But to be honest I don't understand where they come from. Seems people are upset about being de anonymized on the internet. It was my understanding that it is trivial for the government to deanonymize you directly through their own tooling and trivial for private industry to deanonymize you through statistical analysis.
So in that sense, what new thing are we fearing that will come to bear that hasn't come to bear already? Seems to me we are already in a post anonymous world and just maybe most people don't understand that memo until this story came out. Media runs with it so much because people read about it not because it is actually anything new per say.
We are not in a post-anonymous world. People who care can absolutely still remain anonymous, for the time being, with enough effort. However, the number of services we can use is being increasingly cut off by these measures. If the trend continues, then we will soon be in such a world, but we are not there yet.
I hate comments like yours beyond belief. "Oh, I'm so smart. It's too much effort to stay private, so I've accepted that a dystopian surveillance state where every action anyone ever takes is recorded permanently and accessible to anyone is inevitable. Look at these fucking idiots worrying about this issue. Can't they just accept it will happen and shut up?"
It is also worth noting that there is a distinction to be made between government and corporate surveillance. Even if it were possible for state actors to de-anonymize specific targets with reliability (it's not, with sufficient opsec), that is very different from a corporation being able to do it. Once a corporation has your data, they will sell it to anyone and everyone, making your entire life public record for anyone to find with a bit of digging. That is a threat model that is much more likely for Average Joe than being targeted by the government, but it is also a threat which is easier to defeat than that of a state actor. This cynical defeatism is baseless.
Lack of creativity for that username really. Slapped home row and called it a day. But still I'm sure FBI knows exactly who I am. Same for European and middle eastern intelligence orgs. I'm sure ad networks all over the world have me fingerprinted, especially considering I run firefox and block ads, like that alone narrows me down to probably less than a million people globally, maybe substantially less than that.
And this is just me spitballing. Imagine if this is your life's career, 40 hours a week for 40 years, plus a whole department of coworkers all on this effort. And multiple companies and governments each with their own departments on these efforts. How far this would have advanced by now what 30+ years into world wide public computer networks. How far ahead the state of the art actually is compared to what the public must assume. What lawmakers must assume.
But to be honest I don't understand where they come from. Seems people are upset about being de anonymized on the internet. It was my understanding that it is trivial for the government to deanonymize you directly through their own tooling and trivial for private industry to deanonymize you through statistical analysis.
So in that sense, what new thing are we fearing that will come to bear that hasn't come to bear already? Seems to me we are already in a post anonymous world and just maybe most people don't understand that memo until this story came out. Media runs with it so much because people read about it not because it is actually anything new per say.