A famous New Yorker cartoon from 1993 depicted two dogs in front of a computer, with one of them saying, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” The joke reflected the fact that, at the time, on the Internet, we reveled in pseudonymity – the act of being able to shield your true identity behind a screen name. Thanks to our friend, the omnipresent LLM, that’s all about to change.
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.
This is genuinely bad news for the many groups of people who have a legitimate reason to hide their identity.
