We show that large language models can be used to perform at-scale deanonymization. With full Internet access, our agent can re-identify Hacker News users and Anthropic Interviewer participants at high precision, given pseudonymous online profiles and conversations alone, matching what would take hours for a dedicated human investigator. We then design attacks for the closed-world setting. Given two databases of pseudonymous individuals, each containing unstructured text written by or about that individual, we implement a scalable attack pipeline that uses LLMs to: (1) extract identity-relevant features, (2) search for candidate matches via semantic embeddings, and (3) reason over top candidates to verify matches and reduce false positives. Compared to classical deanonymization work (e.g., on the Netflix prize) that required structured data, our approach works directly on raw user content across arbitrary platforms. We construct three datasets with known ground-truth data to evaluate our attacks. The first links Hacker News to LinkedIn profiles, using cross-platform references that appear in the profiles. Our second dataset matches users across Reddit movie discussion communities; and the third splits a single user's Reddit history in time to create two pseudonymous profiles to be matched. In each setting, LLM-based methods substantially outperform classical baselines, achieving up to 68% recall at 90% precision compared to near 0% for the best non-LLM method. Our results show that the practical obscurity protecting pseudonymous users online no longer holds and that threat models for online privacy need to be reconsidered.

 

Podcasts provide highly diverse content to a massive listener base through a unique on- demand modality. However, limited data has prevented large-scale computational analysis of the podcast ecosystem. To fill this gap, we introduce a massive dataset of over 1.1M pod- cast transcripts that is largely comprehensive of all English language podcasts available through public RSS feeds from May and June of 2020. This data is not limited to text, but includes metadata, inferred speaker roles, and audio fea- tures and speaker turns for a subset of 370K episodes. Using this data, we conduct a founda- tional investigation into the content, structure, and responsiveness of this ecosystem. Together, our data and analyses open the door to contin- ued computational research of this popular and impactful medium.

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