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> If that were standard practice collaboration would eventually uncover that was occurring, and a leaker would compensate. I don't think that's really the issu

> If that were standard practice collaboration would eventually uncover that was occurring, and a leaker would compensate. I don't think that's really the issue. Let's suppose you have 64 employees with access to a doc. You can uniquely identify them with 6 bits in the doc. A doc of a couple pages would be more than enough to put in those bits, and many more. Even if you had two collaborators who shared docs for a word for word diff, they'd still miss half the identifying bits, which reduces the potential culprit pool to 8, and that's assuming zero redundancy. The issue I imagine is more usability. Someone identifies one of those bits as content that should be changed: what happens when they suggest the edit?

tablespoon 5y ago
> Even if you had two collaborators who shared docs for a word for word diff, they'd still miss half the identifying bits, which reduces the potential culprit pool to 8, and that's assuming zero redundancy. That's not really what I'm talking about. It seems like you're focusing on identifying all the exact bits that are being used to identify someone, but that's not important. What is important is the recipients figuring out that someone is monkeying with the documents in a systematic way to trace them. Once a leaker knows that, instead of leaking the exact document for publication, they'd either leak reworded summary of key points themselves, or require the journalist to only publish something similar.