Story from my past: at university, I once partook of a game called the “assassins’ guild”. It was a kind of Battle Royale. Fifty-odd participants would each be circularly assigned two “targets” from the other forty-nine, and instructed to “kill” them (for example, by writing “knife” on a stick and poking them with it, or by shooting them with a nerf gun). You’d be told their halls of residence, so you could find them there, if needed.
Your targets were revealed at 09:00 on the first day. I found my target’s Facebook page, found a post announcing her going to uni, and saw she was studying a subject which shared a module with my subject. From there I was able to pull up the timetable of her subject, guess which lectures were mandatory, and notice that she had a mandatory one right now. I “killed” her at 10:00 as she left the lecture hall.
I didn’t even get the first kill! Someone else pulled off the same trick even quicker than me!
This is with a smart uni student’s level of skill: the only thing it took was effort. If AI is good enough to do this, then privacy removal will be very easy to perform at scale.
We had basically the same game (until it was banned) many years (I presume) before your experience. I’m not even sure the game made sense in your day, with the sort of information you describe, let alone in the modern day. We have made a profound transition from a world where you didn’t know most (theoretically knowable) things to one where at near zero cost you can know anything.
Story from my past: at university, I once partook of a game called the “assassins’ guild”. It was a kind of Battle Royale. Fifty-odd participants would each be circularly assigned two “targets” from the other forty-nine, and instructed to “kill” them (for example, by writing “knife” on a stick and poking them with it, or by shooting them with a nerf gun). You’d be told their halls of residence, so you could find them there, if needed.
Your targets were revealed at 09:00 on the first day. I found my target’s Facebook page, found a post announcing her going to uni, and saw she was studying a subject which shared a module with my subject. From there I was able to pull up the timetable of her subject, guess which lectures were mandatory, and notice that she had a mandatory one right now. I “killed” her at 10:00 as she left the lecture hall.
I didn’t even get the first kill! Someone else pulled off the same trick even quicker than me!
This is with a smart uni student’s level of skill: the only thing it took was effort. If AI is good enough to do this, then privacy removal will be very easy to perform at scale.
We had basically the same game (until it was banned) many years (I presume) before your experience. I’m not even sure the game made sense in your day, with the sort of information you describe, let alone in the modern day. We have made a profound transition from a world where you didn’t know most (theoretically knowable) things to one where at near zero cost you can know anything.