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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   2744 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 6, 2023

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Does anyone have a good guide on OPSEC for running a pseudonymous online profile? And what do you think about Anatoly Karlin’s contention that AI will make the whole exercise futile?

We're all going to get doxxed in the next 5 years, sure. It's going to be completely trivial - as Karlin says - to fingerprint writing style and have AI seamlessly connect all of your online writing. The only people who won't be so easily discovered are those who have zero lengthy writing that is scrape-able (ie. no significant writing under their real name on LinkedIn or Facebook, no documentation under their name, no research papers or dissertations, no articles of any kind under their byline, no PDF of internal feedback or commentary mistakenly uploaded to the corporate website, no high school essay that won third place in a public competition etc...). That's before we consider AI fingerprinting methods that automate a lot of current doxxing methods, eg. trawling countless forum pages for obscure details, username mentions, matching leaked email/password lists, location data and so on.

My guess is that if you're the relatively high verbal IQ kind of person who writes longform political content online, you probably have at least one of the above, or some other writing under your real name that has been or will be scraped at some point.

I’ve always questioned, for an average normal person who’s not working in some sort of opinion shaping job, how much would it matter? I have a tumblr, I left posts on hubski, Saidit and Reddit. But given that my job isn’t high powered or focused on shaping opinions, I can’t imagine any practical value in outing me.

I think most average people don't have radical political views. If they said something 10 years ago employers won't care unless it's a high profile or public facing role or your enemies specifically come after you. "Normies" don't have 2 million words written over 15 years on fringe conservative political discussion boards like some of us here, though.

In my case I'm skeptical my current employer would care and if they did, there are plenty of small eg. Israeli or Australian or Arab shops I could work for full of people who don't give a shit about "political correctness", but many people aren't so lucky.

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