this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2026
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LLMs can unmask anonymous internet users for $1–4 each, matching 67% of pseudonymous Hacker News accounts to real LinkedIn profiles at 90% precision (arstechnica.com)
submitted 1 month ago by Innerworld@lemmy.world to c/privacy@programming.dev
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[–] RickyRigatoni@piefed.zip 8 points 1 month ago (4 children)

What does 67% at 90% precision mean

[–] MadhuGururajan@programming.dev 2 points 1 month ago

Precision: ratio of true positives to total predicted positives.

Recall: ratio of true positives to actual positives

[–] LodeMike@lemmy.today 1 points 1 month ago

67% made a match. 90% of matches were right.

No idea how they got that number, though.

[–] lasta@piefed.world 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Recall—that is, how many users were successfully deanonymized—was as high as 68 percent. Precision—meaning the rate of guesses that correctly identify the user—was up to 90 percent.

I take that to mean there is a 90% match between anonymized posts and real life profiles for 68% of users and that it’s a minimum confidence level needed for a user to be considered deanonymized.