Some of us who lived in that era and who are tech savvy think the privacy paranoia is little more than the equivalent of TSA’s security theater at airports.
There is nothing stopping anyone from finding out exactly who you are, where you are, and what you’re doing. We all carry locator devices today that never existed in the era of the phone book.
Our social security numbers weren’t in databases with internet exposure where financial companies with information “security” could have them leak. Everyone’s has leaked now.
A lot more people than you’d think are easily googled right down to address, family names, current phone number, past addresses… you name it. Leaks happen every single day and big data is everywhere monitoring your everything.
Having your name, address and home phone number in a book that only has regional numbers and isn’t widely distributed beyond the local scope is the the smallest privacy concern.
Seems like the average young person is fine posting photos and videos on all the social media platforms journaling their whereabouts and habits too.
There’s a world of difference between leaving enough info in Public Internet for some rando to find you and needing a search warrant. It’s trivial to check someone’s comment history on reddit for selfies and start looking for landmarks. I’ve always kept a hard divide between anything that has my real name and my shit posting.
You sure I’m the one acting tough? I’ve simply never shared personal information. I grew up when the idea of putting personal pictures with names online was taught to kids as dangerous. It’s takes effort to doxx yourself and I’ve never done that.
Good you know the basics of protecting your anonymity here’s your medal 🥇
If you think I’m showing how much of a 1337 haxx0r I am by listing some steps to look through people’s posts and shit, you should try reading it as a warning instead.
I’ll do a proof by counterexample. I have no idea how do to that, therefor there is in fact something stopping someone from finding out exactly who you are, which proves the premise to be false. QED mothafucka.
Something really freaky happened to me back on Reddit. I don’t think I posted anything that was too personally identifiable. About as close as I’ll get is saying that I live in red-county in Colorado and am a Broncos fan. Then one day on a fairly niche gaming subreddit, I mentioned how close something in the game was to a nickname that people called me at work, and said something like “hopefully my coworkers never find out about this in the game or I would never hear the end of it.” Then someone responded, “see you at work on Monday [my first name] ;-)”
I still have no clue how that happened. I went back through every comment I had ever made and not once did I post where I worked or what my first name was. I’d never once told any of my coworkers my reddit user name either. It was a bit of a privacy eye-opener for me to realize that even if I thought I was posting anonymously, someone could still potentially find a way to tie my online persona to me.
Might be worth your time to go to the gaming subreddit on your web browser and then use the development mode of the web browser to inspect all the cookie data.
The company might be putting more information in there than they show on the screen, that could be available to anyone who can do a search on their website for your characters name.
For example, once I was playing World of Warcraft on an alt, and I argued with a tryhard player about being nice to other players. The WoW Armory, when you look up the alt’s name, adds in its cookie/memory the name of all the other characters for that same account (to populate a drop-down selection). So that guy started harassing me on my main character without having never knowing its name.
Was that guy the owner of the wow armory? Because otherwise…
No, he was another player/customer. See below.
how did they get your cookie store inside your browser?
When you pull up a character on the Armory inside of the cookie/memory information was a list of all the other characters for that same account/character. And anyone can pull up any other account characters name on the Armory.
My guess is the list of all the character names for the account was there so if you wanted to switch between one character to another from a drop-down UI object.
My point is developers can leak additional information assuming that users can’t see it because it’s not displayed on the UI, but if somebody goes into the developer mode on the browser they can inspect all the memory/cookie information for that web page.
Finally, this was a long time ago, so who knows if it still works that way today or not. My point of mentioning it was as an anecdote on how additional information can leak in ways we wouldn’t suspect.
The simplest explanation is probably that even though the subreddit was niche, the reason you are on it is connected to your demographics, which you share in common with coworkers, making it more likely for one of them to also be browsing it.
In both cases it comes down to being lost in the crowd.
In the 1980s only celebrities worried about having their information in a phone book. That, and maybe people with really unique names. That’s because getting the information out of a phone book was tedious. The only entity that presumably had a searchable database (other than maybe the NSA) was the phone company. They weren’t necessarily trustworthy, but they had better ways of making money than spending all kinds of computer power on individual people. If you wanted to backwards-search a phone number it was an incredibly labour-intensive process without the database.
These days people are much more careful about certain aspects of their identity, but share other things. The thing that’s the same is that picking any one person out of a crowd is still hard.
Any one fish in a school of fish is relatively safe from predators because there’s no reason for a predator to target them specifically. Or, like the joke about running away from a bear: you don’t need to be faster than the bear, just faster than the other guy. In this case, you don’t have to be a completely locked down target, you just have to avoid standing out and being an obvious target.
Having your name, address and home phone number in a book that only has regional numbers and isn’t widely distributed beyond the local scope is the the smallest privacy concern.
That was actually the idea behind the “right to be forgotten” ruling in the EU: The original case was an IIRC Spanish restaurant owner, quite successful, but when he googled his (quite unique) name the first hit was an article about his first restaurant going bankrupt 20 years ago. Back in the days if you were a journalist investigating the guy you’d figure out that he once had a restaurant in town soandso and then rummage through the town’s newspaper archive and find the article, and then decide whether it’s relevant and how to handle it, now everyone and their dog is finding it by accident. And clicking on it, meaning it will stay the first hit because for google clicks mean that things are relevant.
Seems like the average young person is fine posting photos and videos on all the social media platforms journaling their whereabouts and habits too.
Heh. The German Pirate Party had an ideological split over that one, the majority vs. the data protection critical twits (they reclaimed the term twit for themselves after being called exactly that). Their blog is still up. The idea of post-privacy is that at some point, noone will fucking care because everyone has their skeletons not in their closet but hanging from the balcony… which isn’t a bad state of affairs in itself, but going all accelerationist on it isn’t the greatest idea.
On the flip side you had a second rift line, that between the majority and the tinfoil hats – a very loud minority, not just because of all the crackling. The kind of people who thought that it should somehow be possible to be a politician, vote on party policy etc. and still stay anonymous.
at some point, noone will fucking care because everyone has their skeletons not in their closet but hanging from the balcony… which isn’t a bad state
No, it’s not a bad state, if that would be true for everyone. In reality, only poor and average people will have a graveyard balcony. The rich people will still hold their secrets.
Or… everyone, rich and poor, don’t hide their skeletons anymore, because people just… don’t care anymore. We are over-flooded by information. Doesn’t matter if it’s useful or not. Actually I’m impressed how Israel’s actions were decisive in stopping the Ukraine-Russia war. I have not heard any news about that war on the media for a week, so the war it’s over, Russia went home, right?
If Nixon was the President today, he wouldn’t even think of resigning.
Some of us who lived in that era and who are tech savvy think the privacy paranoia is little more than the equivalent of TSA’s security theater at airports.
There is nothing stopping anyone from finding out exactly who you are, where you are, and what you’re doing. We all carry locator devices today that never existed in the era of the phone book.
Our social security numbers weren’t in databases with internet exposure where financial companies with information “security” could have them leak. Everyone’s has leaked now.
A lot more people than you’d think are easily googled right down to address, family names, current phone number, past addresses… you name it. Leaks happen every single day and big data is everywhere monitoring your everything.
Having your name, address and home phone number in a book that only has regional numbers and isn’t widely distributed beyond the local scope is the the smallest privacy concern.
Seems like the average young person is fine posting photos and videos on all the social media platforms journaling their whereabouts and habits too.
All right prove it.
Post my real name, real home address, and my current location.
There’s nothing stopping you, apparently.
To find you attackers would:
How much have you doxxed yourself through the years?
Then do it. I used the same username reddit. Last time someone tried to prove it, they got the state wrong and I never even tried hiding that.
Naah, I got better stuff to do than snooping at you 🕵️
And I’m not experienced in it, so it would take a lot of time learning the craft. Those series don’t watch themselves you know…
Don’t make claims you can’t back up.
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There’s a world of difference between leaving enough info in Public Internet for some rando to find you and needing a search warrant. It’s trivial to check someone’s comment history on reddit for selfies and start looking for landmarks. I’ve always kept a hard divide between anything that has my real name and my shit posting.
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Yeah he’s just be a cunt that pretends he doesn’t understand nuance to feel superior. Still plenty of that from reddit here
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Don’t ask people to doxx you, you are the one standing in a field during a thunderstorm.
And I can fully back up my claim of having no experience in doxxing.
You are the one that ends up in trouble by acting tough guy, when someone with too much time on their hands posts your details on pastebin.
You sure I’m the one acting tough? I’ve simply never shared personal information. I grew up when the idea of putting personal pictures with names online was taught to kids as dangerous. It’s takes effort to doxx yourself and I’ve never done that.
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Good you know the basics of protecting your anonymity here’s your medal 🥇
If you think I’m showing how much of a 1337 haxx0r I am by listing some steps to look through people’s posts and shit, you should try reading it as a warning instead.
I’ll do a proof by counterexample. I have no idea how do to that, therefor there is in fact something stopping someone from finding out exactly who you are, which proves the premise to be false. QED mothafucka.
Tbh they did say someone, not everyone.
a) That would be in violation of Lemmy.World rules and get instant deleted and banned.
b) It would put the poster in legal trouble.
c) Hello, Snowden, PATRIOT and PRISM.
I totally agree with the third point, but that’s not anyone.
Anyone with a purpose, and money.
Those are some pretty sizeable caveats lol
Something really freaky happened to me back on Reddit. I don’t think I posted anything that was too personally identifiable. About as close as I’ll get is saying that I live in red-county in Colorado and am a Broncos fan. Then one day on a fairly niche gaming subreddit, I mentioned how close something in the game was to a nickname that people called me at work, and said something like “hopefully my coworkers never find out about this in the game or I would never hear the end of it.” Then someone responded, “see you at work on Monday [my first name] ;-)”
I still have no clue how that happened. I went back through every comment I had ever made and not once did I post where I worked or what my first name was. I’d never once told any of my coworkers my reddit user name either. It was a bit of a privacy eye-opener for me to realize that even if I thought I was posting anonymously, someone could still potentially find a way to tie my online persona to me.
Might be worth your time to go to the gaming subreddit on your web browser and then use the development mode of the web browser to inspect all the cookie data.
The company might be putting more information in there than they show on the screen, that could be available to anyone who can do a search on their website for your characters name.
For example, once I was playing World of Warcraft on an alt, and I argued with a tryhard player about being nice to other players. The WoW Armory, when you look up the alt’s name, adds in its cookie/memory the name of all the other characters for that same account (to populate a drop-down selection). So that guy started harassing me on my main character without having never knowing its name.
Was that guy the owner of the wow armory? Because otherwise… how did they get your cookie store inside your browser?
No, he was another player/customer. See below.
When you pull up a character on the Armory inside of the cookie/memory information was a list of all the other characters for that same account/character. And anyone can pull up any other account characters name on the Armory.
My guess is the list of all the character names for the account was there so if you wanted to switch between one character to another from a drop-down UI object.
My point is developers can leak additional information assuming that users can’t see it because it’s not displayed on the UI, but if somebody goes into the developer mode on the browser they can inspect all the memory/cookie information for that web page.
Finally, this was a long time ago, so who knows if it still works that way today or not. My point of mentioning it was as an anecdote on how additional information can leak in ways we wouldn’t suspect.
Most likely scenario is they saw you browsing Reddit at work and saw your username on the screen. Reddit leaves the username out on the main page.
The simplest explanation is probably that even though the subreddit was niche, the reason you are on it is connected to your demographics, which you share in common with coworkers, making it more likely for one of them to also be browsing it.
Real smooth, Philip
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In both cases it comes down to being lost in the crowd.
In the 1980s only celebrities worried about having their information in a phone book. That, and maybe people with really unique names. That’s because getting the information out of a phone book was tedious. The only entity that presumably had a searchable database (other than maybe the NSA) was the phone company. They weren’t necessarily trustworthy, but they had better ways of making money than spending all kinds of computer power on individual people. If you wanted to backwards-search a phone number it was an incredibly labour-intensive process without the database.
These days people are much more careful about certain aspects of their identity, but share other things. The thing that’s the same is that picking any one person out of a crowd is still hard.
Any one fish in a school of fish is relatively safe from predators because there’s no reason for a predator to target them specifically. Or, like the joke about running away from a bear: you don’t need to be faster than the bear, just faster than the other guy. In this case, you don’t have to be a completely locked down target, you just have to avoid standing out and being an obvious target.
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I hate you and how right you are.
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That was actually the idea behind the “right to be forgotten” ruling in the EU: The original case was an IIRC Spanish restaurant owner, quite successful, but when he googled his (quite unique) name the first hit was an article about his first restaurant going bankrupt 20 years ago. Back in the days if you were a journalist investigating the guy you’d figure out that he once had a restaurant in town soandso and then rummage through the town’s newspaper archive and find the article, and then decide whether it’s relevant and how to handle it, now everyone and their dog is finding it by accident. And clicking on it, meaning it will stay the first hit because for google clicks mean that things are relevant.
Heh. The German Pirate Party had an ideological split over that one, the majority vs. the data protection critical twits (they reclaimed the term twit for themselves after being called exactly that). Their blog is still up. The idea of post-privacy is that at some point, noone will fucking care because everyone has their skeletons not in their closet but hanging from the balcony… which isn’t a bad state of affairs in itself, but going all accelerationist on it isn’t the greatest idea.
On the flip side you had a second rift line, that between the majority and the tinfoil hats – a very loud minority, not just because of all the crackling. The kind of people who thought that it should somehow be possible to be a politician, vote on party policy etc. and still stay anonymous.
No, it’s not a bad state, if that would be true for everyone. In reality, only poor and average people will have a graveyard balcony. The rich people will still hold their secrets.
Or… everyone, rich and poor, don’t hide their skeletons anymore, because people just… don’t care anymore. We are over-flooded by information. Doesn’t matter if it’s useful or not. Actually I’m impressed how Israel’s actions were decisive in stopping the Ukraine-Russia war. I have not heard any news about that war on the media for a week, so the war it’s over, Russia went home, right?
If Nixon was the President today, he wouldn’t even think of resigning.
I don’t know how it is in your place, but here this is mostly possible, depending on where you draw the line.