memes

This comment will be searchable one day if it’s not already. With LLMs I’m not sure how it won’t be possible to match writing styles, formats, vocabulary with natural progressions in these over time.

TLDR: past anonymity is no guarantee of future

In both cases it comes down to being lost in the crowd.

In the 1980s only celebrities worried about having their information in a phone book. That, and maybe people with really unique names. That's because getting the information out of a phone book was tedious. The only entity that presumably had a searchable database (other than maybe the NSA) was the phone company. They weren't necessarily trustworthy, but they had better ways of making money than spending all kinds of computer power on individual people. If you wanted to backwards-search a phone number it was an incredibly labour-intensive process without the database.

These days people are much more careful about certain aspects of their identity, but share other things. The thing that's the same is that picking any one person out of a crowd is still hard.

Any one fish in a school of fish is relatively safe from predators because there's no reason for a predator to target them specifically. Or, like the joke about running away from a bear: you don't need to be faster than the bear, just faster than the other guy. In this case, you don't have to be a completely locked down target, you just have to avoid standing out and being an obvious target.

There is nothing stopping anyone from finding out exactly who you are, where you are, and what you're doing.

All right prove it.

Post my real name, real home address, and my current location.

There's nothing stopping you, apparently.

Having your name, address and home phone number in a book that only has regional numbers and isn’t widely distributed beyond the local scope is the the smallest privacy concern.

That was actually the idea behind the "right to be forgotten" ruling in the EU: The original case was an IIRC Spanish restaurant owner, quite successful, but when he googled his (quite unique) name the first hit was an article about his first restaurant going bankrupt 20 years ago. Back in the days if you were a journalist investigating the guy you'd figure out that he once had a restaurant in town soandso and then rummage through the town's newspaper archive and find the article, and then decide whether it's relevant and how to handle it, now everyone and their dog is finding it by accident. And clicking on it, meaning it will stay the first hit because for google clicks mean that things are relevant.

Seems like the average young person is fine posting photos and videos on all the social media platforms journaling their whereabouts and habits too.

Heh. The German Pirate Party had an ideological split over that one, the majority vs. the data protection critical twits (they reclaimed the term twit for themselves after being called exactly that). Their blog is still up. The idea of post-privacy is that at some point, noone will fucking care because everyone has their skeletons not in their closet but hanging from the balcony... which isn't a bad state of affairs in itself, but going all accelerationist on it isn't the greatest idea.

On the flip side you had a second rift line, that between the majority and the tinfoil hats -- a very loud minority, not just because of all the crackling. The kind of people who thought that it should somehow be possible to be a politician, vote on party policy etc. and still stay anonymous.