How Bungie identified a mass sender of fake DMCA notices
A side note that I found particularly interesting> On March 22, the Reynolds account logged out of Google and less than a second later, the Wiland account logged in, suggesting the same person was behind both accounts.I've always wondered how often timing analysis is used in practice by surveillence big tech. I suspect that as people become more privacy aware, and start using VPNs, pseudonames, multiple accounts, etc, that big tech will start using timing analysis more and more to correlate traffic and identify users. Like if your friend sends you a Reddit link on WhatsApp, and you immediately open it in your browser, that Reddit session is now linked to you.Another more complex example: let's say Google has already identified your Reddit account. You open a Reddit discussion, and deep in the discussion it links to a Youtube video, and you open it in your browser. Now even if you weren't logged into Youtube, Google could guess that it's you based on the timing of when your Reddit account opened the discussion, and when the linked Youtube video was accessed. And not just that video, but now every Youtube video watched in the same browsing session, is now linked back to you (assuming you have first-party cookies enabled, which is basically required if you ever want to log into anything).Seems a bit paranoid, but I actually suspect this happened to me a few months ago. I was using a FOSS reddit client and clicked a youtube link buried deep in a reddit thread, and opened it in Newpipe (a FOSS youtube client). I wasn't logged in, and was using a VPN, and yet the next day on my Youtube feed I started getting recommendations based on that video (and those recommendations were very different from my usual ones). Scary stuff.