Slashdot Mirror
When Writing, How Anonymous Can You Be, Really?
An anonymous reader writes "Do you still think your online writing is, basically, anonymous? Think again! Research has it people put much of their personal traits into their writing, and computers may just be able to pick them up. That's at least what a recently announced competition on author identification (Given a document, who wrote it?) and author profiling (Given a document, what are its author's age and gender?) wants to find out. Alas, re-using other people's writing is no solution either; there's also a competition on plagiarism detection (Given a document, is it an original?). Wanna revisit your recent rants?"
As previously reported on Slashdot. Now, please identify me. Here's a hint: I have a 5 digit UID.
>throw machine at 4chan /mlp/
>"Identify!"
>all posters sound the same
>machine concludes all posters are part of a highly advanced AI
>machine becomes depressed that it will never create anything wonderful like the spaghetti threads or
>kills itself
>mfw
Based on the above, who am I?
Like facial recognition.... I am sure this works wonderfully when it only has 10 or 20 exemplars to compare against, but it fails miserably as it scales up. Good luck conclusively identifying an author when there are over a million profiles to potentially match with.
Google thinks I'm a 20 year old male. I'm in my early thirties and a gal. I think visiting Slashdot so much throws off its algorithm, as does all the video game sites I hang out at. You'd think the searches for things like "gel nails" might tip them off, but it's probably further confused by my lack of visits to Pinterest.
I'd be interested to see if this program can do any better at analyzing my writing than Google does analyzing my search history.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
This would have been a lot more fun about two months ago to detect paid political astroturfers.
The ultimate AI-ish application would be an astroturfer plugin for chrome probably called "AstroturfBlock". So the site is a "tech" site, the contents are pure politics, and the text analysis system indicates an unemployed liberal arts degree holder... Go ahead and block it.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
One example are the company performance surveys, that are supposed to be anonymous. I cant answer questions like 'how do you think the company leadership is doing' without effectively giving away who I am - my opinion is based on my position, and thus is easily inferred.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
Of course, authors can use these tools too, and then iteratively change their texts until they cannot be correctly identified or profiled.
Just like spammers can check whether their e-mails ends up in spam filters before sending them.
It will be a never-ending cat and mouse game.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
When Writing, How Anonymous Can You Be, Really?
No.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
Your exact version of chrome combined with the exact version of various plugins you used (flash, pdf readers, add blcokers etc) can all be reported to the server and when combined they lead to a lot of bits of entropy. Tor won't help you get around that.
Most people would just use something like Tor (or Tor and another VPN/proxy service).
Erm... the transport doesn't matter if you're analyzing message composition.
Wasn't this part of what that Barr guy was doing to try to figure out who members of Anonymous were? I think I read recently that he turned out to be right about the one that ran to Canada.
Actually, Tor comes prepackaged with a browser with privacy settings enabled by default. The server shouldn't be able to differentiate you from any other user of the stock Tor bundle.
prbly ez to id me.
Actually, Tor comes prepackaged with a browser with privacy settings enabled by default. The server shouldn't be able to differentiate you from any other user of the stock Tor bundle.
That's for the TOR bundle if used as they recommend, but the article is about identifying authors by what they write, them not about idintifying by technical means. On Slashdot not RTFA could be used as an identifying metric but on the other hand it's a rather wide net.
In a cybernetic fit of rage she pissed off to another age...
I bet it's Shakspeare.
As a professional writer, I wish to be less anonymous. Hello, New Yorker?
As one of billions who are exposed, I doubt that I will attract any attention regardless of this technology. Perhaps they will figure out who really wrote Shakespeare's plays, but surely they will devote fewer resources to the rest of us.
...omphaloskepsis often...
We can all (I hope) recognise authors quotes whom we have some familiarity even if we haven't read the passage in question before. Terry Pratchet quotes for instance stand out a mile, Frank Herbert can be identified by the fact that he'll use the word 'subtle' at least twice a paragraph. Even here on /. certain posters styles identify them without having to read their UID, Girlintraining is an example (for me at least), hell I can spot her posts purely based on the responses to her posts for gods sake.
With the privacy arms race going on right now on the internet, identifying people based on what they write *and* their style, is not only the magic bullet for Big Brother, but quite acheivable given a big enough sample,
In a cybernetic fit of rage she pissed off to another age...
The problem with anonymity is that we have become addicted to digital..well..everything. Once you have the data in a digital format it is merely a matter of algorithms, storage, and computational power to pretty much wring whatever you want out of the data. I was a loud mouth Libertarian for quite a few years.. I ranted and threw in my 2 cents at a lot of places online.. then things like the att closet data capture and facebook image recognition started popping up and the writing on the digital wall was pretty much done. I expect nothing I do digitally not to be intercepted, databased, scanned, weighted saved for future use. Imho the only real option for any privacy is not to make it digital in any way including cell phones, land lines, or any other type mass communication.. but thats just me and my tinfoil hat..
they use the analysis to identify a small range of who to watch to find certain confirmation they have the right guy
law enforcement tools are not limited only to 100% certain ones. the fuzzy ones are used to narrow down a list of targets, where law enforcement's limited manpower can be better spent to find certain confirmation
if you live in a country with good law enforcement, this is hollywood fantasy and/ or paranoid schizophrenia, not reality. you want to actually catch the actual perp because you actually want to prevent crimes
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I have Dupytren Contacture. It foreshortens the tendon on my ring fingers of both hands. The result is that when I typing fast I make common repeatable mistakes in typing as well as common typographical errors due to muscle memory. The use of certain vocabulary fixes who you are to those who may be watching, illuminating social exposure, education or intelligence. There are simply so many ways to measure the content a person generates. In a world that growing abhors common anonymity, but reserves that right only for those with the wealth and power to build high walls, we need to ask whether or not we are willing to limit our self expression to remain quietly safe.
I for one would rather be known as a trouble maker, than not known at all for what it is that I feel moved to say.
Give me liberty or give me death is still the moral high ground.
Most people would just use something like Tor (or Tor and another VPN/proxy service).
Erm... the transport doesn't matter if you're analyzing message composition.
Right, it's not about the identity - it's about matching different pieces of text as written by the same author
Once the texts are matched, your identity is compromised as long as ONE of the texts is coming from a known identified source (email, etc.)
I can tell a girl's age based on her trim.
Do they change cant or pitch as they age?
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
Kevin Bacon.
>
I for one would rather be known as a trouble maker, than not known at all for what it is that I feel moved to say.
Have to agree with you there, however I imagine there are people out there for whom this style of tool would be a terrifying prospect, depends where you stand I guess.
In a cybernetic fit of rage she pissed off to another age...
Traceability, ie, masking your IP address, has almost nothing to do with the article. Just damned near nothing.
You can find a few dozens of my posts here on slashdot. You might browse to another site, where someone has posted, using my identification. Based on my thought processes, my writing style, my use of punctuation, etc, you can COMPARE the documents, and decide with a pretty high probability that either, A: I am the same author or B: I am not the same Runaway1956 that posted that other document.
The title is a little misleading, as I might post thousands of posts online, and remain anonymous. It's likely that the more posts I make, the less anonymous I become, but anonymity isn't really the issue addressed in TFA.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Yep - that was part of Barr's stock in trade. He compared posts made by anon members in various venues, then traced some of those members to identify them. An IRC server was critical to Barr's process, as I recall. Or, more accurately, the IRC server was critical in this particular instance, as it maintained logs that some of the other servers did not.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Timothy's put-downs have been getting a lot of undeserved attention recently. For starters, I don't care what others say about Timothy. He's still nasty, two-faced, and he intends to dig a grave in which to bury liberty and freedom. Now stay with me a moment here; I am making a point. Specifically, if my own experience has taught me anything, it's that he thinks that he's a tribune of the oppressed. However, his endeavors are so lewd that they are easily taken up and assimilated by spiteful, fork-tongued authoritarians, whose intellectual level corresponds to the material offered. On the other hand, I admit I have a tendency to become a bit insensitive whenever I rebuke Timothy for trying to lay all of society open to the predations of organized criminality. While I am desirous of mending this tiny personality flaw, Timothy has made it known that he fully intends to emphasize the negative in our lives instead of accentuating the positive. If those words don't scare you, nothing will. If they are not a clear warning, I don't know what could be. Let me conclude by saying that we who want to deal summarily with unscrupulous snobs will not rest until we do.
are only afforded by the rich, connected and well-armed. For the others, be careful what you say, anywhere.
New Economic Perspectives
Scenario:
Repressed journalist uses Tor to write blog on evil dictator.
Evil dictator can read blog, but owner is anonymous.
Evil dictator puts text into identification machine.
Identification machine spits out a name of a journalist in his country (doesn't even matter if its the right one.)
Journalist is tortured and dies in squalid prison conditions.
Oh shit!.....I mean, oh darn!
Table-ized A.I.
Which is pointless if your actual writing can give you away. No amount of Tor/VPN or whatever, will do anything useful if your actual writing itself can lead back to you. If I use every anonymity trick in the book, the gig is still up the second I say "Hi, I'm Bob Smith, of 6424 N. 22nd Street, Akron OH".
Sure, you could make a magical anonymous internet, but it defeats the purpose of trying to disseminate whatever your writing to an audience, unless your only going for a very small, select audience of people using the same scheme. And even then, if others could access it, you still might not be anonymous.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
n a world that growing abhors common anonymity...
I'm not even sure of this anymore. I'm beginning to think the death of anonymity is inevitable due to nothing but technology; ubiquitous networking, computing power, and near infinite storage. Even without the government, and unregulated corporate behaviors (how else do you stop data farming?), the ability would still be there, and someone would harness it.
I'm not supporting killing the ability to be anonymous, or supporting the actions of people who would exploit it. I just think that it is going to get increasingly hard to maintain it. Soon we'll see anonymity like we see encryption, not a concrete, perfect, thing, but a matter of degrees. There will be no true anoniminity, but only how much time and resources it would take to unmask people. This, probably, is already true. A determined person, with expensive resources, could probably find almost anyone.
Hell, a couple months ago I got curious about a childhood friend, someone I haven't seen or talked to in over 20 years. It took about 15 minutes of half-hearted idle searching before I figured out where he lived, how much his house cost, and when he bought it (including a recent Google map of it, and a builders layout, where he worked, his rough income, the car he drives, his wife's name, where her parents live, that his mother recently died, and his father is in a retirement home, etc... I gave up after 15 minutes because I got a bit creeped out. I'm not a PI, I didn't buy any tools for this, I only used Google. I can't even imagine what I would have found if I spent more time, and effort, and money on it.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
The only thing that Barr did correctly was look up WHOIS info on the People's Liberation Front's website after an Anonymous guy claimed to be "Supreme Commander" of the PLF... When Barr confronted him, the guy claimed it was a joke, so Barr pointed to an innocent man instead. (Ars Tech article on the 'correct' Commander X.) Otherwise, Barr's tactics -- including analyzing what the people wrote -- gave him completely wrong answers.
Now mostly at Usenet:comp.misc & SoylentNews.org (it's made of people!)
Face recognition software can recognize individuals out of a huge pool of millions using statistical classifiers. It is also possible to identify a person's handwriting with similar methods.
I bet it is possible to use a classifier to find the author assuming that it has been trained with a long enough text written by him and the unidentified text has enough length.
It has nothing to do with your internet link. It uses the traits you leave in your text.
I can't stand how every slashdot story submission has to end with a pink flamingo smoke grenade. I'm guessing that sober "just the facts, ma'am" submissions still exist, but rarely make it through the selection hoop of our post-counting overlords.
I have several online pseudonyms which I make an effort to keep separate. I rarely post the same idea under more than one identity. If I post it here, it doesn't go there. I prefer to keep things separate so far as I can. I also have some background in computational linguistics. I've known for fifteen years that there is absolutely no way to win this battle long term. Only the most insipid comments will escape long-term annealing. If the word "gay" is the all season tire on your social media K-car, then your identity is safely concealed within the deep-wank weeds.
If every post you write contains colourful language or idiom such as "all-season tire of deep-wank camouflage" you're toast and you know it, clap your hands. Merely getting my possessives and plurals and possessive plurals right more often than not narrows the net substantially. I might pedantically write Harry S Truman without putting a dot after the S (Snopes: "Although the 'S' was not technically an abbreviation and therefore did not need to be followed by a period, Truman's full name was generally rendered as 'Harry S. Truman' during his lifetime ..."). I make use of colons, semicolons (these come and go), mdash appositives, and parenthetical side-notes--at least one of these in almost every paragraph I write. I post way more links than the average person. My thoughts meander. There is playful use of language with double readings. I subvert cliche to achieve double readings that enable me to circle away from my target, then loop back from an unexpected angle. My unit of thought is the paragraph more so than the sentence.
Even with all those signatures, originality in word selection is my neon tattoo. The corpus analysis algorithms likely don't do much (yet) with originality. Hard to characterize. For a while my anonymity might pass through the gun-metal algorithms unmelded by virtue of my writing being too bright and distinctive and easy to trace. But not for long. Even the fractal filigrees of originality will be coded eventually. (Pay no attention to the alliteration: an accident, not a stylistic signature.)
Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.
This is about respect. We all live a double life, pretty much all the time. We speak differently in front of our mothers (most of us) than with the lady-killing rough necks at the peanut bar or power tie horn-dogs at the chichi sushi bar.
I value anonymity because I don't wish to own everything I say on a literal level, stripped of context, devoid of my original conceit or persona.
I happen to regard linearity as a social construct. Humans are not inherently linear in cognition or constitution. We learn how to cultivate linear facades in our areas of competence (but not necessarily around the edges: this is why a competent accountant consults his astrologer Madam Threenipple). If you like the primary facade you have, and it suits all purposes, then I suppose you'll see the charm in proclaiming it from the RealName rafters.
If you're a Baptist homosexual (I've known a few), you might wish to string your public identity by separate ropes.
Or maybe you've just got things to work out. You're figuring things out on the fly and trying them on for size and you don't wish to fall prey to the Joseph McCarthy clean-nose auto-da-fe "have you ever". Implication: Anything you've ever said will be permanently recorded and will classify you irretrievably. This despite 0/1 statistics never passing T-scores. If the same person also has an NRA membership and has been a career employee of the Hoover Institute for two decades? Still a communist. Ten times more dangerous.
The kind of person most willing t
About two years into my current job, I was able to guess which of my longer serving colleagues had written or contributed to various anonymous documents and reports floating around the office. The processes are easy; learning what words they use misuse or confuse, who writes in a more formal or a more chatty style, those who seem to be unable to leave out detail or write a precis when appropriate, et.c. What confuses this is copy-editing and the numerous copied passages that are typically found in such documents.
I just have to turn my writing English Finnish, Russian, and, finally, through the back to English again. Analysis software!
Your ad here.
you can COMPARE the documents, and decide with a pretty high probability that either, A: I am the same author or B: I am not the same Runaway1956 that posted that other document.
Or that C: Someone imitated your linguistic style.
Just because most people avoided Creative Writing class did not mean all of us did, and there are quite a few people who are more than capable of mimicking various linguistic styles which are not naturally their own.
There are 4 simple rules that will help you to avoid this type of identification:
1. Be brief
2. Write seldom
3. Plagiarize!
4. Do not write in your mother tongue.
It wouldn't be that hard to write a script that would randomly swap your words with ones from a thesaurus run through Berkeley's FrameNet.
nevertheless conjecture it prevail comprehensible?
(but would it be understandable?)
I wonder what happened if you used automatic translation, like google translate, to translate to a different language and back. I bet that would make it a lot harder to match to other things you wrote, especially if you used a different intermediate language each time. Having to touch up the obvious errors might still provide a partial "fingerprint" of your writing style though.
This isn't really news. I've been having discussions online since before AOL & Windows 3.1 existed, when the hot things were email lists and Usenet.
Trolls were around even then and once they would get booted off or blocked they would don new aliases, which fooled nobody.
Their style of writing gave them away.
Anyway, I can understand what you're saying about how powerful Google is and how difficult it is to be truly anonymous now. How much information you can glean about someone is scary. I have a friend who fell in love with a girl he met casually. he only knew her name but with google he was able to find out so much and it wasn't long before he was following her on facebook, on pinterest etc. While it was fairly innocent, I mean, he wasn't doing anything bad (he wasn't stalking her), it was illuminating and frightening to see what it's like now. When I was a kid things were nothing like this. Things continue to evolve in unexpected directions.
This is another thing... People are much less adverse to sharing now, at least in the younger generations. When I was young, and the Web new and full of pretty much no-one but nerds, everyone I knew strove of pseudo-anonymity, and tried to keep a divide between their "real world" self, and their "online" self. Now, psychologically, it seems that that divide has lifted, and the internet is as real as your actual life (until things go wrong, obviously), so people are much freer with sharing their personal details. Back when "social networking" became the thing to do, I had a few accounts under various pseudonyms, and I valued those identities almost like my real one (I've been using this one for over 15 years now, for example), since they accrued recognition, and credibility just like if I was using my real name in real circumstances. But now I, too, am using my real name on places like Facebook and Google+. There came a point where there was no point resisting. I still keep a wall up, though, since I recognize that everything I ever say will be around forever, and can be potentially accessed by anyone.Most people I know don't even bother anymore.
It amazes me what people will say on Facebook, publicly.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
Hell, a couple months ago I got curious about a childhood friend, someone I haven't seen or talked to in over 20 years. It took about 15 minutes of half-hearted idle searching before I figured out where he lived...
You got lucky. There's a person I've been trying to find for a couple of years, finally gave up. If they're named Galron Metamucil you'll have no trouble finding him, but if he's Andrew Jackson, well, good luck finding the right one.
Free Martian Whores!
I knew a bit about him before hand, and found his Facebook page (protected and neglected), so I could figure out that he was still in state, at least at some point in the more recent past. He did have a somewhat unique surname, with a unique spelling, so I could narrow it down a bit. I did have to tear through several people though, since even a unique surname, isn't. Mine is rather uncommon as well, but thanks to the internet, it seems very common now. On the first page of a search, there is 6 people who share my exact name/surname, one of whom lives in the same city as me. I've always been tempted to look them up.
The more information you have to start with, the better. Which high school they went to is very useful, as is any previous addresses, as various sites index these. Women are tougher, though, since their names can change. It took me a couple years of idle searching to find a girl I went to high school with, in the intervening years she married twice, move a bunch of times, etc... I only found her thanks to an old mutual friend finding me on Facebook.
It really hasn't been worth the trouble. In the end, what do you have to say to someone you haven't seen in decades? With the girl the conversation was basically "So, your a professor now?
"Yep."
"Wow. You ever finish that tattoo?"
"Nope."
"Crap."
"... silence and crickets..."
"Gotta go, kids got home."
I also had an ex-girlfriend track me down 15 years later, basically the conversation died after; "what have you been up to?"... How the hell do you even answer that?
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
Gracias! Pardon my misunderstanding, and Thanks for telling me. The first thing that came to my mind was M.I.T. the school in Massachusetts. (My dad said that when he first moved to San Diego he kept misreading the "S.D." initials in the local paper as "South Dakota" and kept wondering why they would print so much news about South Dakota here in California. His "L.A." frame of mind must have rubbed off on me) Good luck with your Masters Degree!