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Writing Style Fingerprint Tool Easily Fooled
Urchin writes "Some of the techniques used by literary detectives and courts of law to identify the authorship of text are easily fooled, say US researchers. They found that non-professional writers could hide their identity from 'stylometric' techniques by writing in the style of novelist Cormac McCarthy. Stylometric methods have been used in a number of high-profile legal cases in recent decades, including the 'Unabomber' trial. 'We would strongly suggest that courts examine their methods of stylometry against the possibility of adversarial attacks,' say the researchers."
No, but they knew they were being analyzed and for what. It's trivial to change my style (well, maybe not in English, I don't tend to have the word pool to draw from) and become someone else. If I know in advance that my writing would be used to find me.
You can, probably, given time and persistance, sift through the thousands and millions of board messages posted everywhere on the internet and find out who I am in other boards. I didn't try to hide my identity against comparison of writing styles.
I could see this working if applied to notes and texts written by someone who didn't have any reason to assume it would become the subject of an investigation. I'd deem it utterly worthless, though, when applied to ransom notes and the like.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
> I don't think anyone has ever sold writing analysis as a unique identifier. But it can be useful.
One problem with that is the human tendency to be overconfident as to how good these tests are. This happens everywhere. Court, business, whatever.
Say you have some metric at work (e.g. lines of code) that's easy to measure. If it's the only measure management has, it's what they'll use to measure how good you're doing. This applies even if the results are absurd, because they would rather believe that they have *some* idea what's going on than to accept the fact that they have no idea what's going on.
In summary, sometimes NO information is better than bad information, but people are very reluctant to accept that fact.