Burner accounts on social media sites can increasingly be analyzed to identify the pseudonymous users who post to them using AI in research that has far-reaching consequences for privacy on the Internet, researchers said.
The finding, from a recently published research paper, is based on results of experiments correlating specific individuals with accounts or posts across more than one social media platform. The success rate was far greater than existing classical deanonymization work that relied on humans assembling structured data sets suitable for algorithmic matching or manual work by skilled investigators. Recall—that is, how many users were successfully deanonymized—was as high as 68 percent. Precision—meaning the rate of guesses that correctly identify the user—was up to 90 percent.
The findings have the potential to upend pseudonymity, an imperfect but often sufficient privacy measure used by many people to post queries and participate in sometimes sensitive public discussions while making it hard for others to positively identify the speakers. The ability to cheaply and quickly identify the people behind such obscured accounts opens them up to doxxing, stalking, and the assembly of detailed marketing profiles that track where speakers live, what they do for a living, and other personal information. This pseudonymity measure no longer holds.
*if you’re fucking stupid and leak personal details across multiple accounts
you say this, but do I have to sacrifice being connected to online communities that are more local to my area? A huge privacy issue for me is just participating in online communities for my state and my city. I want to remain anonymous, but I also want to participate in these more local discussions. Just being subscribed to those communities narrows down their search by like 99%. Sure I could create a burner account to participate in those communities, but then I look like an astroturfing bot to other users because I don’t participate in any other conversations across reddit or lemmy or whatever.
How does one connect with their local community digitally without making a massive sacrifice to privacy? It feels unavoidable.
For community specific stuff, maybe use a separate account. That way, your anonymous accounts leak less. In jerboa for example, it’s easy to switch accounts. On PC, different accounts can be logged in on different instances.
Being subscribed to those communities (n a single website.
If people would get the fuck off Reddit and decide it was ok to have multiple websites to log into, it would be harder. Internet centralization is a personal security risk.
Yep. Maintaining anonymity across platforms requires constant effort. It also helps to just not have any accounts on any mainstream social media platforms.
Yeah, someone could do the difficult work of putting all of my MagicShel accounts together into a single aggregate person, for whom a fair bit of demographic data would be available if you combed each account. That being said, none of it is PII and connecting me to my actual identity would likely require cooperation of a couple key sites. I think if you compromised (or subpoenaed) a minimum of 3 separate services you could put it together based on who made donations in my name.
Point being, no random internet asshole is going to be calling my phone or knocking on my door, and I’m not interesting enough to be worth the effort for any rational actor.
I don’t use non-pseudononymous social media.
Yeah this stuff was never impossible before, it’s just easy to digest now.