De-anonymizing Social Networks https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/shmat_oak09.pdf If I understood it correctly from a quick scan: by talking to the same people across different networks (e.g. Alice is friends with Bob and Claire on both GNU Social and Mastodon, but all of them have different and untraceable nicknames), Mallory can figure out with high probability which account is Alice's on the other network given a network/friends graph of both.