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I've forced myself to use different writing styles when trying to be anonymous. I've no clue if I succeeded, but I'm relatively sure that I wasn't as clearly my
by NegativeK 14y ago
I've forced myself to use different writing styles when trying to be anonymous. I've no clue if I succeeded, but I'm relatively sure that I wasn't as clearly myself. Every time, I've wondered what it would take to write an anonymizing tool that would strip identifying patterns from the sentences.
Of course, modifying word choice seems trivial in comparison to analyzing how a person lays out an entire paper or communicates the steps of their thought process.
- pavel_lishin 14y agoI bet switching to a different keyboard layout would do wonders. I would wager that doing that would slow down your thought->words output stream enough to alter it.
- gnosis 14y ago"I've wondered what it would take to write an anonymizing tool that would strip identifying patterns from the sentences." Peter Wayner came up with a technique called "Mimic Functions" [1] that could (at least in principle) change a file so that it assumes some statistical properties of a different file. Unfortunately, it's easier said than done. One problem is that the sender doesn't know exactly which statistical tests would be used by the attacker, so while mimic functions could be devised to emulate certain statistical properties of a given file, it may be impossible to mimic all the statistical properties of any but the most trivial file -- especially if you want the result to make sense to a human reader. It might fool a machine, though. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimic_function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimic_function