid about large corporations, authoritarian governments, lobbyists/interest groups, etc.

Re: undefined

#38

Post by amanaplanacanal »

chromacity wrote: post #30
alcazar wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand you don't mean this in bad faith and are just trying to protect the internet from slop. I just want to say that there is a human behind all of these articles. My intent is not to "spam," but to share what I think are the best practices for better privacy and security. I hope I am helping some people, at least.

No, come on. Have you really tested all VPNs in 2026 and picked the best one? You're posting 100% AI-slop articles and the internet is already overflowing with this content.

It's obvious from most of those comparison type articles on the Internet that the author never actually used the product, and just threw something together based on other articles and sales copy. I don't know where you can find real life comparisons based on testing any more.

Re: undefined

#39

Post by floren »

alcazar wrote: post #29
chromacity wrote: post #27

This is an AI-generated article on an obvious spam blog that also features such bangers as "Best VPNs in 2026 for privacy and security", "Best crypto hardware wallets in 2026", etc. I'll still engage because I guess that's what we do on HN right now. If you have a single, stable online identity, it doesn't matter how much noise you inject, simply because you can't avoid linking that identity to yourself - through the…

I understand you don't mean this in bad faith and are just trying to protect the internet from slop. I just want to say that there is a human behind all of these articles. My intent is not to "spam," but to share what I think are the best practices for better privacy and security. I hope I am helping some people, at least.

The article stank of slop from the first paragraph. You are not distributing high-quality information here.

Re: undefined

#40

Post by culi »

chromacity wrote: post #27

This is an AI-generated article on an obvious spam blog that also features such bangers as "Best VPNs in 2026 for privacy and security", "Best crypto hardware wallets in 2026", etc. I'll still engage because I guess that's what we do on HN right now. If you have a single, stable online identity, it doesn't matter how much noise you inject, simply because you can't avoid linking that identity to yourself - through the…

There's this really cool browser add-on called Adnauseum. It's a layer on top of uBlock Origin. It will visually still hide the ads from you but in the background it actually selectively "clicks" on certain ads and tries to create some sort of alt profile for you

This gets into the topic of data poisoning. Where you are not only defending your own privacy but you are actively poisoning the corporate well and are arguably benefiting others

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