One would think that it could be possible to make a tool that takes some text and "anonymizes" it by making it a little more standard and boring (uniforming punctuation and sentence structure, changing words with some synonyms, etc). Maybe wouldn't make it particularly compelling, but would be valuable for political dissidents and other people with a high threat model.

Does anyone have some tools to share?

> A stronger conjecture is that we’re heading towards a sort of generalized pseudpocalypse. Perhaps, in the future, if you interact with the world through essentially any high-bandwidth channel, then you identify yourself. Say you wear a mask in public and only speak by sub-vocalizing into a voice changer. That’s fine, you’ll still be identified using your body shape, gait, or chemical signature. Or say you don’t like your car being tracked everywhere, so you stop carrying a phone and you somehow convince lawmakers to ban license plates. No problem, your car will still be tracked using tiny scratches or unique pinging sounds from the engine. Or say you don’t like being tracked on the internet, so you lock down your browser profile, buy stuff only with Monero, and connect through a chain of three VPNs. That’s OK. You’ll still be identified through how you wiggle your finger as you scroll down the page. We’re all just too unique, and the information theoretic limit is coming for us.

Forensic research, NSA, Palantir…

Btw 42. Sleep, eat, have sex, have fun, be useful.

There's been some interesting threads about stylometry over the years [1]. The top link was quite decent at unmasking HN alt accounts with basic ngram analysis whipped up in one day [2].

1. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=stylometry

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33756141

Entropy is unfortunately a very bad metric to estimate if these identification techniques will scale. Plugging my work here as example: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-55296-6

So anonymity of written speech is toast. We should, however, strive to preserve other forms of anonymity. For example, donations given to political causes should be kept confidential. Let protesters wear masks up to the point where they break the law.

yes but no, can't we just ask AI to sufficiently shuffle our words or for algos to do so?

"boom", pseudoanonymity (spell?) restored?

One potential solution here I suppose is to make deanonymization or contributing to it a serious crime. I doubt that will happen in most places, though, since it’s often the government that wants to do this to its own citizens.

This always seems theoretical. Has it happened?

[flagged]