Amazing mind reader reveals his 'gift'

Duval Guillaume0 HN recommenders · 2012–2021
15M views · demo · evergreen · Uploaded 2012-09-24

A Belgian bank-safety campaign video in which a supposed clairvoyant stuns people by revealing personal financial details, then shows he found them all online. It warns viewers to be careful about what they share and about online banking security.

Cited as a vivid demonstration of how much personal data is findable and shared online, in privacy and tracking threads.

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3 comments from Hacker News

@fruchtose2012 · in “Dave The Incredible Mindreader – How Does He Do It?”

This link nothing but blogspam. Just go here for the video that the link pads with meaningless text: [VIDEO]

@kelseydh2016 · in “Trackers”

That reminds me a lot of this video: [VIDEO] Would be great to make one similar combining the two concepts in regards to sharing phone data.

@dredmorbius2021 · in “How can you tell if someone is lying?”

The notion that behavioural tics can betray lying (or truth-telling) is also part of the kayfabye / stage dressing of truth-determination and vetting. If you have a set of props (polygraph, truth-teller, various actual or fabricated observations, etc.) that you can present as a plausible basis for claiming someone is lying, then you can apply more severe psychological pressure, possibly getting them to break and confess, though often also simply forcing a false confession, a very real hazard. (See various accounts suggesting that friendly-demeanor interrogation is far more useful.) In the account I detailed in an earlier comment on this thread, I'd ... let slip to people who I thought might feed back my counterpart ... that I was in touch with some people who were incredibly good at hacking online information, and dug for (and revealed) a few details I'd turned up ... which actually were based on reverse-engineering a database structure and assessing the contents. (One ... glorious personal weakness of the adversary revealed some critical information I'd been looking for, in particular.) I suspect that message did find its way back, as my adversary was caught entirely unawares. The net effects weren't entirely unlike a YouTube video on an "amazing mind reader" (actually warning of data surveillance and privacy ... on behalf of a bank): [VIDEO] And the CIA's Crypto AG operation, in which a firm allegedly selling products to encrypt Telex communications had been back-doored for