New-ish "free speech" app, Parler

Politics & Elections
381

Good luck with that. It is trivially easy to ‘unmask’ someone if you have the right data. For example, if I have your IP address, I can see that user ‘eschereal’'s IP logged into a bank computer, then did a POST to twitter, then did another POST to facebook… By analyzing timestamps and patterns, I will soon know exactly who you are. Add in data from AIs looking at writing style fingerprints and common subject matter analysis and all kinds of other tools, and soon I can track you around the internet even if you use VPNs and all manner of ways of hiding your activity.

Perhaps a real security expert who stays on the ball can remain anonymous. For the average person, just a slipup here or there by you or the site you are using will burn you.

For example, my email address/password have shown up in 42 hacked dtabases, according to google. Let’s say one of them was the sdmb. Now ‘Sam Stone’ is publicly tied to my personal email, as well as my IP address, Anyone with that data (and the data in 41 other databases) has a huge collection of text they can use to annalyze my writing, common typos, etc, and use that to track me wherever I post, with a good degree of accuracy, no matter how much I try to hide my identity.

Remaining anonymous on the Internet is almost impossible if you have been on long enough and people really want to find out who you are. And as the tools get better, it will become more common, or even a casual thing to do an identity search and discover what you do online even if you are trying to hide it.

382

So what?
I’ve always assumed everything I posted on the internet could be traced to me. For me, the “solution”,( although I don’t view this as a problem ) is to not post anything on the internet that I would embarrass me.

It would probably take a person with any sort of internet detecting skills less than 3 minutes to suss out my real identity, because I don’t particularly care if anyone finds out who’s behind the SDMB Ann Hedonia account. You could make a printout of every single thing I’ve ever posted on-line and send it to everyone I know, and I wouldn’t lose a minute of sleep over it.

Of course, it’s easy for me because I don’t hold opinions that I know are odious and need to be hidden. But if I did, I hide them, as in not post them online.

383

To Ann’s point, when I saw disgraced ex-President Trump call forth a volunteer army to destroy the United States Constitution because he didn’t like that Americans had enough of his incompetence, incompetence which killed 250k lives and 10,000,000 jobs, my reaction was:

384

Oh, oh, if they checked out my hypochondriac kid, they’d say “Huh, had syphilis when he was six, three broken legs on 7/4/97, AIDS twice during Spring Break '99, and now has all three variants of COVID simultaneously… along with the Plague.”

Please, let us be the judge of that. (Hmmm, didn’t you post in Cafe Society a decade ago about crushing on that reality show star?)*

Seriously, I’m not on any social media, and my Googling would confuse anyone. All I have to worry about is if someone found my stuff here and said “Sorry, we could never hire anyone who spouts so much drivel.”

…

*That was just a guess… no one’s been stalking you for ten years… honest!

385

I’m not just talking about saying things that are currently politically incorrect. I’m saying that through the internet people now have access to information about you that they otherwise couldn’t legally ask, and which may cause them to be prejudiced against you. Perhaps you disclosed that you occasionally have chest pains in a post asking people if it’s serious, and now your insurer may have an issue with you. Or stuff you say that YOU didn’t think is objectionable pisses off an employer, so they don’t hire you.

And don’t forget - the Overton window is always moving. What is today’s unobjectionable statement my be tomorrow’s anathema, and the Internet is forever. We have already seen people have their careers ruined over actions taken or things sid years ago that were at best mildly inappropriate then, but are now despicable.

Or imagine an employer training an AI by taking the best and worst performing employees in the company, the using their internet histories for training data to identify potential recruits that would make good employees, They run your history through the AI, and it gives you a thumbs-down. The employer might not even know why you got a thumbs down, but the AI has proven to be very good at picking recent people, so… Maybe it’s triggering on things no one would ever expect, such as the time in which you post, or the words you use, or how often you post during regular work hours, or the fact that you like to watch horror movies. Or maybe it’s your gender or skin color - the AI doesn’t care, it just knows how to match people that tend to be more successful on the job.

Or let’s say a horrible Republican is elected, and decides to make a list of all the ‘radicals’, who will then find it harder to get clearances, apply for government jobs, whatever. People who think their politics are hidden by anonymity may find themselves sorely mistaken.

This isn’t about good behaviiur on the internet, or having the ‘right’ idea. It’s about asymmetric information and the dangers it poses to privacy and civil society. If you think the powers that be are bad now, wait 'till they have the tools to easily characterize you along as many different axes as they want.

Are you a fan of China’s ‘social credit’ system? What I’m saying is that by mining our data, anyone who wants one can already dredge up your ‘social credit’ score based on their criteria. At that point, you just need to hope that they are peoole on ‘your’ side.

386

Heh. Anybody remember the SDMB poster named Sam_Stone? Wonder what ever happened to that guy.

387

No, no, you see, conservative views must be universally accepted and listened to through whatever venue or media conservatives see fit, or it’s censorship. Liberal views are objectively wrong, so it’s OK to stifle them and them alone in any way you can.

388

Mind you, if somebody wants to advocate for European-style “digital privacy” laws where governments and businesses can’t go digging around in all our online activities whenever they want, I’m all for that (and I support the ACLU’s efforts in that direction).

But that’s not the same thing as people expecting never to see any consequences from their voluntary and knowingly public social-media activities conducted under their own identities. Any not-absolutely-cretinous user of social media is fully aware that they’re putting their comments and photos and what-not out on a public platform to be potentially shared with the whole world.

That voluntarily shared information is part of an individual’s public persona on the internet. Demanding that everybody should just ignore the aspects of your public persona that they find problematic is not at all the same thing as not wanting the world to see your private emails or browser history or online purchases.

And I’ll also point out that we shouldn’t just gloss over the other false equivalence Sam_Stone’s trying to draw here, between “conservative views” and “liberal views”. To quote a previous well-made point:

People on the left aren’t saying that we should shun or ban law-abiding rational people who merely have different views from ours on how best to run our democracy. We’re saying that we’re okay with shunning and banning non-law-abiding, non-rational people who are advocating violent destruction of our democracy.

389

No, they need a court order. Their HR dept cant look at that stuff, i’d be illegal.

390

Unless there is a law preventing Google from selling all this data to the HR dept (or more likely to a background check company engaged by the HR dept) why would they need a subpoena? Wouldn’t they just need a financial inducement?

391

Some data, the data you agreed to, they can.

Here is what they can sell:

392

That’s a widespread but silly myth. Got all your old Myspace and Angelfire and Geocities posts? Neither does anybody else. Facebook won’t be forever either.

393

Clearly the phrase is just a statement saying that if you think you can memory-hole stuff on the internet, you are likely to fail, No one thinks that “The internet is forever” means that it’s impossible for any data to vanish. It means you shouldn’t count on it.

Anyway, if you are worried about your old MySpace, Geocities or Angelfire content…

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Angelfire

As I said, The Internet is forever.

394

That’s a fair cop. It appears my opinion on this did change over seven years. Perhaps the widespread nature of ‘cancel culture’ and the political aspect of it caused me to change my mind. Your many hours of frantically searching 20 years of my old posts for a ‘gotcha’ has finally paid off. Well done.

395

It’s rare that people admit to their opinions being 100% political driven and not based on anything more fundamental. Well done.

396

And once again, the thread descends into ad-hominem. Well done. You managed to get your cheap shot in outside of the pit.

And ‘100% political’ is clearly hyperbole. We are now in a situation where ‘cancel culture’ is widespread enough that it’s damaging our civil society. The scale of the problem affected my thinking as well.

Also, there are two kinds of people: those who will admit that from time to time their polutical beliefs may color their thinking, and those in denial.

397

I didn’t mean the statement to be an attack. I was congratulating you on your openness.

398

Well then, I guess I owe you an apology. Sorry about that. My sarcasm detector was in overdrive.

399

https:// flic.kr/p/2kxzDYu

:thinking:

This u?

https:// flic.kr/p/2kxvpYj

400

Your link is titled “Hundreds of thousands of ‘lost’ MySpace songs have been recovered” which sounds like it backs up your claim, until you read the next line: “but it’s less than one percent of the total songs accidentally deleted”