<story><title>Maigret: Collect a dossier on a person by username from thousands of sites</title><url>https://github.com/soxoj/maigret</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>AdmiralAsshat</author><text>Seems incredibly prone to false positives. For example, I can guarantee that I&amp;#x27;m not the AdmiralAsshat on Reddit, Gmail, or Twitter, because that username was already taken by the time I tried to sign up for them.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>smeagull</author><text>You always need to balance Precision and Recall. For something like this, you want to be exhaustive.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve worked on search engines, and depending on who is using them, that balance gets struck differently on the ROC curve. For legal matters, for example, they want every record that might match. For ad-hoc (google style) queries, nobody reads the second page so you care more about Precision @ 20 (or really, at 3)</text></comment>
<story><title>Maigret: Collect a dossier on a person by username from thousands of sites</title><url>https://github.com/soxoj/maigret</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>AdmiralAsshat</author><text>Seems incredibly prone to false positives. For example, I can guarantee that I&amp;#x27;m not the AdmiralAsshat on Reddit, Gmail, or Twitter, because that username was already taken by the time I tried to sign up for them.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lol768</author><text>Yup; for common&amp;#x2F;short usernames it&amp;#x27;s all too common for other folks to register using the same identifier.&lt;p&gt;The end result seems to be that this tool decides you&amp;#x27;re interested in &amp;quot;dating&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;porn&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;stocks&amp;quot; and tags you with a &amp;quot;ru&amp;quot; country code - despite not owning any of the accounts that the determination has been based off of.&lt;p&gt;The README should come with a disclaimer really.</text></comment>