Silk Road forums

Discussion => Security => Topic started by: burneraccount2398423 on March 18, 2012, 07:35 pm

Title: We need an option to burn SR profiles but keep stats
Post by: burneraccount2398423 on March 18, 2012, 07:35 pm
(disclaimer: this is a one-time account and will not be logged in again. Don't bother trying to PM me or anything, it just won't work).

Guess I will throw my hat in the ring with the other former LE on this site.

Patterns, data and panic are what get most humans busted for most crimes. Anything from jaywalking to murder, the arrest usually comes about due to one of those three things. Since most (not all!) of what happens on SR is illegal someplace, I wanted to ask the community to find a way to plug a particularly huge gap in security.

All of us who shop or sell on SR have a username/profile thingy that shows how trusted we are. The problem is that the longer we use these usernames, the more data builds up. The more we shop for one item or the more we sell one item, the more patterns build up. No, I can't think of a way that information will be used to bust someone, but maybe if enough years go by and enough people put their minds to it, somebody else will think of a way to use these data/pattern sets to bust people.

Solution: some way we can kill off our usernames every so often, make new ones, but still have a generic stat that shows our trustiness. The main reason a lot of us keep our usernames for the long term is that giving them up means we can't order from certain sellers, we have to finalize early a lot more, or for sellers nobody wants to take the risk of buying and/or prices have to be superlow and erase profit margins.

So we keep our profile names. And we keep building data. And we keep operating in patterns. And the problem just grows and grows until some genius figures out a way to put it all together using a supercomputer or some such thing.

If we could just wipe out our usernames, and transfer the general shopping stats (converted to a "range" rather than a static number. So if you have 34 transactions, it would read "between 30 and 40," and if you spend $2,423.23 it would say "between $2,000 and $3,000") and maybe a way to rate feedback too (such as "this seller gives detailed feedback 70-80% of the time")

Just a thought. Would LOVE to see this security feature enabled. The only thing that worries me about my personal safety on SR is the human aspect, and all that stuff attached to your profile name is human. Ditching our profile would drastically improve our safety, but nobody is going to do it if it means losing the goodwill they have built up.
Title: Re: We need an option to burn SR profiles but keep stats
Post by: thedoctorisin on March 18, 2012, 10:53 pm
Hmm.  Some thoughts:

If we switch out our username, and keep our trusted stats, I would venture to guess that someone with enough time (like LE) could determine when the usernames were switched.  For example, let's say that LE is watching on very specific person and they notice the ID is no longer active staring on 4/1.  All they would need to do is go back to 4/1 or 4/2 and look for other users that had the same trusted values (or close to it) and start observing them.

We also have to remember that some people use their names for marketing.  They know the seller by that specific name, changing that would be destroying the brand, especially if someone doesn't come on the site that often.  Some may be ok with the change, others not so much.

If one is looking for a more 'anonymous' system, I would say that the user name is randomly generated alphanumeric characters each time they login to the account. So, they have a register ID but what is shown to the public is different each and every time.  Again, this would not work for people who build their brand, but it does address the point.  I would think making the tracking would be orders of magnitude harder for tracking.

Granted, all of this would be moot if LE found the SR data sources...
Title: Re: We need an option to burn SR profiles but keep stats
Post by: coptcha on March 19, 2012, 08:33 pm
I can see the use of a "range" vs. the very specific amounts that show now. There are probably hundreds of people in the $1k-$2k range but only one or two with exactly $1,743.23 as an amount, thus a range is way more anon than a specific amount. It's a good point, but that info is only seen by the account owner and vendors they are currently buying from, so I don't think LE can really harvest them without doing something absurd like selling to one person dozens of times and taking snapshots of the stats each time. Which is so much work and so much expense (and so much liability, since they would have to let the drugs get out into the wild over and over again to get that data pattern) that it just won't happen.

A range would be a VERY GOOD IDEA if SR was like eBay, with publicly viewable profiles and whatnot, but since buyers don't have those on SR it isn't needed. Would certainly not hurt, but won't really help much either.

Changing our buyer names every few months would be really nice. Lots of buyers buy a small amount of something from various buyers to check them out, which results in their name and address being sent out many times to different people, at least some of whom the buyer chooses to not do business with anymore. Each of those vendors is a potential screwup who may not delete the address or some such thing, and the only thing that connects a buyer's address to this site over and over again is the username. I would love to be able to get a new ID every tenth order or so without losing my stats. Maybe a "stealth mode" for buyers who just don't want to be connected to the ever-increasing stream of feedback they leave (though now that I think about it, our names aren't visible to anyone but people we are buying from anyway, right? So, maybe there is no point there either).

As for sellers, that's a whole different ballgame. They run a business and they can't change their name without ruining their business. If they change usernames but find a way to let customers know the new name is the same person as the old name, then there is no point in changing it. But short of a human error, sellers are still pretty safe on SR as long as they stick to the standard accepted practices.

Not bad ideas, but probably not necessary unless it can be done really easily.