I just got a “New users interested in dialoguing with you (not a match yet)” notification and when I clicked on it the first thing I saw was that exactly one person in my Top Voted users list was marked as recently active in dialogue matching. I don’t vote much so my Top Voted users list is in fact an All Voted users list. This means that either the new user interested in dialoguing with me is the one guy who is conspicuously presented at the top of my page, or it’s some random that I’ve never interacted with and have no way of matching.
This is technically not a privacy violation because it could be some random, but I have to imagine this is leaking more bits of information than you intended it to (it’s way more than a 5:1 update), so I figured I’d report it as a bug unanticipated feature.
It further occurs to me that anyone who was dedicated to extracting information from the system could completely deanonymize their matches by setting a simple script to scrape https://www.lesswrong.com/dialogueMatching every minute or so and cross-referencing “new users interested” notifications with the moment someone shoots to the top of the “recently active in dialogue matching” list. It sounds like you don’t care about that kind of attack though so I guess I’m mentioning it for completeness.
The notifications for matches only go out on a weekly basis, so I don’t think timing it would work. Also, we don’t sort users who clicked you in any way differently than other users on your page, so you might have been checked by a person who you haven’t voted much on.
I just got a “New users interested in dialoguing with you (not a match yet)” notification and when I clicked on it the first thing I saw was that exactly one person in my Top Voted users list was marked as recently active in dialogue matching. I don’t vote much so my Top Voted users list is in fact an All Voted users list. This means that either the new user interested in dialoguing with me is the one guy who is conspicuously presented at the top of my page, or it’s some random that I’ve never interacted with and have no way of matching.
This is technically not a privacy violation because it could be some random, but I have to imagine this is leaking more bits of information than you intended it to (it’s way more than a 5:1 update), so I figured I’d report it as a
bugunanticipated feature.It further occurs to me that anyone who was dedicated to extracting information from the system could completely deanonymize their matches by setting a simple script to scrape https://www.lesswrong.com/dialogueMatching every minute or so and cross-referencing “new users interested” notifications with the moment someone shoots to the top of the “recently active in dialogue matching” list. It sounds like you don’t care about that kind of attack though so I guess I’m mentioning it for completeness.
We thought of these things!
The notifications for matches only go out on a weekly basis, so I don’t think timing it would work. Also, we don’t sort users who clicked you in any way differently than other users on your page, so you might have been checked by a person who you haven’t voted much on.