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.
I’m a big fan of privacy, and I’ve thought about this too. The easy answer is that the people spying on us aren’t as competent as they believe (and many of us fear), but I think that’s a little too complacent for me to leave it at that. I will say that there is enough noise in the system, and enough universal access to the sorts of things that are major force multipliers now, that the situation isn’t quite so bleak as it seems.
For example, with 300 million people, many of them tourists, questionably-legal presences, or privacy-obsessives, it’s very difficult to find strong unique identifiers. Consciously adjusting your behavior/fashion along a few axes can throw off a model working in gestalt, to the point where a lot of false positives begin to surface. Likewise putting in false leads. If I were going to ground to try to avoid detection, I’d probably try to blend in as homeless, and I must imagine that that would be far enough outside of my normal behavior that my gait (due to different attire), voice, and manner of speaking would all be very difficult to pin down to my normal identity.
Online, it gets easier. Toss a few red herrings about your real life into your posting habits on whatever samizdat forum you frequent, and maybe consciously strip out one or two telltale stylistic attributes common in your normal writing. An LLM can help you find them, if you by any chance don’t find any on your own. With the growing prominence of LLMs, we’re all more conscientious about writing tics, after all. If you want to be really paranoid, you can ask a local model to rewrite everything you post in the style of a college professor / precocious teenager / foreigner writing carefully in a second language, or anything else that’s both distinctly not you but still readable. You mentioned this, of course, but I think a consistent false style is more effective and more relatable. To further mitigate the drawbacks you outline, I could see this done semi-programmatically, changing em dashes to other kinds of dashes, switching “by” with “to”, and so on, without altering other things.
I will say that the primary issue that worries me is not anonymity but reach with anonymity. Shadowbanning/deboosting tends to target anonymous accounts more readily, and Twitter, for instance, generally wants money to let you start communicating at scale. We’re much worse off than when you could simply create a Reddit/Twitter/whatever account with a throwaway email and a username and start engaging with a community, no chilling effect included. I think the loss of this is a major part of stuck culture[1].
More formally, some things you may not have considered:
Many features are strongly correlated. In fact, clusters exist. Supposing I’m searching for a political partisan of one side or the other, using your initial feature space, targeting the modal (stereotypical, at least) member of either party:
43 year old single White upper middle class woman employed in administration, seeing a therapist, never married, slightly overweight, lives in a city in the American Northeast, agnostic or atheist, native English speaker.
25 year old White male, middle income tradesman in the American Midwest, comes from a two parent household, nigh-obsessive gymgoer, from a suburban area in the American Midwest, dechurched Christian, no known outstanding psychological conditions, native English speaker.
Both of these are very specific descriptions. You would expect, naively, that they weed out 16183/16184s of the population. But, in practice, if you’re already looking for a Democrat/Republican with strong political views, you’ve barely made a dent[2]!
I believe the same applies to writing style. Two University of Maine grads from the same department, with the same nationality and age, probably write similarly. Likewise two immigrants with the same original language and home country.
I did attempt to account for correlations. However, I freely admit that the approximation I used to try to account for them is rather crude, and likely the most tenuous part of the whole estimate. (This is discussed a bit in footnotes 8 and 12)
Interesting article.
I’m a big fan of privacy, and I’ve thought about this too. The easy answer is that the people spying on us aren’t as competent as they believe (and many of us fear), but I think that’s a little too complacent for me to leave it at that. I will say that there is enough noise in the system, and enough universal access to the sorts of things that are major force multipliers now, that the situation isn’t quite so bleak as it seems.
For example, with 300 million people, many of them tourists, questionably-legal presences, or privacy-obsessives, it’s very difficult to find strong unique identifiers. Consciously adjusting your behavior/fashion along a few axes can throw off a model working in gestalt, to the point where a lot of false positives begin to surface. Likewise putting in false leads. If I were going to ground to try to avoid detection, I’d probably try to blend in as homeless, and I must imagine that that would be far enough outside of my normal behavior that my gait (due to different attire), voice, and manner of speaking would all be very difficult to pin down to my normal identity.
Online, it gets easier. Toss a few red herrings about your real life into your posting habits on whatever samizdat forum you frequent, and maybe consciously strip out one or two telltale stylistic attributes common in your normal writing. An LLM can help you find them, if you by any chance don’t find any on your own. With the growing prominence of LLMs, we’re all more conscientious about writing tics, after all. If you want to be really paranoid, you can ask a local model to rewrite everything you post in the style of a college professor / precocious teenager / foreigner writing carefully in a second language, or anything else that’s both distinctly not you but still readable. You mentioned this, of course, but I think a consistent false style is more effective and more relatable. To further mitigate the drawbacks you outline, I could see this done semi-programmatically, changing em dashes to other kinds of dashes, switching “by” with “to”, and so on, without altering other things.
I will say that the primary issue that worries me is not anonymity but reach with anonymity. Shadowbanning/deboosting tends to target anonymous accounts more readily, and Twitter, for instance, generally wants money to let you start communicating at scale. We’re much worse off than when you could simply create a Reddit/Twitter/whatever account with a throwaway email and a username and start engaging with a community, no chilling effect included. I think the loss of this is a major part of stuck culture[1].
More formally, some things you may not have considered:
Many features are strongly correlated. In fact, clusters exist. Supposing I’m searching for a political partisan of one side or the other, using your initial feature space, targeting the modal (stereotypical, at least) member of either party:
43 year old single White upper middle class woman employed in administration, seeing a therapist, never married, slightly overweight, lives in a city in the American Northeast, agnostic or atheist, native English speaker.
25 year old White male, middle income tradesman in the American Midwest, comes from a two parent household, nigh-obsessive gymgoer, from a suburban area in the American Midwest, dechurched Christian, no known outstanding psychological conditions, native English speaker.
Both of these are very specific descriptions. You would expect, naively, that they weed out 16183/16184s of the population. But, in practice, if you’re already looking for a Democrat/Republican with strong political views, you’ve barely made a dent[2]!
I believe the same applies to writing style. Two University of Maine grads from the same department, with the same nationality and age, probably write similarly. Likewise two immigrants with the same original language and home country.
In 2016, we were using new vocabularies on the internet every year or so. Today, everyone speaks in a sort of mutated, decayed version of 2016-speak.
(yes, you’ve probably shaved off around two thirds of potential candidates, but that’s not nearly enough to make someone identifiable)
I did attempt to account for correlations. However, I freely admit that the approximation I used to try to account for them is rather crude, and likely the most tenuous part of the whole estimate. (This is discussed a bit in footnotes 8 and 12)