Artwork

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…

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…

The following prompt is used…

Source: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.16800 [2026-02-18]

-–

I don’t know why people are so keen to put the details of their private life in public; they forget that invisibility is a superpower…
~ Banksy

Related: https://cloudflare.com/learning/ai/data-poisoning

Oh no no no no no…
Please, God, Gods, or whoever, no…

I absolutely don’t want my descendants to talk with some void-empty limited bloody-meatground utter nonsense… I don’t want that freaking awful mess of terribly limited data to talk with my children or their children possibly framing and damaging their true memories and genuine confidence in me I had been developing the whole life… I don’t want them to remember the algorithm or some imitation of me talking with a machine or some chat bot… no… never… please no… PLEASE NO…
No…
No…
Never…
No…

Some limited inhuman stupid chat/voice/avatar/anything bot? No…
Some bot that may erroneously represent me behind my back?
Never…
Some nonsense that may reshape memories of my ancestors?
No…
Never…
No…

If I am dead, I am dead. I want my descendants to just remember me, talk to me in their memories, real videos, audios, and photos, my effort, my ideas and love in artwork if ever they’ll be interested… and once in a while visit the grave, at least 2-3 times per their life, if ever possible… and that’s it…

If I am dead, I am dead as my ancestors are, who are not dead for me being alive but in my memories or something more magnificent/supernatural, and how I remember them, where they wanted to be the best they could, respected, glorified, and admired, without disturbing them in memories, soul, and the heart they gifted me, who I will always appreciate, respect, and love…

I never got a response from Reddit regarding my account unknown state, too - https://www.reddit.com/user/serious_angel
I’d been using that account for years, and I can use it, and I do now. I do comment, vote, save bookmarks etc.
…
Meanwhile, the account is marked as “banned”, if I am not mistaken, yet I never ever did anything to get banned in the first place I believe. I awarded other comments with money, purchased “NFT” avatars, so I contributed monetarily to the platform, too. It just, all of a sudden, got “banned”, and for literally unknown reason.
…
I realized that after years only, too! People don’t even see my comments, and I had been commenting for at least a year before even realizing no one sees them! I accidentally noticed that when tried surfing to my account via “incognito mode”, and since then I’ve been trying to figure out what is wrong - yet no response from the official Reddit support, after multiple attempts writing them…

Source

-–

Yet, it is the first time I used the aforementioned form, and I hope to receive response eventually!
Source

I tried submitting the appeal form 4 times now. No response still…
I do regret my life time I thrown into the literal void on Reddit… where no one cares, and no one ever knows about it…

Wonderful day! ✨

Have you checked out the following miracles?:
- Alexandrite - Web, though may be self-hosted;
- Thunder - Android, and probably iOS;

No, sorry. Never. I believe in mind training and development, human discussions, attribution, contribution, and discoveries for human work, imagination, achievements, and scientific miracles.

You? You do you with your LLM.

deleted by creator

Thank you very much for the care and response! I’ve followed the idea @hector@lemmy.today shared, and hope to receive a response from Reddit, eventually. I wish you a great and safe day!

Thank you very much for sharing about the /r/ShadowBan Community! I’ve read their pages, and the tutorial regarding appealing, and it the form at /appeal does indeed offer a field for submission!

Previously, I used the second appealing method, likely powered by ZenDesk. but no response. Yet, it is the first time I used the aforementioned form, and I hope to receive response eventually!

Regarding the ban-evasions (multiple accounts, Emails), I had a quite sorrowful case with it on Freenode/Libera IRC, where an operator (I would name them… but won’t - it feels impolite, since they are not here), had been banning me for literally unknown reason at least 8 times in a few months, and for weeks, in the channel #linux. I’ve been in this channel since at least 2007, and these bans not only caused me much worries, but I just tried to realize the reason. I wrote them in private - nothing.
Here, I a created new account at Freenode, they banned me, too (Linux Community prohibits “alts”). I created another, and got a network K-line. Created another - got another K-line, and here I damaged my reputation in the channels who saw the K-line on the network, to such a low level I still try to recover. And when you try explaining the matter, it gets only worse…

Just a few believe you on IRC if you get K-lined. After a year of making a mental pause< I re-joined, and got almost instantly ridiculed by another member who recalled me being “banned so many times”, yet what I could do? No one listened to me and no one believed I had no idea why that operator was banning me in the first place, including other operators.

What is interesting is that this operator is not an operator anymore the last time I checked, though 4 years have passed since.

Regardless… Thank you, and please do stay safe, too! 🛡

I never got a response from Reddit regarding my account unknown state, too - https://www.reddit.com/user/serious_angel

I’d been using that account for years, and I can use it, and I do now. I do comment, vote, save bookmarks etc.

I’ve tried contacting the official Reddit via Email, and their automation tells to write them using the website form. I tried that too, at least 8 times over 4 recent years - no response. Never.

After several attempts, I tried sending messages to moderators in general Communities like /r/Laravel or /r/AskReddit, and I received response from them only, in a built-in chat, but when I try responding back - Error. Their response was to contact the official support, obviously.

Meanwhile, the account is marked as “banned”, if I am not mistaken, yet I never ever did anything to get banned in the first place I believe. I awarded other comments with money, purchased “NFT” avatars, so I contributed monetarily to the platform, too.
It just, all of a sudden, got “banned”, and for literally unknown reason.

I realized that after years only, too! People don’t even see my comments, and I had been commenting for at least a year before even realizing no one sees them! I accidentally noticed that when tried surfing to my account via “incognito mode”, and since then I’ve been trying to figure out what is wrong - yet no response from the official Reddit support, after multiple attempts writing them…

It’s all unseen (for others)	My current profile	Frequent errors

If you want to actually realize the amount of possible misunderstanding in the current conversation and of what shell scriting is, please do consider joining #bash at Libera IRC. Please do also mention the word “throwaway” in the rooms! Since there’s literally no understanding on what you mean still, sorry. It does not feel like you have a significant enough understanding of the subjects raised.

For a very simple example, there are literally no documentation regarding certain cases you’ll encounter in Bash’s built-ins even, unless you actually encounter it or learn from Bash’s very source code, like read built-in. Not to mention shenanigans in shell logics for inter-process communication (IPC), file-descriptors, environment variables like PWD, exported functions’ BASH_FUNC_, pipes, etc.

I still don’t get what you mean, sorry. And why Bash and not another shell?
Why not Korn, Ash, Dash, Zsh, Fish, or anything REPL, including PHP, Perl, Node, Python etc.

Should we consider “throwaway” anything that supports interactive mode of your daily driver you chose in your default terminal prompt?
What does “throwaway” code means in the first place?

I am sorry, but I am not sure what tells you how Bash “was designed” or not. Perhaps you haven’t yet written anything serious in Bash…
Have you checked out Bash PitFalls at Wooledge, at least?
Bash, or the most shells, including Posix, or even Perl, are some of the most complex languages out there to make a mistake… since there’s no compiler to protect you from, and though legendary but readline may cause the whole terminal go flying, depending on the terminal/terminfo in process…

No, sorry. I absolutely disagree on your stance regarding “shell” for a “bugless” “huge deal” in “real cases”.

There are some… of course, but for some reason these are first I recalled at this moment - some bands a military colleague had been listening back in the days, on fields.

The band name is Lyube (Любэ). There’s a YouTube channel, and some of the titles I still recall he listened to:
- А зори здесь тихие-тихие - Любэ;
- Там за туманами - Любэ;
- Комбат- Любэ;

Another song another colleague had been listening to was Чей чай горячей by Чайф.

And though I am not very fluent in Russian (the sense of lyrics in these are quite hard to comprehend, too), rare but tears of these two strong men made me believe these were incredibly significant for them, and represented an unbearable sorrow of any war…

It’s rather sad when such extensions don’t refer to their source code in descriptions.
Meanwhile, Google Chrome extensions are to be updated automatically.
Sorry, I won’t install it, since I have no trust in the source of it, and I care about my time to not re-check it on every update.

Thank you, but I do disagree. You cannot know the “result” of that LLM does include all the required context, and you won’t re-clarify it, since the output does already not contain the relevant, and in the end you miss the knowledge and waste the time, too.

How are you sure the output does include the relevant? Will you ever re-submit the question to an algorithm, without even knowing it is required re-submit it, since there’s even no indication for it? I.e. The LLM just did not include what you needed, did not include also important context surrounding it, and did not even tell you the authors to question further - no attribution, no accountability, no sense, sorry.

Please no. Absolutely not. LLM is absolutely not “nice for dealing with confusion” but the very opposite.
Please do consider people effort, articles, attributions, and actually learning and organizing your knowledge. Please do train your mind, and self-confidence.

Thank you, but I am sorry, I will not read the output of the LLM. I’ll re-recheck the grammar manually.

It’s worth to mention that the StackOverflow survey referenced does not include many countries with also great/genius developers, including Belarus, Russia, China, Iran…
There are related cases raised on Meta scopes: Developer Survey 2025 is, apparently, region blocked…

Apparently, while I’ve being employed in security as software engineer for at least 19 years now, I’ve never ever considered these trendy LLM/“AI” all serious, and still do not.

Sorry, I have literally no interest in all of it that makes you dependent on it, atrophies mind, degrades research and social skills, and negates self-confidencen with respect to other authors, their work, and attributions. Nor any of my colleagues in military and those I know better in person.

Constant research, general IDEs like JetBrains’s, IDA Pro, Sublime Text, VS Code, etc. backed by forums, chats, and Communities, is absolutely enough for the accountable and fun work in our teams, who manage to keep in adequate deadlines.

Nor will use any LLM in my work, art, or research… I prefer people, communication, discoveries, effort, creativity, and human art…
I just disable it everywhere possible, and will do all my life. The close case to my environment was VS Code, and hopefully there’s no reason to build it from source since they still leave built-in options to disable it: https://stackoverflow.com/a/79534407/5113030 (How can I disable GitHub Copilot in VS Code?..)

Isn’t it just inadequate to not think and develop your mind, and let alone pass control of your environment to a yet another model or “advanced T9” of unknown source of unknown iteration.

In pentesting, random black-box IO, medicine experimental unverified intel, log data approximation why not? But in environment control, education, art or programming, fine art… No, never ^^

Meanwhile… so freaking, incredibly many developers, artists are left without attribution, respect, gratitude…
So many people atrophy their skils for learning, contribution, researching, accumulation, self-organization…
So much human precious time is wasted…
So much gets devalued…

The time will show… and just a few actually accountable will recover only, probably…
This is so heartache… sorrowful…