3 ms·

stylometry is far too strong

caminante 3y ago
Deleting protects you against stylometry (and further identity detection)? Ha! Wishful thinking with all of the auto-archivers. If you post on reddit, it's likely already crawled and archived somewhere.
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  It is not great, but it is better (if you wish to not be identified) to keep it in fewer perhaps non-public or poorly indexed archives. The internet does forget, sometimes.
  - nickstinemates 3y ago
    That the internet never forgets is a myth. It forgets surprisingly quickly and I think will only accelerate. Sure, someone may have a copy of something somewhere, but discovering it via any search engine is impossible. Personally I put a lot of PHP and VB code out ~20 years ago that I could find easily until I couldn't. There's Myspace profiles I've tried to pull up, images posted by friends 15 years ago in random places. Early video. All gone.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      I generally agree. It depends how Internet famous you were, how hard a person looks, how common your name is, whether there's something specific you're looking for about a person. But, yeah, I'm willing to bet that a lot of random casual searches wouldn't turn up some Internet scandal/controversy around a non-famous person unless you really knew what to look for.
    - nativeit 3y ago
      I agree, although trends for whether this is becoming more or less the default is not quite as clear in my mind. On one hand, the sheer mass of content being generated every day has become exponentially larger (I wonder if this has begun leveling off at all?), so there’s more to index and presumably more noise with which to conceal a signal. On the other hand, data science has progressed, storage media is cheaper, and everything is much more accessible; As a result creepy services like LexisNexis, Palantir, and TLOxp have all become vastly more sophisticated in their ability to retain and analyze data that they can pretty effectively associate with specific people/organizations. I’m not sure which factor is more influential—the ability for data to persist, or the ability for it to then be found and interpreted. Would it matter if the content was still available in some forgotten corner of the internet if there weren’t effective tools available for finding it and connecting it back to its author? It’s actually sort of entertaining to test the limits of this on yourself. I tried to find original media and references from a band I played with circa 2002. We were being ambitious with our publicity efforts, and consistently pumping audio, video, and images onto whatever nascent services were available at the time (from memory I can recall CD Baby, LastFM, Craigslist, miscellaneous forums, and towards the end, MySpace). I had already been designing websites for several years by that point, so we had a website, one that wasn’t just a Geocities/Anglefire template. That said, I am pretty sure that was at the height of my career with Macromedia’s Flash and ActionScript, so no real surprise that it didn’t get Archived in any functional form. One strategy that my own experience has found quite effective is to avoid using unique or unusual identifiers. If you’re named something like Arthur Dent it is going to be considerably more difficult to find and associate information than if you’re name is Zaphod Beeblebrox. That’s obvious, but it extends to everything else, from usernames to product brand preferences—if you stick to the middle of every given bell curve then your needle will necessarily reside in a much larger haystack. The few things that tend to be unique, at least when correlated with things like timelines or location—things like telephone numbers, email addresses, usernames, account numbers, etc.—can usually be effectively obscured one way or a another. The things that can’t (government ID numbers) then become crucial to keep private. Except, at least one of those creepy services (TLOxp) was built by one of the three main credit rating agencies and so almost definitely has your social security number already, and has been attaching it to all manner of data for several years, all while also selling it off to anyone with a budget (not to mention losing it outright to hackers), so any concerted efforts to conceal oneself seems almost certainly doomed. It’d be an ideal problem for national governments to address using consumer protection laws and privacy regulations if it wasn’t also in our best interests to protect ourselves from said governments. Sorry for the essay, this line of thought evidently yanked a pretty intertwined thread for me.
  - caminante 3y ago
    I agree with your critique that stylometry overrides throwaway accounts. The issue is "deleting." AFAIK, nobody's disagreeing that the internet can forget and deleting is "better" for privacy. The question is "how much" better. Here we're talking about the false sense of privacy through erasure when archivers should be assumed to be running everywhere and at all times. The latter weighs in favor of the parent's critique that deleting is not constructive.
lelandfe 3y ago
launder your style through ChatGPT I wonder if one could hook up a browser extension to do this
- npongratz 3y ago
  Launder it by freely giving it to a large-scale data vacuuming/surveillance operation?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - nickthegreek 3y ago
    Using a local LLM could work just as well if all you are doing is asking it slightly change existing text. The concept itself paired with a throwaway account(s) seems to be better than other alternatives like just deleting everything.
- tivert 3y ago
  >> stylometry is far too strong > launder your style through ChatGPT > I wonder if one could hook up a browser extension to do this It seems totally feasible. Though I think it would be far more interesting to make a purpose built anti-stylometry tool, that explicitly tries to analyze for and mute the signals stylometry uses. Edit: what I'm talking about is apparently called "adversarial stylometry": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylometry#Adversarial_stylometry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylometry#Adversarial_stylome... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adversarial_stylometry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adversarial_stylometry
  - lelandfe 3y ago
    > All adversarial stylometry shares the core idea of faithfully paraphrasing the source text so that the meaning is unchanged but the stylistic signals are obscured Having an LLM rewrite a comment would do this entirely, no? Are you just interested from an academic perspective how one might build something more surgical, that only changes some words in a comment?
remram 3y ago
Stylometry can link long-lived identities, but can't do much if every throwaway only posts a couple of comments. There needs to be enough content to analyze. Especially if the overall community is large, like Reddit.
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  assuming that you don't accidentally use a totally unique idiosyncrasy of yours in one of those comments
matheusmoreira 3y ago
Is there no automated way to defeat stylometry? Software that rewords and restructures writing so that it becomes unattributable? AI should be able to do it.

Deleting protects you against stylometry (and further identity detection)? Ha! Wishful thinking with all of the auto-archivers. If you post on reddit, it's likely already crawled and archived somewhere.

whimsicalism 3y ago
It is not great, but it is better (if you wish to not be identified) to keep it in fewer perhaps non-public or poorly indexed archives. The internet does forget, sometimes.
- nickstinemates 3y ago
  That the internet never forgets is a myth. It forgets surprisingly quickly and I think will only accelerate. Sure, someone may have a copy of something somewhere, but discovering it via any search engine is impossible. Personally I put a lot of PHP and VB code out ~20 years ago that I could find easily until I couldn't. There's Myspace profiles I've tried to pull up, images posted by friends 15 years ago in random places. Early video. All gone.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    I generally agree. It depends how Internet famous you were, how hard a person looks, how common your name is, whether there's something specific you're looking for about a person. But, yeah, I'm willing to bet that a lot of random casual searches wouldn't turn up some Internet scandal/controversy around a non-famous person unless you really knew what to look for.
  - nativeit 3y ago
    I agree, although trends for whether this is becoming more or less the default is not quite as clear in my mind. On one hand, the sheer mass of content being generated every day has become exponentially larger (I wonder if this has begun leveling off at all?), so there’s more to index and presumably more noise with which to conceal a signal. On the other hand, data science has progressed, storage media is cheaper, and everything is much more accessible; As a result creepy services like LexisNexis, Palantir, and TLOxp have all become vastly more sophisticated in their ability to retain and analyze data that they can pretty effectively associate with specific people/organizations. I’m not sure which factor is more influential—the ability for data to persist, or the ability for it to then be found and interpreted. Would it matter if the content was still available in some forgotten corner of the internet if there weren’t effective tools available for finding it and connecting it back to its author? It’s actually sort of entertaining to test the limits of this on yourself. I tried to find original media and references from a band I played with circa 2002. We were being ambitious with our publicity efforts, and consistently pumping audio, video, and images onto whatever nascent services were available at the time (from memory I can recall CD Baby, LastFM, Craigslist, miscellaneous forums, and towards the end, MySpace). I had already been designing websites for several years by that point, so we had a website, one that wasn’t just a Geocities/Anglefire template. That said, I am pretty sure that was at the height of my career with Macromedia’s Flash and ActionScript, so no real surprise that it didn’t get Archived in any functional form. One strategy that my own experience has found quite effective is to avoid using unique or unusual identifiers. If you’re named something like Arthur Dent it is going to be considerably more difficult to find and associate information than if you’re name is Zaphod Beeblebrox. That’s obvious, but it extends to everything else, from usernames to product brand preferences—if you stick to the middle of every given bell curve then your needle will necessarily reside in a much larger haystack. The few things that tend to be unique, at least when correlated with things like timelines or location—things like telephone numbers, email addresses, usernames, account numbers, etc.—can usually be effectively obscured one way or a another. The things that can’t (government ID numbers) then become crucial to keep private. Except, at least one of those creepy services (TLOxp) was built by one of the three main credit rating agencies and so almost definitely has your social security number already, and has been attaching it to all manner of data for several years, all while also selling it off to anyone with a budget (not to mention losing it outright to hackers), so any concerted efforts to conceal oneself seems almost certainly doomed. It’d be an ideal problem for national governments to address using consumer protection laws and privacy regulations if it wasn’t also in our best interests to protect ourselves from said governments. Sorry for the essay, this line of thought evidently yanked a pretty intertwined thread for me.
- caminante 3y ago
  I agree with your critique that stylometry overrides throwaway accounts. The issue is "deleting." AFAIK, nobody's disagreeing that the internet can forget and deleting is "better" for privacy. The question is "how much" better. Here we're talking about the false sense of privacy through erasure when archivers should be assumed to be running everywhere and at all times. The latter weighs in favor of the parent's critique that deleting is not constructive.

lelandfe 3y ago

launder your style through ChatGPT I wonder if one could hook up a browser extension to do this

npongratz 3y ago
Launder it by freely giving it to a large-scale data vacuuming/surveillance operation?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- nickthegreek 3y ago
  Using a local LLM could work just as well if all you are doing is asking it slightly change existing text. The concept itself paired with a throwaway account(s) seems to be better than other alternatives like just deleting everything.
tivert 3y ago
>> stylometry is far too strong > launder your style through ChatGPT > I wonder if one could hook up a browser extension to do this It seems totally feasible. Though I think it would be far more interesting to make a purpose built anti-stylometry tool, that explicitly tries to analyze for and mute the signals stylometry uses. Edit: what I'm talking about is apparently called "adversarial stylometry": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylometry#Adversarial_stylometry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylometry#Adversarial_stylome... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adversarial_stylometry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adversarial_stylometry
- lelandfe 3y ago
  > All adversarial stylometry shares the core idea of faithfully paraphrasing the source text so that the meaning is unchanged but the stylistic signals are obscured Having an LLM rewrite a comment would do this entirely, no? Are you just interested from an academic perspective how one might build something more surgical, that only changes some words in a comment?

remram 3y ago

Stylometry can link long-lived identities, but can't do much if every throwaway only posts a couple of comments. There needs to be enough content to analyze. Especially if the overall community is large, like Reddit.

whimsicalism 3y ago
assuming that you don't accidentally use a totally unique idiosyncrasy of yours in one of those comments

matheusmoreira 3y ago

Is there no automated way to defeat stylometry? Software that rewords and restructures writing so that it becomes unattributable? AI should be able to do it.