LLM-Assisted Deanonymization

Source: Schneier on Security

LLM‑assisted de‑anonymization

Turns out that LLMs are good at de‑anonymization:

• LLM agents can identify who you are from your anonymous online posts.
• Across Hacker News, Reddit, LinkedIn, and anonymized interview transcripts, the method identifies users with high precision and scales to tens of thousands of candidates.

While it has been known that individuals can be uniquely identified by surprisingly few attributes, this was often practically limited. Data is frequently only available in unstructured form, and deanonymization traditionally required human investigators to search and reason based on clues.

We show that from a handful of comments, LLMs can infer where you live, what you do, and your interests — then search for you on the web. In our new research, we demonstrate that this is not only possible but increasingly practical.