By Isaaq Tomkins
Publication Date: 2026-03-08 14:00:00
AI has made it much easier for malicious hackers to identify anonymous social media accounts, a new study warns.
In most testing scenarios, Large Language Models (LLMs) – the technology behind platforms like ChatGPT – successfully matched anonymous online users with their real identities on other platforms based on the information they posted.
AI researchers Simon Lermen and Daniel Paleka said LLMs make it more cost-effective to carry out sophisticated privacy attacks and force a “fundamental reassessment of what can be considered private online.”
In their experiment, the researchers fed anonymous accounts into an AI and made it collect all sorts of information. They gave a hypothetical example of a user talking about problems at school and walking their dog, Biscuit, through a “Dolores Park.”
In this hypothetical case, the AI then looked for these details elsewhere and assigned @anon_user42 to the known identity with a high degree of confidence.
While this…
