2026-04-30
minor edit 2026-08-08
As an attacker, maybe you should exploit divergence between social norms/morality and actual offence-defence balance
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Summary
- As an attacker who wants information on a target, you can go scrape dating apps and do reverse image search on everyone (by scraping all faces on the internet or using PimEyes or similar). This is technically very easy but social norms aren't accepting of it yet. Technological offence/defence will eventually change social norms.
- There might be more tactics similar to this, where obtaining information is technically very easy but no one has done it yet because of social norms. There may exist more low-hanging fruit of this type.
Main
- One maxim I have repeatedly stated elsewhere is "technological offense/defence balances shape incentives shape morality." First, the offence/defence balance shifts (usually due to some technological breakthrough), then people's incentives change as a result and it becomes eaiser for some set of people to get what they want, then they create new moral rhetoric to justify this route.
- There is a very long list of examples I have to justisfy this claim, out of scope for this post.
- In the privacy/transparency context, the offence/defence balance is rapidly changing and so is society's morality over it. Technology has made transparency (not privacy) a lot easier, and society also has gotten used to a lot more transparency as compared to 30 years ago.
- However, there is still a divergence between the two.
- For example, there is still a divergence between what people's social norms and morality is around privacy of sex life, versus the actual offence/defence balance on privacy of this information.
- For whatsoever reason, as of 2026, people do still expect a high level of privacy around their sex life and to a lesser degree, around their family life. This varies by culture ofcourse, atheist cultures are likely to be more public about this than religious cultures for instance.
- However, the offence/defence balance for sexual information is shifting in favour of offence, just like it is for every other type of information. For starters, a significant fraction of dating happens online instead of irl because of economic pressures (people want to save time and get efficient matchmaking), this already means reduced privacy. Furthermore, it is actually quite easy to make this information public and searchable. (Use a browser emulator like selenium to scrape the dating profiles, use existing reverse face lookup tool or else scrape all images on the internet and implement embedding search. And lastly, yes, use jailbroken AI models to write all the code.) There have been attempts to do this and release the datasets or tools, but due to social pushback, multiple such people took down the datasets or tools.
- If you are playing this game on the attacker's side, it seems like you especially want to go for tactics like this, where the offence/defence balance is in favour of offence, and the only reason the data and tools are not public already is because social norms haven't caught up.
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