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Using stylometry to find orange site users with alternate accounts for example !YOU! :marseyspyglow:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016

Author here. This site lets you put in a username and get the users with the most similar writing style to that user. It confirmed several users who I suspected were alts and after informally asking around has identified abandoned accounts of people I know from many years ago. I made this site mostly to show how easy this is and how it can erode online privacy. If some guy with a little bit of Python, and $8 to rent a decent dedicated server for a day can make this, imagine what a company with millions of dollars and a couple dozen PhD linguists could do.

Here's Paul Graham:

https://stylometry.net/user?username=pg

How can I avoid being identified by stylometry?

You may be wondering what you can do to avoid having your writing style be used to profile you. This site works primarily by analyzing for each user the frequencies of the most common words and phrases in the English language. Accordingly, the easiest way to avoid being identified is to simply use different words than you ordinarily would when writing. More sophisticated models than the one I made can use punctuation, comma usage, and capitalization to identify you so try alternating those as well. Services like Quillbot can help with you this but depending on your circmstances you may not want to send your writings to a third party service.

Also, most authorship identification algorithms have poor accuracy when working with small amounts of words. This means the optimal strategy would be discarding an account either after every comment or after a small number of comments. Unfortunately, this is against HN rules and may result in a ban.

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I sometimes think about random things that only I would write. e.g. I'm the only person I know annoying enough to use e.g. and i.e. in regular conversation and just seeing that would probably cut me out of a largeish crowd of people. A couple more things like that and I'd probably be an easy dox. Good thing I'm not interesting nor important enough for anyone to try tho

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