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by tarpitt 16 days ago
It takes many bits to identify an individual.

Let's say I offhandedly mention your email in this comment, for example, like we had an out of band conversation somewhere else. Then, someone takes that email and links it to another forum where they find your phone number. Then another person looks up that phone number in a phone book. Then another person finds your github account from the email associated with your PGP and finds where you work etc. Let's say a comment you wrote 7 months ago vaguely mentions something about where you live, which in combination with the previous information narrows it down to a single place.

At what point does that become doxxing and who is responsible? Pseudonymous people nessisarially, slowly leak small amounts of information about themselves when on the internet in order to engage in communication.

It is only when you collect "enough" bits of information that it becomes threatening doxx.

You could say publishing this collection of facts is the doxx. But the point of the article is that stylometry and AI tools can do this investigation for you. Anyone can trivially assemble the collection themselves.

I think ultimately, it's a matter of personal responsibility. It has to be. If you have perfect opsec, I can't touch you AI tools or not. And if I have perfect opsec and I'm doxxing you, then no laws will be able to catch up to me.

2 comments

Laws aren't cryptography. They aren't all or nothing. Making something illegal has a chilling effect on that thing, even if not 100% enforceable. It would be illegal to try to hack the NSA, so I'm scared to do it, even through Tor.
... And even though it's hard to define whether any given action is or isn't hacking.
The article is about plugging in one or more pieces of writing and getting a name. That’s not leaking their phone number, their email address, their location, their associations, or other information and piecing together an investigative file on someone. It means that with AI, based on the idiosyncratic writing style of “tarpitt” on HackerNews, I could get your real name no matter the topics you commented about. It assumes only that you have other writings available somewhere that can be tied to your real name.