Comment by tbrownaw

3 years ago

> but this functionality turned out way creepier than I thought the moment I tried it

Hopefully this raised awareness means that people who actually need anonymity will be more likely to know to take precautions.

7 comments

tbrownaw

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kaba0  3 years ago

Genuinely asking, what way is there to combat this? Is there a tool that takes out stylistic elements of your comment?

  • klabb3  3 years ago

    This is the million dollar question. I think the goal of "anonymity for most intents and purposes" is worthy, it's been how I've enjoyed HN and Reddit, but I also know that it was just a matter of time before stylometry and other meta-analysis of post history become 10 second tools for everyone. Now the cat is out of the box.

    I've been thinking about this a bit, and I've landed in that having a stable identifier across ALL comments & posts is a poor default. We still probably want some coherence, at minimum within a thread, eg to follow a back-and-forth. The site itself may also use stable identifier for abuse prevention. But there's no reason one should have the same username externally traceable for posts about completely different topics.

    In practice, this could be done with low friction pseudonym creation, which all ties to the same account privately.

  • marbu  3 years ago

    One way would be to run such tool before posting and then based on the results, tweak the post and repeat until the similarities are not statistically significant. Or instead of tweaking, start posting under a new throwaway account. But this won't save you when some new way to analyze style appears in the future. Moreover there are other types of meta data which can be taken into account to narrow down the search space a bit such as timestamps. And obviously more you write, harder it is to control these things.