arxiv.org
Large-scale online deanonymization with LLMs
We show that large language models can be used to perform at-scale deanonymization. With full Internet access, our agent can re-identify Hacker News users and Anthropic Interviewer participants at high precision, given pseudonymous online profiles and conversations alone, matching what would take hours for a dedicated human investigator. We then design attacks for the closed-world setting. Given two databases of pseudonymous individuals, each containing unstructured text written by or about that individual, we implement a scalable attack pipeline that uses LLMs to: (1) extract identity-relevant features, (2) search for candidate matches via semantic embeddings, and (3) reason over top candidates to verify matches and reduce false positives. Compared to classical deanonymization work (e.g., on the Netflix prize) that required structured data, our approach works directly on raw user content across arbitrary platforms. We construct three datasets with known ground-truth data to evaluate our attacks. The first links Hacker News to LinkedIn profiles, using cross-platform references that appear in the profiles. Our second dataset matches users across Reddit movie discussion communities; and the third splits a single user's Reddit history in time to create two pseudonymous profiles to be matched. In each setting, LLM-based methods substantially outperform classical baselines, achieving up to 68% recall at 90% precision compared to near 0% for the best non-LLM method. Our results show that the practical obscurity protecting pseudonymous users online no longer holds and that threat models for online privacy need to be reconsidered.
![Window title: The Indie Web Manifesto
Pre description from site owner: From another indie site (lulu in cyberspace!), I saw someone 'repost' this one Manifesto, once written in 1997, and was amazed how relevant it still is! The original site it was published on is long gone, but an archived version still exists.
I tried to keep most of the content the same, but couldn't help to add another cat gif in it - I believe images in text makes reading easier!
[Article start]
The Indie Web Manifesto
Saturday, 1st February 1997
in english, par le minirézo
The indie web, it's these thousands of websites delivering millions of pages, built up...](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:x3pbijszh54353koznlxi4ks/bafkreiesrnxmfvxanv5wrnrwrgcjkms3kjqiuumjjw3uw7alxn6wlglgsm)
!["I asked chatgpt"
"I asked grok"
well I asked my owner and she told me not to worry about it :3
[drawing of a catgirl wearing a pink sweater with pink hair and a pink tail being patted on the head looking quite pleased, with some hearts drawn around her]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:6a6znqwbtimeanqim44nijzk/bafkreictre75tpxpjxu2per3usyr3reyuk7ilrbmgyv3r5ccnia2f4etpm)