Creeping as a Service | Hacker News Reader

Creeping as a Service

every.to

358 pointsdshipper138 comments

Stuff like this makes our online presence very creepy. More than I personally used to think anyway. Even on platforms where people usually think of their accounts as "throwaway" or "anonymous".

Take Reddit. Besides the well-known archive sites that keep removed/deleted content (removeddit, ceddit, etc), there is this cool service (pushshift) that offers all that and more. One interesting and relevant feature of this tool is the ability to look up all content by a specific author/username. You just put the name there, and lo and behold, everything this person ever posted is right there; even if it's deleted, or removed.

If you do a quick test using this tool, you'll soon see the amount of people who thought their deleted content couldn't be tied back to them, continuing to use their usernames like nothing happened. The deleted content can sometimes be incredibly sensitive information that the person posted by mistake (or when looking for advice, having a rant about something, etc). It sometimes includes very specific details that may uniquely identify a person. And most users aren't aware of any of this. And it's available even if you delete your account. Someone just has to know that you used this username once upon a time.

The tool eventually removed this option from the UI (but it's still available through their API). The thread where this removal was announced is interesting and reveals how useful this tool was to some users on Reddit for combating spam/harassment (or even to find their own content), but nevertheless this dark side of it is there. As you might expect, someone slapped a new UI on that very tool, and that feature is readily available today, few google searches away.

When I saw this tool, it really reminded me of that. It's incredible how our online activities became permanent, no matter how much we try to erase the parts we don't like (or don't want to be public).

Tools like this are why I stopped using Reddit ( aside from talking about programming). And I assume anything I post here may eventually be traced back to me.

Even if you do change your username regularly, your patterns of speech may stay rather similar. And no matter what you say, the context around it may change in 30 years or so.

This new generation loves to screenshot personal conversations and then post them to Reddit for brownie points. Meaning if you get involved with someone who's slightly malicious, they can easily ruin your life too.

At this point I'm very careful to only meet folks in person. It's not unheard of for people to share compromising details about themselves, only to become extortion victims.

Everything you’re saying is true, and from a privacy standpoint it is quite scary.

However, there’s a really easy way to not worry about this: don’t be mean/rude to other people publicly, and think about what you say before writing it down.

It’s also hard to be “compromised” if you really own who you are. Embarrassing things about yourself are only embarrassing if you’re embarrassed about them.

Obviously, people have interests and fetishes they’d rather not be made public. Maybe they’d like to interact with those communities online and remain anonymous. I don’t have an easy answer for that - an alt account might not be enough.

Still, for many social media sites it really is in some ways the same standard as written letters. Don’t write things that you’re worried about being read and attributed to you in the future.

Security by obscurity many apply: if in 2050 everyone everyone has 30-40 years of social media data under their belt, it strikes my as unlikely that anybody’s going to care about the one thing you said 30 years ago, a needle in quite an enormous haystack.

After all, you aren’t a historical figure.

To each their own, you can only control what you say, not how it's interpreted.

Plus I really think people should be able to mature, just because you said something really mean when you were 19, doesn't mean at 39 you're a horrible person. In fact just because you said something really mean at 19, doesn't mean you're a horrible person at 19. But instead of it being a one-off comment at a party, it's now a part of you. I really think this is why so many young adults get so stressed out over social media, you constantly need to create this artificial image of some superhuman who's living a fantastic amazing life. Any misstep you'll lose fans,followers, etc. This makes so many people so miserable.

I know I became much happier after I got rid of my social media, but again to each their own.

As we get more comfortable with the idea that people have decades long fully public histories of inconsequential things, we will also get more comfortable with the idea that a person at 19 is different from the same person at 39.

Rereading my blog entries from 15 years ago, I wouldn't write the same things today, but if someone points at a 2006 blog entry to say something about 2021 me I also expect people won't take them especially seriously.

I think you may be overestimating how much people will care about the time difference. Simply put, it's extra additional context that will almost assuredly have to be put forward as a defense by you, after they have already formed their impression of you.

I suspect such claims will come off as very hollow to most people who have become upset with you. You would probably be questioned about why you had not proactively removed and apologized for your old writings on your own, as soon as you "changed your mind" about the topic. This of course ignores that changes are often slow, and rather unlikely to prompt you to recall every single trace you may have left of your previous thoughts. But that's all squishy context that the internet has thoroughly shown it does not care for, nor even recognize most of the time.

I've been writing publicly on the Internet for >15y, under my real name (www.jefftk.com), and no one has given me a hard time for old posts. Quite the contrary: people have often written to say they found my old posts useful or otherwise interesting.

I do think it might be different if my entire online presence consisted of a handful of posts written a long time ago, but anyone trying to get a sense of me from my writing can tell very quickly that I have a lot of views about a lot of different things.

I would really caution against thinking this way. Parent discusses changing contexts which is exactly right. Things said in polite society 30 years ago are no longer acceptable, there is no reason to think that what we say today in polite society will be acceptable in 30 years time. The thing is even though everyone will have skeletons in their closet that doesn't act as some sort of defense, it will only take the right kind of persistence by someone strongly motivated to blow up your life, it doesn't matter that much that they have skeletons.

It also seems to be very asymmetric, in that the ones most likely to attack are the ones with the least history. It's an asymmetric tool younger folks can use against older folks, and that asymmetry will always exist.

"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." -Cardinal Richelieu (supposedly)

Your view seems quite naive to me. Not only do times change, with previously acceptable things becoming unspeakable (eg. "retarded", "transsexual", "transvestite"), but with taking out of context and selective quoting you can distort the meaning of almost anything.

Rewatching one of my favorite shows (Arrested Development) was rough. They made "Retard" and "Tranny" jokes left and right.

Forget trans jokes - just typical gay jokes were common until the early 2010s.

They're still pretty common, at least on Family Guy reruns.

And the jokes about the Japanese characters as well.

They really leaned on the idea that you can get away with insensitive humor as long as it’s delivered by the crass idiot of the show (generally Gob)

>After all, you aren’t a historical figure.

easy for you to say

Give it time

>don’t be mean/rude to other people publicly, and think about what you say before writing it down.

This is obviously good advice, but the rest of your comment basically amounts to rephrasing "there is nothing to be afraid of if you have nothing to hide". The problem is that often times people don't have a choice about what they are forced to hide.

For example, one's sexuality is often something that needs to be hidden. It isn't just that some fetishes are embarrassing. Some orientations in some jurisdictions are illegal or not legally protected. It was just a few months ago that the US Supreme Court ruled that you can't fire people for being gay for example. And that is just the legal repercussions. There are all sorts of social, religious, and familial circles that will react negatively to a person's true self that might force that person to hide a part of their life.

Ideally we get to a place in the future when this isn't true. However it is true today and failing to recognize it is either of sign of naivety, privilege, or a lack of empathy.

> It was just a few months ago that the US Supreme Court ruled that you can't fire people for being gay for example.

This is to say nothing of the (however unfathomable) possibility of the country taking a 180 and walking this back.

> Some orientations in some jurisdictions are illegal or not legally protected. It was just a few months ago that the US Supreme Court ruled that you can't fire people for being gay for example.

Here are several maps[1] of the US that show the states and counties where it is legal to discriminate against LGBT people in housing, education, healthcare, public accommodations and whether or not hate crimes against them are recognized by the governments as hate crimes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_the_United_Stat...

> Ideally we get to a place in the future when this isn't true.

You know the Gibson quote "The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed"? The corollary is that the present isn't evenly distributed either. The past often lingers well past it's sell-by date.

So even if/when we get to such a place, I don't think the problem will actually go away for a long time, if ever.

Consider that the US is more than two generations past the 1964 civil rights act, and that while, as a country, the US recently elected and even reelected a Black president, there has subsequently been a significant reactionary backlash, to put it mildly, that is still ongoing.

Cancel culture really isn’t about what you think of yourself. It’s about what others think of you.

> there’s a really easy way to not worry about this: don’t be mean/rude to other people publicly, and think about what you say before writing it down.

I wouldn't usually do this, but since you're arguing it's okay...

Here's you belittling someone: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25349593

Here's you discovering that text doesn't always convey the tone you wanted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24518501

Here's you being rude: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25055238

If you don't think these comments reflect badly on you, wait until the online mob has had a few hours to get angry and then try explaining. Remember that anyone going after you can take comments out of context, add commentary to twist the perspective, and pull comments from arbitrarily far into the past (extra useful if you've ever changed your mind).

I disagree on the assessment of your picks of the GP's comments, and I'd urge everyone to read through them as well.

None of them is "mean/rude". Perhaps not watered-down to the modern PC norms, but they are perfectly fine and would've not been out of place in an in-person conversation.

You appear to be mistaking expressing an opinion for showing a disrespect or trying to offend someone. That's a slippery slope.

This old argument for victim blaming made sense when the UX for publishing content brought to mind submitting a thesis

When the UX is deliberately designed to make is seem more like a free flowing discussion in a bar, the responsibility is no longer sorely with the user.

I run a script called "shreddit" I found on GitHub that edits and then deletes your comments. It's configured via a YAML file and you can whitelist or filter stuff that you want deleted. I do this every few months. It's probably paranoid and maybe not even useful, but I grew up with imageboards that were fully anonymous and auto delete - for me it should all be ephemeral.

There are few sites which keep track of your delete history as well as edit history so you are not immune to being archived and watched by someone else.

I grew up with imageboards that were fully anonymous and auto delete

You would be horrified at how easy it to recover supposedly-deleted content from most imageboards.

I'm aware of 4chan archives - I use them all the time, but at least stuff under "anonymous".

Oh, I meant that most imageboard software is so ropey I can recover deleted stuff without any external archive or prior monitoring. Finding people's identity is of course a different and harder problem.

Do they have this for Facebook? If like to obfuscate my data before deleting my profile

> Even if you do change your username regularly, your patterns of speech may stay rather similar.

This is so true. There was some guy on a career advice subreddit complaining that he wasn't getting any job offers. As more and more details came out, the guy became combative and refused to take any ownership of his own flaws.

He eventually made a new account, but he couldn't help himself and began making the same complaints and in much the same manner.

"Retroactive prosecution" are words that I tell my daughters all the time. Do NOT put your opinions online...period. You have no idea what will be illegal in 30 years and if you were for or against it.

For Americans, if it were legal for you to post something today, your actions are legally protected thanks to Article 1, Section 9, Clause 3 of the Constitution, which prevents “ex post facto” laws, or laws which retroactively change the legal consequences of past actions.

Most countries have some version of this protection, so your legal advice to your daughters is probably incorrect.

Not if your families beliefs are outdated or otherwise bigoted. My older family members are racist. I harbored racist beliefs, and told plenty of racist jokes as a boy. My "opinions", I posted on twitter, as a teenager, would be more than enough to get me expelled from society today. Be it culturally cancelled in the US, or imprisoned in the UK.

Not everyone is raised by good people. Thankfully I had a seismic event (Perma banned from a favorite game after sinking 1000s of hours for being offensive) correct my behavior. I thank my lucky stars it was merely me being banned from a video game that caused me to reconsider how I act, and not something much more serious.

Fascinating story! Interesting counter-narrative to tropes about video games being harmful to ethics or personal growth. Have you written about your experiences at any length?

I think you're not quite getting bikeshaving's point. Certainly in the US, you can't be jailed for past behavior even if it's outlawed now. It seems like Great Britain isn't quite as absolute, but the European Convention on Human Rights bans it explicitly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Convention_on_Human_R...

I also think "expelled from society" is a touch dramatic. As best I can tell, not a single famous racist has starved to death, or even been forced back to subsistence agriculture. I think the most extreme penalty I've seen is having to change jobs/industries, or perhaps losing some friends.

So your standard for whether something is serious is whether someone literally dies as a direct result of it?

For most of us, losing your career and all or almost all your friends is kind of a big deal.

People have committed suicide over this.

Try applying your standards to things you believe in some time. "He says he was a victim of racist discrimination? Well, he still seems to be alive and fed, and has stable employment at Walmart. So that's a touch dramatic."

That is not my standard for "serious". But my standard for "expelled from society" is actually that they be expelled from society.

I agree that the social penalties for racism can be serious. Although I look forward to you naming 3 people who because of teenage postings lost their "career and all or almost all [their] friends", because again I think you're being hyperbolic in a way that undermines your point.

However, I also think that racism is serious. Perhaps this seems crazy to you, but I'm much more concerned with the many lives destroyed by racism (very much including actual murder) than I am with the social consequences racists (very rarely) experience.

You're focusing on a turn of phrase used by an earlier poster in order to ignore the larger discussion. There is no value in litigating the exact phrase "expelled from society". Whatever you want to call it, the point is that lives get ruined and people commit suicide over things that don't reflect who they are.

Demanding evidence of ruined lives for 'teenage postings' is again, an arbitary limitation that doesn't make sense given that we are talking about things that will be happening in the future, not things that happened in the past. We need to wait for social mores to change enough since teenage postings even started existing around 10-15 years ago.

However despite you deliberately trying to set a standard that makes no sense given the topic, I Googled for 5 minutes and satisfied it anyway:

Teenage girl killed herself amid fears she would be branded racist over joke photo she sent friends, inquest hears

[0] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/28/teenage-girl-kil...

White teen who posted racist video of black HS classmate eating chicken could face criminal charges

[1] https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/white-teen-made-ra...

Teen commits suicide after cyberbullies share explicit messages outing him as bisexual

[2] https://www.aol.com/article/news/2019/10/01/teen-commits-sui...

Two of these kids actually died, which I think is even more than losing their "career and all or almost all [their] friends".

Nobody is arguing for racism. What you're wrong about is the poo-poohing the threat that the combination of shifting social mores, eternally-recorded online remarks, and vindicitive power create.

Implicitly you seem to be suggesting that it's okay if some 'racists' have their lives ruined, since the cause is so just and important. Looking at the stories of these kids above dying - do those stories make you think anything different?

Are they acceptable losses, or did they deserve it? Or is there a problem here to fix?

You probably think of yourself as an empathetic person. So try expanding your empathy to more people.

Perhaps you've had the privilege of always believing only things that align 100% with the views of the powerful. You seem to be a wealthy San Francisco leftist, so I can see how you would live under the basic belief that "if power is suppressing it, it must be bad".

Perhaps you think there is a clean simple line between Good People and Those Evil Nazis Who Deserve What They Get. There is not. Humans are complex.

However, try to conceive that someone could be both dissident and not-evil at the same time. If you need to, you can imagine living in another society where the power actually disagrees with you. What then?

And please recognize that your orthodoxy may change. Maybe you'll change your views, or society will. Then you'll be the "racist", or "Nazi", or "communist", or "kaffir", or "heretic", or "reactionary", or whatever label they're using in 30 years.

I am not the one who set the "expelled from society" standard. My point was that it was dramatic. If you are truly interested in a healthy "larger discussion" you'll hopefully agree that turning down the rhetorical temperature makes it easy to have a good discussion that gets at the truth.

Of course, given that you've decided to spend multiple paragraphs in a personal fantasy building a very poor straw man of me and my views, I think that a good discussion is not really your goal here.

>I am not the one who set the "expelled from society" standard.

Yes you are. I said "serious" and you yourself specifically pulled it back to the literal interpretation of "expelled from society". Another poster used those words casually; you're the one who decided that their literal intepretation was the "standard".

On the rest, this just feels like you're pointing at my tone as an excuse to avoid acknowledging or engaging any of the questions I brought up.

I said "Perhaps you believe X". This isn't building a strawman, it's trying to get to the heart of the beliefs underlying the issue. If you believe something totally different than X it'd be great if you would explain it.

A good discussion is my goal. Is it yours? You smugly tried to shut me down with a demand for news stories that you thought couldn't be satisfied. And now you're refusing to talk - with the excuse that you don't think I want to talk.

In any case, I'd welcome a meaningful response that actually addresses my points and the larger discussion.

Bottom line: You seem to think that it's only very rarely that a few terrible racists get socially punished this way, implying you think the situation is okay. I showed you that it's not, it's kids and normal people, and people are dying. What's your reponse to this new information?

One thing I'd really like HN readers to understand is that UK newspapers, even supposedly respectable ones like the Telegraph, are FUCKING GARBAGE.

Please stop posting links to them because they're often inaccurate, sometimes deliberately so.

Phoebe Connop, the girl who died, was British so I think it's kind of reasonable to post British papers about it. But here are some non-British ones if you really want.

https://au.news.yahoo.com/uk-teenager-phoebe-connop-hanged-h...

https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/news-life/school...

> I harbored racist beliefs, and told plenty of racist jokes as a boy. My "opinions", I posted on twitter, as a teenager, would be more than enough to get me expelled from society today. Be it culturally cancelled in the US, or imprisoned in the UK

that's not a problem with you, but with cancel culture in general.

It is basically impossible to get imprisoned in the UK for mere verbal racism, and highly racist opinions are posted in the newspapers all the time. Even the "gas the jews" Nazi dog guy was only fined £800 and it didn't stop him standing for election.

"only fined £800" for a joke. Might not be prison, but it's still extremely worrying.

Nah, he put a lot of effort into getting a particularly blatant piece of anti-Semitism heavily publicised.

The use of highly selective and unsubstantiated accusations of anti-Semitism is becoming a problem, but not in this case.

He says he never expected it to get farther than a few friends. It went viral without any promotion on his part. Is there any actual evidence it was all some carefully planned sinister plot to spread a few Hitlery catch phrases for some reason and not something done to annoy his girlfriend and amuse his friends or are you making a judgement based on something other than evidence?

> It went viral without any promotion on his part

How many youtube subscribers did he have at the point he posted it?

He subsequently turned it into an "edgy" comedy career, career in politics, and ~1m youtube subscribers across his various channels. Pretty good return on investment.

> spread a few Hitlery catch phrases for some reason

This not an argument in his favor.

> How many youtube subscribers did he have at the point he posted it?

I looked it up. He had all of 400 subscribers when the video was uploaded. He clearly wasn't trying to leverage his massive youtube fanbase at the time. His girlfriend testified in court that her boyfriend wasn't racist. They were both caught off guard by the video's popularity and the response it got from authorities.

She said "I know what kind of person he is. It is just not a very nice thing to say obviously. I didn't think about it being anything other than him annoying me, I didn't think it would have the effect that it did."

> He subsequently turned it into an "edgy" comedy career, career in politics, and ~1m youtube subscribers across his various channels. Pretty good return on investment.

I mean, on one hand he's got more youtube subscribers than ever, but on the other he lost his job and will struggle to get hired for the rest of his life because people will assume he's a racist because of a joke... I'm not sure I'd call that a win exactly, but I can't blame him from trying to make the best of the situation any way that he can. He seems genuinely interested in fighting against what happened to him so that it doesn't happen to others.

> This not an argument in his favor.

That was your theory, although I still can't imagine what you thought the end goal there was. He goes through all that trouble to manufacture and promote a viral video with a couple seconds of hitler in it but for what exactly? If he were a secret nazi and this was all some kind of master plan what is the pay off here?

If you're really without any evidence that the video wasn't just a joke that people took too seriously, why have you accused him of being a racist with a nefarious plan? What kind of evidence do you think a person should have before they make a claim like that about another person?

Different perspective. It's not legal advice. It's read history advice...when governments change people generally go to prison or worse for things that were legal under the previous government. Since data is mobile and global there is good chance that if a government goes away the data won't.

I'm thinking McCarthyism as an example makes it good advice either way.

I think gp may be going for "persecution" rather than "prosecution", i.e. jury of public opinion rather than jury in a courtroom.

While this is technically correct from legal standpoint, the kernel of truth is in there. (Il)legality doesn't matter much compared to consequences. Consequences matter a lot, and in that case his advice is perfectly sound.

That one "joke" you made when you were sixteen might render you unemployable by 2040. People evolve, and their earlier marks on earth vanish. Before social media even the worst could re-make themselves into something better, now even the best have their worst moments permanently recorded.

The hope would be that, as more and more people are caught up in this sort of thing, we'd become more accepting of personal growth, as a society. This hasn't happened yet. Hopefully this is just a growing pain. But I can definitely see why people wouldn't want to take a chance, given the stakes!

there is no guarantee that the constitution will be the same in 30 years.

Also for Americans, parallel investigation is a thing.

> Also for Americans, parallel investigation is a thing.

Usually called parallel construction: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

you can never predict how old laws would work with modern systems - for example, in Russia you also have this rule, but after the mass persecution and censorship started the judges ruled that a post on social media, even one made before the new laws were written, is still perfect ground for conviction because it is still accessible at the time of arrest. So, how many tweets do people have? Are you going to closely follow new laws and comb through all of your post history on the entire internet every time a new law is passed?

Legally yes, but call it retroactive cancelation then... Something that is legal today but might be shameful or even ilegal in 30 years.

An example: a young person paints his face in black before going to a party. Decades later, black face is a thing and people find out about that party and it's now a shit show for the guy that is a prime minister of a country. There's no legal prosecution, but cancelation is even harder to deal with.

Just because you're protected from the government doesn't mean that the mob won't get you. Take for example, the founder of Mozilla. Apparently a number of years ago he donated a thousand dollars to a political organization that lobbied for some anti-LGBT laws. The public outrage forced him to resign.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich#Appointment_to_CE...

This is one reason that I create new account on each service every few months or until my cookies expire. I never remember or save passwords.

“anonymous” accounts aren’t even that anonymous...

Post a few times and just with your text (no IP address or anything), I can pretty accurately determine who you are:

https://twitter.com/austingwalters/status/104189476543920128...

Depends on population size, but HN (for instance) is small enough.

Ha, I did something similar to Quora [1] back in 2014/15-ish while the population size was still small as well.

Currently working on using similar tech to match would-be authors with the publishers that most commonly sign book deals in their style, plus a few other projects. Fun tech, but also lots of interesting potential!

[1] https://www.quora.com/How-vulnerable-are-Quora-answers-to-au...

And then there's the various anonymous imageboards where no registration is required and names are not only optional but actively discouraged. While discussion is not always constructive, it certainly represents a wider spectrum of thoughts and is therefore inherently more interesting.

Traditionally, threads and posts are ephemeral: old ones get deleted as new ones are created. There are automatic archiving services out there though.

The trick is to make every account a throwaway and not link anything together.

kkjkg

I don't think it's all that bad.

Forgettability certainly isn't something we have in day to day interactions with those around us, our friends, coworkers, nor our neighbors. We tend to pay dearly in our local social circles for the sort of behavior that we tempt ourselves with online. People just stop spending time with us when we can't get along. You have skin in the game.

If there's something different about the internet, it's that it compels so many of us to say regretful things that we want to delete.

> It's incredible how our online activities became permanent, no matter how much we try to erase the parts we don't like

I'm having the opposite realization lately. This tech trope of permanence isn't actually happening.

For instance, I used to be able to search some of my unique internet/gaming aliases 15 years ago and get thousands of results as I was a big forum poster back then and those hits showed up. Now I get three hits across the whole internet. Things die and nobody saves it. Why would they?

Then you look at Archive.org, the main presence I can think of that's aiming for long term records, and they have breadth, like website homepages going back weekly for a decade, but they rarely have evidence of that controversial deleted tweet from a week ago. Quickly, all people have are screenshots and then it fizzles out.

Finally, to my eyes, the only issue with permanence of things we've said in the past, if it exists, isn't with the permanence itself but because modern culture gives very few of us a way back from something unsavory (by someone's standard) that we once uttered.

Just hours ago, I had posts shadow removed from r/nba, ya sports. All well within rules, but not acceptable for whatever reason, and that's their right(maybe should only be for staff not sub mods though to shadow,) but it sucks. Makes a platform even if it's the only game in town pretty unusable. When I commented in said thread that they were shadow banning many comments, I got the 2 day ban :) I've commented before here, that shadow banning is very underhanded even if effective and especially infuriating when your content is fine which are most of my experiences. So then at some point you have to wonder about what even gets out vs what all is mined, and used however. Just populate the platforms fully with bots and marketeers I guess and let them talk amongst themselves. Maybe we can give those bots and marketers the right to vote as an extension of corporate personhood. The interesting thing is how you have zero recourse, not to say you should or have any right, but you were likely in the middle a discussion with another person/people and you are now to look the fool with removed content and no ability to respond. Shady business, but luckily sports in this case.

update nobody wants: I took other's advice and contacted the mods and reported like the private message suggests. Somehow that was "evading the ban" which got me a permanent site-wide ban. I never logged in to any other account or posted on the banned one in the sub banned from. It makes no sense. Did they just take a sub mods false word on this? I would have thought that's something determined in code pretty easily. I'll respect this though and not use their service, and talk truthfully about them to anyone who will listen. I understand they are a ycombinator company, so please don't ban me here too for sports wrongthink and being critical of a once really good platform.

And yet, whenever I want to refer back to a Reddit comment I made in the past, I can never find it even with these tools.

This isn't a new problem. "The internet is forever" is a adage I grew up with several decades ago. Everyone knows that if you post it on the internet, it can be copied and used against you.

What is new are the giant companies that profit greatly from encouraging users to deanonymize themselves and post compromising details on the internet, so those details can be mined and used for targeted advertising. I look at the adults who, just two decades ago, warned each other about what they put on the internet, and they're now on Facebook leaking nearly every detail about themselves and their private lives to the internet.

Damn this sure is about a level of Giving A Fuck About Twitter than I have never achieved in the thirteen years I've been on Twitter. Like, I just looked at the data Spoonbill has on my account and it's just a set of "egypturnash changed their website/bio/location" entries in mid-May 2020, which is when I assume this site first decided to look at my profile.

Also this sure is a stealth ad and a half for Spoonbill.

They have records in there since 2014, so I'm not sure if it's a project that has a monetization plan after even 7 years of existing. It's a quite fun app, and people used to these mash-ups in early days of Web 2.0 and REST APIs. It's not more than that. Although I just signed up, and hoping I can track people’s employment changes (I don't use LinkedIn).

Who cares? I don't mean "who cares about this article"; I found it worth the read. What I really mean is: is there really that much interest, or even that much of interest, in the edits of peoples' autobiographical sound bites?

We "learn" that Elon Musk is indeed self-centered and image-obsessed. Big deal, I'm sure he hopes that you think so, and you already knew so before reading this. Anyone whose net worth is tied to their public image and fandom is almost certainly the same. It's also not clear how much of those changes are actually his personality and how much are simply consistent with his public persona. A delta between the two would be interesting but almost by definition impossible to determine from this info.

Don't get me wrong: I'm sure there is a fascinating PhD or two to be found in this info. But for any ordinary person (including journalists or TMZ employee) are there any real, insightful nuggets in what is explicitly the process of curation?

People care. As evidence I present the entire yellow journalism, reality show, and influencer industry.

There’s an entire meme economy built on top of things like the batchelor. None of those people are even noteworthy.

People really really care.

I understand that many people are interested in celebrity. (That's why I included people like "TMZ employee" as "ordinary people").

I really meant the ephemera of autographical edits. It seemed as relevant as collecting used cocktail napkins of celebrities.

A parallel comment to yours suggests its fodder for "gotcha" posts. I guess that makes sense for those who like that, so does answer, a little, my "who cares" question.

It's "awesome" to make sure that if someone ever had something in there that's now embarrassing or wrong you can taunt them with it without having to have stalked them yourself. Stalker paradise.

Sigh. This is indeed an example of someone who would care.

HR seems to, and that alone is enough to cause massive disruption for most people, even the 'relatively well off'. If you aren't rich enough to never need to work again to survive, then your livelihood is one Twitter mob away from being destroyed.

Seriously, you think HR has time or interest in the updates to peoples’ Twitter bios? Their Twitter stream perhaps

> We "learn" that Elon Musk is indeed self-centered and image-obsessed.

It's an untestable hypothesis, but I've always wondered if anyone would care about Elon Musk if he never got hairplugs.

https://pagesix.com/2018/07/25/its-highly-likely-elon-musk-s...

I just can't imagine him developing a cult personality without it. I think people would think of him more like Ballmer - just kinda crazy.

Yeah, cuz nobody cares about Bezos

There was twitter thing a couple weeks ago comparing Tom Brady and a 1970s QB, and how young Brady looked. https://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/other/twitter-stunned-by-to... Yet almost nobody understood that yes Brady has had cosmetic work done, it isn't all natural youth he has.

Almost all male celebs have had work done. Same with many older sports and business people, such as Mark Cuban.

Combined with photo alteration, very few look as they would if they aged "normally".

I think so too. There have been studies that show that more attractive politicians get more votes (just for being more attractive), also attractive people get better jobs/wages. I'd even wager that Trump wouldn't have been president if he would look his age (or had less hair). Same analogy would definitely apply to Musk. There is an inherent quality to looks that hasn't been erased by us being more sophisticated than ever. As much as it's unfair.

Spoonbill updates are neat when people use twitter bios as a mini resume, like a linkedin feed of sorts. That way you can see who left facebook this week.

For starters, your current and future employers, dates and insurance companies.

> Who cares? I don't mean "who cares about this article"; I found it worth the read. What I really mean is: is there really that much interest, or even that much of interest, in the edits of peoples' autobiographical sound bites?

For stalkers, I bet there's plenty of demand.

This is awful. One more way to add to the social cooling.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24627363

You already have to think about everything you do online. Now you have to think about something you do even if it’s posted for a second. Some service is going to monitor it or one of the archive crusades will snap it up. This was already a concern, but now it’s more apparent. Now we have enterprise level employee monitoring for the internet.

None of this is new. It’s just getting worse. I fear for our future generations where they are discovering themselves and happen to post something online over their life journey and it’s immediately snapped up to be used against them later in life. We’ve been talking about this for years. What a shame we’re at this point. One day there will be a revolt to the internet. It will take a while, but it will happen.

If you want to use this service without signing up, you can browse someone's profile directly at https://spoonbill.io/data/<username>

is this by design, or just lazy coding?

facilitating crass creeping as a service where one monitors spoonbill for removal requests for the really interesting stuff

This only works if someone who follows this <username> has already signed up to the service.

Not really related, but Budgie Smuggler is the Australian common name for men's speedo like swimwear. The name is derived from the fact that the look of a man's privates while wearing the swim wear appears as if the man is hiding (smuggling) a small bird (a budgie) down his pants.

Hence, Budgie Smuggler.

FWIW the U.S. equivalent is "banana hammock".

A company has gone to town on the theme: https://budgysmuggler.com.au/collections/mens-swimwear

Not affiliated, I just think it is a laugh.

I've been wondering when something like this would be made. I've felt that it would be even more disgusting to track changes on LinkedIn profiles (imagine these changes being purchased by companies where you're interviewing).

Unfortunately the web is open and there's nothing really to stop it, sans regulations and trust that they will be enforced. Once your life is on the internet you might as well assume everything you say or do is being tracked in some version control repository for humans.

I did a vendor review last year for a SaaS which tracks the changes of your employees linkedin profiles (they also partnered with monster and a few other job boards). The service is used by HR departments to measure employee happiness and risk rate which person is looking.

can you share vendoor name/url ? thanks!

How is this disgusting? I'm pretty out of the loop with social media. But I'm assuming the major networks have the concept of a "private" profile. And I assume that such profiles wouldn't be available on this service.

If I'm wrong about the existence of private profiles, then the problem isn't this service. The problem would be publishing information publicly that they wish to remain private.

I guess I find it slimey in the sense that when you update your profile, you're usually not expecting the old information to follow you around. Someone may remove information because it hurts their career (e.g. removing information that can reveal your age). Or perhaps they've switched careers and if someone sees that it might be used against them. The point of using LinkedIn for an employee is to help sell their self. Would they use LinkedIn differently if they knew these changes would be tracked and potentially betray their intended use of the platform?

Of course you and I know better, but I don't think most people know their digital lives are so easily tracked and sold.

Back in 2013, at the intersection of peak .ly domain usage, crazy amounts of information available through Facebook's graph APIs (as well as other social networks), widespread GPS-equipped smartphone usage, and free and open APIs literally everywhere (including Google maps), along with my own re-education as a then-modern web developer after years of mostly desktop app development, I realised it would be possible to plot the movements of anyone you "knew" online within a pretty good margin of error in most cases using their social media updates.

As a joke - let me emphasise: AS A JOKE (we'll get to this in a minute) - I seriously considered (aware of the irony) registering stalk.ly as a domain name with Libyan Spider and using it to host a site that billed itself as an online private investigation agency with the tagline, "We'll find out what you need to know... for a price." The whole thing was overall going to look as shady as reasonably possible.

You'd be able to find out exactly what you'd been up to and where you'd been based on your social media posts, with a timeline, map view, etc. There'd be a sign-up option that would offer you the ability to do the same for your "friends".

Worried your partner has been having an affair? No problem: slap their profile URL in here and we'll tell you exactly what they've been up to and where they've been up to it, etc. Want to know what your kids or employees have been up to? We've got that covered too. Oh yeah.

The point was to highlight how much oversharing most of us do online, and how unaware we all often are of how much information about our lives we're really giving away. Also I was more than a bit curious about how many people would actually try to sign up, and I thought it might be funny.

Fortunately (I think, although I still wonder sometimes) my tendency to laziness kicked in and I never actually implemented it. I was also a bit concerned about the possibility of unintended consequences that could be personally detrimental. I have no doubt Facebook et all would have gone ber-effin-zerk once they'd spotted the app, but that wasn't my major concern - I was more worried about the reaction of friends, and my employer, if by some chance it had gained some traction.

The ideal outcome would have been for it to provide a certain amount of entertainment for a while, and possibly drawn some small attention to issues of privacy that - prior to that point - had very much been minority concerns. Still, I was quite worried about it backfiring.

The real plot twist would be if you send a message to the user they were stalking letting them know who made the attempt.

Absolute genius. That would have been incredible. It would also have caused the most incredible shitstorm.

Maybe let them check, offer a redacted or scrambled/fictionalised history, and then let their target know a week or two later.

Otherwise I think it would have been shut down really quickly. You really want the thing to build up a head of steam before the sky falls if at all possible.

There used to be a service - IIRC called "please rob me" - that tracked users' movements based on geotags in EXIF data posted to social media. Pretty scary, and actually implemented. Most sites weren't stripping EXIF data at the time, so if somebody posted a photo 5min ago you could get latitude/longitude by just examining the file. If the coords wasn't the person's home address, you'd know they were away and open to being robbed.

That's pretty terrifying. I think it's still an issue for Instagram: people with public profiles who post holiday photos are basically advertising the fact they're away from home unless they wait until they get back to post them.

Every time I learn about stuff like this I'm glad that I left the toxic cesspool that is social media years ago. (Of course I don't include HN in this category.)

I am with you there. Sometimes though I wish HN'ers were a little more compassionate to their fellow hackers. I suppose everything can't be perfect though.

>> though I wish HN'ers were a little more compassionate to their fellow hackers

The reason why HN'ers are not always kind to other HN'ers is, because HN is nothing more and nothing less than social media, albeit at its finest.

In the past I've theorized people do this for HN comments to track edits.

As a serial edit-until-finally-satisfied poster, I suppose it's nice to know that those edits are taking up terabytes of data in such systems. :)

Eventually HN will get hacked (doesn't everyone?) and all the upvotes/downvotes will be revealed too!

This reminds me of the moment Facebook redesigned profiles as "timelines" making it possible for anyone to zoom back 5 years and read status updates that you thought were lost to obscurity.

Was the information always public? Yes. But the difficulty in accessing it meant that only the most obsessive stalker would find their way back to it.

Making difficult-to-access public information extremely easy to access is type of privacy change.

I thought about creating a similar service for LinkedIn (targeted for recruiters) with the hypothesis that people updating their LinkedIn profiles are more likely to be searching or open to new jobs. Ultimately decided the creepiness was too high and that such tool shouldn't exist. There's also the caveat that while recruiters might be able to better target people in the market, HR can also identify people potentially job searching and punish them.

Its just a step before Doxxing as a Service.

> Social apps have made creepers out of all of us.

Back in the AOL Instant Messenger days of the early 2000's there was a service like this that tracked users' "Away Messages". People definitely tweaked those repeatedly as well :)

I wouldn't really call tracking public biography diffs "creeping" though. Either way, this may be interesting, but is there an actual viable business here?

Would anyone pay to see this information tracked? Maybe journalists?

While this made me feel creeped out at first, that “metadata” all seems like the public information that we intend to share when we signup for a service like Twitter.

Basic but important things such as renames don't even show up...

Systematic collection and archiving of "metadata" is not the same as data being available at some point in time. (It's really the same as the arguments against other automated surveillance: it's "public metadata" where your car is on public roads, but a country-wide database based on automated scans is still different than the fact that someone can follow you around manually)

man... stuff like this makes me glad I'm more socially/internet aware than I was before

breadcrumbs

Someone should make a profile noise generator that frequently updates profiles with non-substantive changes to make such tools less interesting.

One of my favorite subtle Twitter changes was "Tim Apple": https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/7/18254958/tim-cook-apple-tr...

The content here is definitely a useful meditation on what people's core ideals are over time, but I think it paints a really shallow image of human beings. Of course people's Twitter bios change over time, they're a roughly 25-word blurb, not a perfect representation of the individual running the account. People are allowed to feel some topics need more limelight than others at certain times of history, that doesn't mean they're some horrible vulture using the cause for personal gain. Just because you take Bernie2020 or BlackLivesMatter out of your Twitter bio doesn't mean you stop caring about those things, it just means you changed your Twitter bio.

Well said. Social dynamics would continue as pre Internet if humans naturally understood this extension. It seems profile pics with statuses turned out to be the complexity level sufficient for humans to begin conflating these abstractions with reality

Cases like this illustrate how electronic information is perception tech that has scaled human abilities much further than the printing press did, but with incorrect abstractions that have compounded over time, at the expense of our relationships...

We can’t stop human culture from evolving, but we would do well to measure more of where we’re headed. The best related examples off the top of my head is how debates via democracy were had at some point as we decided how juvenile criminal records work

Related, sonder is significant because it is a rare feeling

https://www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/post/23536922667/...

This is some serious in depth writing that speaks a lot of truths that platforms do not want to talk about: how they feed you data is not anywhere close to how the data is best consumed, and how that doesn't matter to the platforms success.

The LinkedIn analysis referred to in the article was really telling as well.

I've been thinking about this in terms of credit files recently. There are services that let you check it daily, but they don't provide a daily time series of the data - that's really where the value is and it's why they don't provide a consumer api.

Information wants to be free. If you post information in a public forum then that information can take on a life of its own. I'm just surprised that people are surprised by that.

Def reminds me of https://www.flock.network as well

This takes me back to the early days of thefacebook.com before the news feed existed and you regularly checked classmates' profiles for updates.

If they track 10,000,000 accounts, does this mean they make millions of request towards Twitter every minute? Isn't that against Twitters terms?

They might be paying Twitter for enterprise API access.

https://developer.twitter.com/en/products/twitter-api/enterp...

I'm not seeing anything about pricing. How do they make money?

> I'm not seeing anything about pricing. How do they make money?

Right next to the "Apply for enterprise access" button, there is a giant block of text saying "Our enterprise solutions are customized with predictable pricing".

Basically, they make money, because that API access isn't free. They don't list the actual price there because, as it is the case with most enterprise sales, there is no fixed pricing, and they work out individual deals on a case-by-case basis (which is based on the number of requests you expect your API to make per day/hour, volume discounts, long-term contract discounts, etc.).

Long story short, there is a price on it, but to find out what it is, you will have to apply. And the price you will get will probably not be representative of the price other people/enterprises get, but at least you will know what it will cost for your specific company/project.

Is archive.org then also creeping as a service?

Yes, it is.

Doesn't seem to work anymore

Seems like they don't have any European accounts? Probably because they don't want to deal with the GDPR issues?