It didn't find my alt, but the second match is one of my twitter mutuals - I wonder if we've inadvertently borrowed style quirks from each other.
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Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
291–300 of 562 posts
Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
#292What algorithm is being used?
It's described here: https://stylometry.net/about
Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
The explanation is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755466 As far as I’m concerned, it’s the killer feature of the app. The top 20 results may be noisy, but the bolded results have a signal to noise ratio close to infinity.
I have 7 bolded names (0.53-0.62) in the top 20 list, and none are alts of mine.
I'm one of them and I can confirm. But then again that's what I'd say if I was.
Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
#294After a few tries on boring accounts, I thought to try the account of somebody who was notorious for an incident outside of HN, and had a (deservedly) bad time at HN for a couple of years before the account went dark. And yeah, there's a bunch of high confidence (.6-.8) hits for that account, and from a quick browse of the comments of the recently active ones, they look really likely to be alts. Like, all three that…
> 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.
Genuinely asking, what way is there to combat this? Is there a tool that takes out stylistic elements of your comment?
Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
#295Cool stuff, thank you for sharing your findings! I don't do throwaway. I either post or STFU. I also STFU on darknet. Its why I found it fun to read/lurk on things like I2P back when it was new. And I know that on a pseudonymous account it is only a matter of time until it can be linked to another pseudonymous account. It would not surprise me if stylometry was used on Dread Pirate Roberts or the people behind The Pi…
Most people greatly underestimate the power of linkage attacks on anonymity. And it doesn't even take fancy ML. In the context of healthcare records, I like to trot out this 25 year old example of an MIT grad student and the then-governor of MA.
Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
#296Maybe this is a good tool to find new friends. :P
Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
#297I checked a few random user names and I am confused. - Why is the author costco[0] not in this lookup? [0]: https://stylometry.net/user?username=costco
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Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
#298I wonder how much this can be improved if metadata is taken into account as well. Especially the distribution of common post dates and times modulo a week, which also exposes in which timezone somebody probably lives.
Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
#299I wonder what's a reasonable threshold for "probably the same person". I've never had an alt on HN, and when I searched myself, it found 3 other users above 0.6, none of whom I've ever heard of before.
If it's >0.9 is you can almost guarantee it's an alt but I've seen certain matches at 0.6. The problem is writing styles change over time. Another idea I had was converting the scores which are just cosine similarity scores into percentiles (so 0.99 would be 99th percentile of certainty) to make them more human interpretable.
I got matched with my old account with a score of only 0.45
Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
#300It's moments like this I'm proud to have my insanity on full display without obscurity. Was surprised to see a bunch of ~30% matches despite not having any alts.