Am I really anonymous?

[Anal Eclipse]

You wanna be anonymous, sever yourself from the internet and go missing.

 

[milk]

Hi, I'm new to KiwiFarms. I'm not sure if I'm posting this thread in the right place, but I just need to know if my identity and location/IP address are completely invisible on this site. They recommended a VPN and Tor during sign up. I'm using my phone and am not in any public place. Am I really safe?

Depends who you want to be anonymous from.

ISP: VPN will hide your activities unless your ISP wants to invest in multimillion dollar deep packet inspection technology. Make sure you have a custom DNS server set, some cheaper VPNs do not do this for you.

Cross-Site Stuff: Don't use any browser you have to sign into. Do not use the mozilla account, do not use chrome or google stuff, sign into windows using a local account.

Phone Poster: Just don't, nothing on your phone is anonymous. There is murmur of chip-level fuckery going on along with unique phone identifiers and interactions with the telecoms.

Specific Websites: If a site wanted to log everything to create heuristics based profiling, then the most important thing is OPSEC (Operational Security). They are not entirely dependent on IP/Geo-location stuff. They will detect your browser agent which includes what browser you are using, your window resolution, IIRC time-zone, and what addons you have, so if you have a browser with all the privacy addons on, that actually works against you.

What is proper browser OPSEC?
Have many web browsers installed, only use a particular browser for particular purposes, with little to no addons and using the default window size.

Example Microsoft Edge for all official communications for work and .gov, Brave for only Kiwifarms, Firefox for Porn. VPN Turned on.

 

[eternal dog mongler]

Could you elaborate on this? I don't quite understand. Other than website owners or people using link-based IP grabbers (and governments/ISPs) I don't see how someone would be able to exploit something like this. The ordinary Kiwi Farms user probably wouldn't be able to (AFAIK of course).

I'm fairly sure Null has it disabled but on other forums you can just post an image hosted on your own web server then go through the network logs to see the IP of anyone who accesses it.

Keep in mind this is pretty pointless because an IP doesn't really do much for you.

 

[ARghEAT]

I'm fairly sure Null has it disabled but on other forums you can just post an image hosted on your own web server then go through the network logs to see the IP of anyone who accesses it.

Keep in mind this is pretty pointless because an IP doesn't really do much for you.

Yeah, I don't think anything useful can really be done with someone's IP other than using it to find their general (city-level) location.

 

[smegma enthusiast]

Somewhat unrelated, but has Null ever revealed who a user was? Like what Lolcow.farm does sometimes (Creepshow art a year ago for example.)

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

A couple of years ago I started thinking about this, it is legit interesting when taking to the extreme. As I see it there are several layers to this but the top two points of interest is identifying who you are OR identifying that you exist while still being anonymous. The difference between these two is identifying Adrian vs establigh the existence of unknown#29739.
Even if randomly hopping between VPN/Proxy/war driving/public hotspots and switching burner computers/phones it could, in a glowing world, still leave a footprint based on repeated activity, writing/commenting style, videos watched, sites visited etc even while using different means to do so. The activity could potentially be correlated and establish the existence of the previously mentioned unknown#29739 while building a profile. A user that really, really tries to stay under the radar, which is a bit suspicious.

My thinking is that if you generally do five things regularly per internet session they should at least be divided up into more sessions so it appears to be five unrelated users. Instead of going to the farms, going to a favorite channel on youtube and looking up foot porn in a single session go to the farms and in parallel to that search for stupid shit that leads to pinterest and the likes, over and over. It might look like a beauty parlor user and not the A&H user that you are.
For the youtube bit let's say it's RedLetterMedia that you are interested in. Switch locations/devices, go to youtube, watch that, while searching for star trek trivia and softcore gay porn and visiting those sites. You are obviously not interested in star trek and softcore gay erotica, so it will throw the true profiling off.
I don't know what to do about the third session that involves foot porn though, sorry.

Summa summarum, even if you are 100% anonymous in the sense that they don't know your real identity your activity can create a fingerprint of a trackable user and it would be very cumbersome to get away from that.

 

[Mayor Adam West]

Honestly at least I haven't said anything horrendous.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Honestly I have said nigger many times.

Don't be so sure about that.

 

[eternal dog mongler]

writing/commenting style

Assuming infinite processing power, this would take most people down. The corpus you'd have to wade through is gigantic though. Basically every English-language post on social media ever made.

If I actually used social media it'd be possible to identify me based on my KF posts I think. I use e.g. and punctuate it correctly, I use second-person a lot while speaking generally, I start sentences with contractions fairly often and I don't use the Oxford comma. This is just stuff I can think of off the top of my head. I'm sure some insane ML algorithm could figure out more.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Assuming infinite processing power, this would take most people down. The corpus you'd have to wade through is gigantic though. Basically every English-language post on social media ever made.

If I actually used social media it'd be possible to identify me based on my KF posts I think. I use e.g. and punctuate it correctly, I use second-person a lot while speaking generally, I start sentences with contractions fairly often and I don't use the Oxford comma. This is just stuff I can think of off the top of my head. I'm sure some insane ML algorithm could figure out more.

I'm pretty certain I read something about a research program that could identify a person by going by their writing style. I'm not a schizo-paranoid person, this is just a subject that is interesting to think about in a tech-thriller kind of way.

 

[El Goblina]

Don't be so sure about that.

The guy you're responding to is a Christian. For us, none of us is "anonymous" because God sees all. This leads to a worldview wherein we don't say things that we'd regret while "anonymous" because we're responsible for it all anyhow. Supposing we're serious about the whole Jesus thing. Lots of people aren't, and that makes me sad.

Since like 2016 or something, I've basically operated online presuming that everything I write will be traced back to me. This really makes any "anonymous" mask that I might wear superfluous. Also keeps me from sliding into dickwolf/shitcock territory.

 

[AmpleApricots]

The problem is that it only needs a very weak link you are maybe not even aware of to connect your top-secret shitposting identity with your shopping-on-amazon identity somewhere down the line in maybe years and then it was all for naught. It doesn't even have to be an outright compromising link, it's enough that it's a link that won't withstand closer investigation. I do a lot to make passive data gathering as frustrating as possible but mostly I pretty much treat most online spaces in a way where I don't say anything I wouldn't say in public, it's the safest route at this point.

I also think there's no way to make modern browsers and their layers of shit safe or truly anonymous in any way. They're just too complex. Complexity is the enemy of security.

 

[Frail Snail]

Assuming infinite processing power, this would take most people down. The corpus you'd have to wade through is gigantic though. Basically every English-language post on social media ever made.

If I actually used social media it'd be possible to identify me based on my KF posts I think. I use e.g. and punctuate it correctly, I use second-person a lot while speaking generally, I start sentences with contractions fairly often and I don't use the Oxford comma. This is just stuff I can think of off the top of my head. I'm sure some insane ML algorithm could figure out more.

Infinite is a gross overestimation. Aside from the things you already mentioned, the overall vocabulary of your average person is very granular and acts as a unique fingerprint if you collect enough posts. If you are an ESL, your mother tongue carries over certain ingrained language constructs. It's very odd how stylometry is almost never mentioned when talking about fingerprinting and privacy. Given a wide enough reach of data collection, I'm fairly certain ~100 medium sized posts are enough to accurately identify 99.9% of people.

I'm pretty certain I read something about a research program that could identify a person by going by their writing style. I'm not a schizo-paranoid person, this is just a subject that is interesting to think about in a tech-thriller kind of way.

Anonymouth is an ancient one that I know of. An interesting (and paranoid) way of playing with this concept would be to adopt a site-wide set of literary works to fit your posts into. Same wordings, constructs and word orders. If it doesn't fit, the post doesn't get approved. Like a hyper-autistic version of /r9k/.