This is great example of what's possible and how true anonymity, even online, is only "technological threshold" anonymity. People obsessed with biometrics might not consider this is another biometric.
Instead of just HN, now do it with the whole internet, imagine what you'd find. Then imagine that it's not being done already.
None of my throwaways and not even my old account shows up. We are not at that level yet. ymmv.
This technique yields so many false positives and negatives, it's practically useless. Possibly it works reliably for mono-lingual, prolific writers. Someone like the Qanon shaman (or whatever the name was) might be picked up, if it doesn't happen to be a collective.
Except that technology is on the side of anonymity this time. LLMs can provide a pretty solid defense against such attacks — just ask ChatGPT to rewrite your message in a random writer's style. The issue is that you'll end up sounding like an LLM, but hey, tradeoffs.
Using throwaways whenever possible mitigates a lot of the risk, too.
That’s true. The old security versus convenience hack.
But if i were a government agency I would be pressing AI providers for data, or fingerprinting the output with punctuation/whitespace or something more subtle.
Tho i guess with open models that people can run on device that’s mitigated a lot.