Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by sophistication 2753 days ago
… all of which is futile as long as NSA records everything and their databases will leak one day.
3 comments

Anonymity will always be greater than privacy. What I'm saying is that there should be a focus on being anonymous without a care (almost) of what you're doing.
I just think it's a futile kind of paranoia. Your anomalous behavior puts you on some list. Writing about it here puts you on some list. As every admin knows so well, spying on user data is much too easy for that not being done all over. We'd need to tear down large scale digital infrastructure to make even a dent into the problem of massive abuse potential. Deleting cookies is cope.
Depending on the context, platform, and data, de-anonymization is almost trivial to perform. Worse, someone can replicate your patterns and masquerade as you (thinking about that "lodestar" opinion where people were debating whether it was Pence or not).
Why live if you're mortal?
A possible threat does not mean a probable one.