: LLM doxxing and the end of the anonymous web?
I just read this editorial by Kelsey Piper in which she shares an experiment she’s been doing where she asks an LLM to identify the author of a random snippet of text from her private files. LLMs used to fail this test, but apparently the new version of Claude pretty consistently can pinpoint her, even when logged out (I didn’t realize you could use Claude without logging in?), even when using different styles of text unrelated to her public writing as a journalist.
I always figured this time would come. Even before LLMs, I remember hearing that you can identify people fairly reliably by just counting which words they use most often. And probably a zillion other ways to association pseudonymous internet accounts with yes-onymous ones.
Needless to say, convexer is not my real name and this is meant to be an anonymous blog. I haven’t said anything here I wouldn’t defend in a court of law. But the purpose of the dumpster site is just to be able to speak a bit more freely about political/sensitive topics, and there are personal experiences I have discussed here that I would prefer my employer and mother not know about. I haven’t tried plugging my own blog into Claude and seeing if it can doxx me; perhaps it goes without saying that I would prefer if readers didn’t do so either.
Perhaps there’s a flicker of hope in the fact that a statistical prediction (texts X and Y are likely to have the same author) isn’t the same thing as proof—if someone doxxes you with Claude, you still have the option of denying it or chalking it up to an LLM hallucination. That’s notably not the case with the other kind of doxxing, where people post your address and shit online; you can’t deny that you live in the place you live in.
In the end I feel the same way as Kelsey does about all this:
I don’t think this is a good development. I just think it’s a predictable development.
One day, we will improve our social norms around anonymity and privacy, and collectively embrace the fact that identity is multifaceted and situational. Perhaps we will evolve new rules of etiquette or even laws about trying to unmask people. But I don’t know how you force that to happen: While the anonymous internet has been a helpful place for me (going back to childhood, when it allowed me to get advice from people older and wiser than me), there are obviously people who take advantage of anonymity to engage in bullying and crime.
People (in particular, voters) are motivated more strongly by fear than by high-minded ideals about safe spaces for free conversation; we’ve seen this already with all the age verification laws, like the one in the UK, which I’m told is quite popular despite the objections of techies. The anonymous web will most likely be a casualty of this suspicious and vindictive cultural moment.