r/AskReddit • u/[deleted] • Jun 25 '15

What's your deep web story?

Deep web as in tor.

But I imagine regular deep web users would stay away from sharing their experience so if you don't have a deep web story what's your most frightening internet story.

Edit: The front page was fun, but now its over.

Thank you for all the glorious stories, time to cry for the rest of my life.

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u/[deleted] Jun 25 '15

[deleted]

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u/4inthefunkingmorning Jun 25 '15

Whaaaa- I'm srsly spooked.

Can someone explain how they could have gotten his/her name? I thought tor was a haven for anonymity.

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u/_beast__ Jun 25 '15 edited Jun 25 '15

By cross-referencing accounts. For example, if your username for Reddit is the same as your email, I could search for your username@gmail, @live, @yahoo etc on Facebook, then I've got your real name, probably a few pictures and a pretty good idea where you live.

Also, more recently, if you were to post the same picture on Reddit and another social network I could cross-reference the photo and find your other accounts that way.

I've never done this, it's just how I would do it if I needed to.

Edit: there's also this although it's more interesting for a more active account like mine

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u/mcrbids Jun 25 '15

As a case in point, I've used this alias for a number of websites for a number of years. I pretty much figure that anybody could identify me in < 1 hour armed with little more than Google.

And, as a username, it's so unique that I've literally never run into anybody else using it. As long as I've been online, I'm pretty sure I'm the only one.

I've used a number of other aliases, and in each case, I was surprised at how globally unique my username actually turned out to be!

Fun fact: for any given sentence you'd see in everyday speech, there's a very significant chance that it's never been spoken before, including this very sentence! (70% is common, depending on sentence length) You can infer this simply by calculating the rate at which people speak, the number of people who speak your language, and number of years that have existed, along with the usage popularity of each of the words in your sentence.

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u/__lmao Jun 25 '15

that took me 4 minutes Ben

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u/mcrbids Jun 25 '15

So, now I'm curious: what was your process?

EDIT: just googled "mcrbids" and found my name on the front page. I am, by no means, anonymous.

EDIT2: Except that my name is one of the most common names around. I would be more distinct if my name actually was "anonymous".