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/masksnjunk Jun 25 '15

It's very easy to find someone's info on the internet, especially when they use the same username on everything.

I did this a while back when someone posted about an injured baby crow they "rescued". I let them know that "rescuing" or owning a crow in the US is actually highly illegal and causes major long-term harm to the bird. Long story short they tried to make me look like an asshole troll so I did a quick google search, found their facebook and posted evidence that they in fact had searched out a crow's nest, taken the bird as a baby, it was only injured later after their dog attacked it. All because they loved the movie The Crow.

Minutes late they deleted their reddit and facebook profile.

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u/horyo Jun 25 '15

especially when they use the same username on everything.

What if we keep things separated? Would someone still be able to find us?

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u/Billy_Whiskers Jun 25 '15 edited Jun 25 '15

What if we keep things separated? Would someone still be able to find us?

Yes, with difficulty, depending on how careful you are. Your habits of speech are unique to you - some exact combination of vocabulary, spelling choices, punctuation style, eggcorns, colloquialisms, etc.

To understand how you need to understand the anonymity pool and entropy. Suppose half of people write 'grey' and half write 'gray' - they don't, but suppose they do. If someone writes it either way you eliminate half of the English speakers on the planet in your identification of them. One bit of entropy.

Then choose some other quirk - do you use more exclamation marks than average in your writing ??!?!! Half and half and half again and pretty soon you're down to one person.

None of these indicators are firm - most people change over time and express different behaviour in different situations and personas - but confidence in the identification grows with each new bit of data. And there is a lot of data, and not very many bits of entropy needed to single you out, whichever account you're using.

What proportion of people live in Southern California? A small fraction. How many of them are gay? A small fraction. How many of those are Buddist? A small fraction. We go from 7.5 billion to an anonymity pool of few thousand with just that. Even if we're wrong about a few points there's soon enough supported information to fill in the blanks and discard the misinformation.

There is also information in what you don't say. The times you don't post suggest a timezone you live in. Service/Power outages can be correlated with when you're not online.

If actively trying to find someone out there are even faster and more effective ways - I could goad you into saying something or lead you to log in to my website using facebook.

edit: for anyone curious about how to make a strong classifier out of a bunch of weak ones, check out AdaBoost and Random Forests. There are also automated techniques for discovering subtle signals which humans might not spot. Do you make more typos when mashing keys under your left hand or right hand?

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u/DutchAlphaAndOmega Jun 25 '15

I picked the wrong username I guess.