Privacy Was a Myth. AI Just Proved It

AI can now identify anonymous social media users by stitching together details scattered across the internet…

There was a time when you could pretend to be anyone on the internet and no one would be able to figure out your real identity.

Priya Sharma, a marketing strategist by profession, used her real name on her LinkedIn account so that potential recruiters could find her. Her Instagram handle was priya_lens to showcase her photography skills. Most of her friends followed her on that account. But they didn’t know that she also had another Instagram handle called ChaiAndCipher where she never revealed her identity. That was to talk to strangers on the internet without revealing who she was or where she was from.

This used to work. You could have a burner account or a pseudonym and you could just as easily have a second life.

But now, thanks to Artificial Intelligence, especially Large Language Models (LLMs), that game is as good as up.

How LLMS decode Hidden Accounts

A recent study by The Guardian has shown that LLMs excel at decoding anonymous accounts. Earlier, this used to require time, skills and obsessive digital stalking but now can be automated, scaled and executed with unbelievable precision.

Because at the heart of all this decoding and stalking is something that comes very naturally to AI: pattern recognition.

Long story short, every anonymous post that you make reveals something about you. Location hints, writing style, interests, timelines, even emotional undertones. They might not mean a lot individually but AI thrives on aggregation.

It can cross reference data which is spread across platforms and link anonymous accounts to real world identities. And the scary part is that this isn’t even hacking in the traditional sense of the world. There are no passwords being cracked or systems being breached.

AI is successfully piecing this together based on publicly available data.

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