It’s actually worse.
The video focuses on how you’re leaking personal info all the time through the software that you use and the connections that you make, and ways to mitigate it.
However, have you guys heard about forensic linguistics? That’s how the Unabomber was caught. The way that you use your language(s) is pretty unique to yourself, and can be used to uncover your identity. This was done manually by two guys, Fitzgerald and Shuy; they were basically identifying patterns in how Unabomber wrote to narrow down the suspects further and further, until they hit the right guy.
Now, let’s talk about large “language” models, like Gemini or ChatGPT. Frankly, I believe that people who think that LLMs are “intelligent” or “comprehend language” themselves lack intelligence and language comprehension. But they were made to find and match patterns in written text, and rather good at it.
Are you getting the picture? What Fitzgerald and Shuy did manually 30 years ago can be automated now. And it gets worse, note how those LLMs “happen” to be developed by companies that you can’t trust to die properly (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and its vassal OpenAI).
So, while the video offers some solid advice regarding privacy, sadly it is not enough. If you’re in some deep shit, and privacy is a life-or-death matter for you, I strongly advise you be always mindful of what and how you write.
And, for the rest of us: fighting individually for our right to privacy is not enough. We need to assemble and organise ourselves, to fight on legal grounds against those who are trying to kill it. You either fight for your rights or you lose them.
Just my two cents. I apologise as this is just side-related to the video, but I couldn’t help it.
VeganCheesecake@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 weeks ago
Conversely, you can now have your manifesto written by a locally run LLM.
brbposting@sh.itjust.works 5 weeks ago
“Revise generically: [manifesto]” (certainly not the best prompt)
Folks seem to like Ollama per HackerNews threads: in a coding context here:
Please no unabombing though
Oh wow he wrote a 35k word manifesto… feel like that’s so rare you’d still stand a solid chance at being identified somehow.
lvxferre@mander.xyz 4 weeks ago
You could, but even then you need to put some thought on how to prompt and review/edit the output.
I’ve noticed from usage that LLMs are extremely prone to repeat verbatim words and expressions from the prompt. So if you ask something like “explain why civilisation is bad from the point of view of a cool-headed logician”, you’re likely outing yourself already.
A lot of the times the output will have “good enough” synonyms. That you could replace with more accurate words… and then you’re outing yourself already. Or simply how you fix it so it sounds like a person instead of a chatbot, we all have writing quirks and you might end leaking them into the review.
And more importantly you need to aware that it is an issue, and that you can be tracked based on how and what you write.