About profiles being public on the fediverse, everything’s possible with enough will. And if someone’s willing to chase another someone down, I’d imagine there’s enough will to track down everything that is shared by this other one. And I can think of some rather feasible ways that tracking can be done anonymously.
For sure.
I kind of hand-waved the issue away, above, but I fear you’re absolutely correct.
Indeed, it’s really not that hard to imagine some programming being put together (perhaps aided with a bit of AI), to absolutely track down and dox just about anyone using careless little hints we typically leave behind when we assume we’re being relatively anonymous, online.
And then, if a bad actor, using password-breaking tools to cause all kinds of mayhem, even possibly breaking in to our online banking accts and so forth. But also, if a govt entity, gaining all kinds of info and insight in to our lives.
It’s actually kind of terrifying, and the tools for such already exist. I guess Palantir’s already doing so…?
Wouldn’t doubt intelligence services from who knows how many countries are keeping an eye here, or even companies such as Meta (even if in their case, without Threads). Maybe an ill-intended individual or a monitoring entity doesn’t even have their own instances.
It’s an important discussion for responsible web-use IMO, however late in the game we generally might be upon such shizzle.
For example, I run uMatrix blocker extension so I can see and control every little javascript a site tries to run, and I note that Facebook’s and Google’s shit are almost everywhere, across ~90% of modern websites. It’s… pretty ridiculous.
About profiles being public on the fediverse, everything’s possible with enough will. And if someone’s willing to chase another someone down, I’d imagine there’s enough will to track down everything that is shared by this other one. And I can think of some rather feasible ways that tracking can be done anonymously.
For sure.
I kind of hand-waved the issue away, above, but I fear you’re absolutely correct.
Indeed, it’s really not that hard to imagine some programming being put together (perhaps aided with a bit of AI), to absolutely track down and dox just about anyone using careless little hints we typically leave behind when we assume we’re being relatively anonymous, online.
And then, if a bad actor, using password-breaking tools to cause all kinds of mayhem, even possibly breaking in to our online banking accts and so forth. But also, if a govt entity, gaining all kinds of info and insight in to our lives.
It’s actually kind of terrifying, and the tools for such already exist. I guess Palantir’s already doing so…?
Wouldn’t doubt intelligence services from who knows how many countries are keeping an eye here, or even companies such as Meta (even if in their case, without Threads). Maybe an ill-intended individual or a monitoring entity doesn’t even have their own instances.
It’s an important discussion for responsible web-use IMO, however late in the game we generally might be upon such shizzle.
For example, I run uMatrix blocker extension so I can see and control every little javascript a site tries to run, and I note that Facebook’s and Google’s shit are almost everywhere, across ~90% of modern websites. It’s… pretty ridiculous.