Tracking Pedophiles By Their Typing Habits

An anonymous reader writes "Pedophiles using the internet to target youngsters could be tracked down — by the way they use a keyboard. Researchers are investigating ways to use technology which can determine a typist's age, sex and culture within ten keystrokes by monitoring their speed and rhythm." Since Phrenology hasn't exactly panned out, they gotta try something new.

Comments

Foolproof

[MyLongNickName]

I am sure this is foolproof! Sign me up!

Typical /. summary

[wowbagger]

Typical /. summary - conflating the idea of "we can tell how old you are from your typing" with "we can tell if you are Wicked Uncle Ernie by your typing."

The idea of this would be that if you can tell that somebody is a 40 year old man, and they are on a forum saying they are a 12 year old girl, you can flag that as being suspicious.

Of course, the problem is that a web site or chat forum has relatively little visibility of the user's typing pattern, so unless you force all forums to be accessed by special software that can monitor typing (AND you prevent the use of cut-and-paste so that you type in one window, then paste into the chat window, or detect such matters and flag THAT) then this won't be very useful at all.

Of course, making THAT statement in the summary would be hard, and would require actually thinking about the story.

As I said, typical /. summary.

It's worse than junk

[Joce640k]

I'm pretty sure chat programs send the message in chunks, not individual keystrokes. /Didn't dignify the article with a reading.

ffs

[Therilith]

Pedophile != child molester

Re:oh no

[Jurily]

How does this work anyway? Does it account for the fact that I know my keyboard is wearing out and thus tend to hit the keys a bit stronger? Does that make me a man?

Does it account for the fact that I grew up typing, and don't even need to look at the keyboard or screen while typing, because it "flows"? Does that make me a woman?

Does it distinguish between typing on a laptop keyboard and a regular one? Since I'm used to laptop keys, I tend to go softer on regular keyboards. Does that make me a pedophile?

And most importantly: WHAT DOES MY TYPING SPEED HAVE TO DO WITH WHO I WANT TO FUCK?

Re:oh no

[Jurily]

One more thing: the caption for the picture says "Fears: Ashleigh Hall, 17, was murdered by Peter Chapman after meeting him on Facebook. Her killing has sparked calls for more security to protect people online"

Can you tell me how anything portrayed in this sentence could possibly relate to typing habits?

This whole article is just standard fearmongering, and not even the entertaining kind.

Re:oh no

[Anonymous Coward]

That's very sad for her, but unless our 17 year old Ashleigh still had to enter puberty, her death has very little ('nothing' to be precise) to do with pedophilia.

Re:oh no

[ultranova]

One more thing: the caption for the picture says "Fears: Ashleigh Hall, 17, was murdered by Peter Chapman after meeting him on Facebook. Her killing has sparked calls for more security to protect people online"

Can you tell me how anything portrayed in this sentence could possibly relate to typing habits?

Or, for that matter, what does it have to do with pedophiles?

This whole article is just standard fearmongering, and not even the entertaining kind.

Actually it seems to be a scam, based on this: "Mr Butler said: 'We're going to submit a proposal to the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council for a bid of probably about £1million so that we can develop the research further."

There's just no possible way you can spend the equivalent of 1.4 million dollars or 1.1 million euros making statistical correlations betweem "typing patterns, speeds and rhythms" and people's background, even if you a dumb enough to believe there is a correlation in the first place.