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I know stylometry is a thing, but is it good enough to fingerprint you according to what you know or talk about? What about in the future as NLP advances? For
by uyt 5y ago
I know stylometry is a thing, but is it good enough to fingerprint you according to what you know or talk about? What about in the future as NLP advances?
For a historic example, '...although Newton's solution was anonymous, he was recognized by Bernoulli as its author; "tanquam ex ungue leonem" (we recognize the lion by his claw).' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Later_life_of_Isaac_Newton#Bernoulli's_mathematical_challenge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Later_life_of_Isaac_Newton#Ber... I am guessing the proof techniques were so hard/original that Bernoulli concluded only Newton could've come up with it at that time.
Likewise, I would assume there's only a handful of people in the world who have this level of expertise on online anonymity. So do you then have to keep this expertise completely isolate to one particular anonymous account to avoid being correlated?
My concern applies to knowledge that isn't particularly world class too, as long as it's in a unique combination. I guess in some sense what we know makes us who we are so it's hard to avoid being "identified" that way without splitting your personality?
- anonypla 5y agoYes, I think it's possible to correlate two identities just using stylometry. Or at least it would be sufficient to shorten the list of possibilities significantly. But I also think this is something that (at this stage) only a highly skilled/motivated adversary with considerable resources would do (such as a state agency). And I also guess this depends on your "original identity" being "talkative" online so that the correlation could find something to correlate to. I don't think my guide is paranoid enough to protect fro such adversaries as for instance Tor itself made it clear in their design paper that protection against a "global adversary" is not really intended. In my case, this seems "out of scope" for now and above the threat model of my guide.