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Re: "Question about the Small Web"
No protocol can protect users' anonymity if they insist on oversharing their personal information.
If you must share, also make up a lot. If 70 percent of your personal information is fake it will be harder to positive identify you.
If you’ve declared yourself to be born in five years, told stories about your life in six places (five you’ve never been to), and claimed relationships that don’t exist, it’s going to be harder to match you to public data.
Worried about AI matching your text across sites? Start running it through ChatGPT. Ask it to rewrite your message as if it spoken by someone with a huge data set like Donald Trump or Chris-Chan.
Jan 17 · 3 weeks ago
Other people mentioned Tor, I'd like to further back that recommendation and add that by actively using it you are helping people who really need it (as in their life and/or freedom may be at risk). If you're not doing anything super illegal then you can bear the risk of being on "a list" as some put it.
Any increase in total Tor traffic is good for the people who really need anonymity. I'd love to see more capules on onion sites, and once Arti matures I'd love to see a Gemini client with built-in Tor!
💀 TestUser [OP] · Jan 18 at 15:58:
If Tor can't protect what western nations call "criminals", (though there illegal and unethical things too) what makes you think it can't protect people in autocratic nations? The same Tools that's used to catch cocaine/opiod dealers/buyers and human trafficing/hitman buyers/sellers are the same tools China and Russia and the rest of the 3rd world autocratic institutions can silence dissent. If the shady people aren't safe, what makes you think the people who are ethical by western enlightenment democracy standards are?
Tor can prevent traffic correlation well enough unless you're sending huge amounts of data. Especially if you're using onion sites. And if you're using a bridge from a foreign country, and you're being careful, you can avoid scrutiny. The people using it for this purpose are often being instructed on how to use it safely.
The main risk of Tor for criminals is that they assume it's some kind of magic invisibility cloak. Chances are they will mess up their opsec--most criminals aren't that smart--and I would guess that "dumb criminal using Tor at home" probably stands out more than "dumb criminal working on clearnet from a McDonalds."
Question about the Small Web — I'm not sure about a lot of the benifits of the small web. Like there's nothing to stop web crawlers from mining data and using LLMs to associate a user name to a legal name, there's very few people that share the same life story. I bet the archives in Textfiles.com has pointed what a kid said 35 years ago to his late 40's legal name by some Pinkertons. There's also nothing we can do about if one day there's spam like there's Spam in usenet now. There's also...
💬 TestUser · 19 comments · Jan 14 · 3 weeks ago · #bloat #privacy #spam