AI Can Now Easily Unmask Your Secret Online Life for $4
A new research paper from ETH Zurich, Anthropic, and MATS demonstrates that Large Language Models can automatically de-anonymize users across platforms like Reddit and Hacker News.
The AI acts like a digital detective using a method called ESRC (Extract, Search, Reason, Calibrate). It scans a user's post history for subtle clues (hobbies, writing style, locations), searches the wider internet (LinkedIn, other forums) for matches, and uses complex reasoning to confirm the identity.
The terrifying results:
- It correctly linked secret Hacker News usernames to real people 67% of the time (with 90% accuracy when it made a firm guess).
- It successfully matched a person's separate Reddit accounts from different years 68% of the time.
- The entire automated process costs only $4 per target.
"Practical obscurity"-the idea that you're safe online because it takes too much human effort to connect your digital breadcrumbs-is dead. Anyone with a few dollars and an LLM API can now mass-dox thousands of pseudonymous accounts in minutes.
Statistical language analysis has been pretty great at this for a decade. Never post as clearnet "you." It's not a matter of "these 12 accounts are one," the issue is if one of them is linked to your real name or email or ID or payments. If the DoJ needs to even administrative subpoena three or more companies to deanonymize you, much less real judicial subpoena, you won't be an easy enough target to care about. Remember, other than rare outliers, evil correlates with laziness!