Sure, everything is ultimately a political problem, but this one is completely driven by technological change. In the USSR (and GDR), it took them a staff of hundreds of thousands of people to write up their reports.
Now it would take a single skilled person the better part of an afternoon to, for example, download a HN dump, and have an LLM create reports on the users. You could put in things like political affiliation, laws broken, countries travelled recently, net worth range, education and work history, professional contacts, ...
I’m not sure who “they” are, but I’m pretty sure they’re already doing that, and don’t need me to get the idea. I think it’s important to talk about what LLMs mean for privacy. Profiling every HN user might be a useful tool to are people more aware of the problems. But I totally get your unease, which is also why I haven’t done that myself.
The cat is out of the bag, can’t get it back in by ignoring the fact.
Security by obscurity :). Accept that they will probably do this and work towards a counter-measure. Political solutions might be a counter-measure, as the Op of this thread is probably alluding to.
Now it would take a single skilled person the better part of an afternoon to, for example, download a HN dump, and have an LLM create reports on the users. You could put in things like political affiliation, laws broken, countries travelled recently, net worth range, education and work history, professional contacts, ...