Anonymizing Writing Style
September 11, 2013
Author J.K. Rowling recently learned firsthand how sophisticated analytics software has become. It was a linguistic analysis of the text in The Cuckoo’s Calling‘s which unmasked her as the popular crime-novel’s author “Robert Galbraith.” (These tools were originally devised to combat plagiarism.) Now, I Programmer tells us in “Anonymouth Hides Identity,” open-source software is being crafted to foil such tools, and give writers “stylometric anonymity.”
Whether a wordsmith just wants to enjoy a long-lost sense of anonymity, as the wildly successful author of the Harry Potter series attempted to do, or has more high-stakes reasons to hide behind a pen name, a team from Drexel University has the answer. The students from the school’s Privacy, Security, and Automation Lab (PSAL) just captured the Andreas Pfitzmann Best Student Paper Award at this year’s Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium for their paper on the subject. The article reveals:
The idea behind Anonymouth is that sylometry can be a threat in situations where individuals want to ensure their privacy while continuing to interact with others over the Internet. A presentation about the program cites two hypothetical scenarios:
*Alice the Anonymous Blogger vs.Bob the Abusive Employer
*Anonymous Forum vs. Oppressive Government. . . .
The JStylo-Anonymouth (JSAN) framework is work in progress at PSAL under the supervision of assistant professor of computer science, Dr. Rachel Greenstadt. It consists of two parts:
*JStylo – authorship attribution framework, used as the underlying feature extraction employing a set of linguistic features
*Anonymouth – authorship evasion (anonymization) framework, which suggests changes that need to be made.
The admittedly very small study discussed in the paper found that 80 percent of participants were able to produce anonymous documents “to a limited extent.” It also found certain constraints– it was more difficult to anonymize existing documents than new creations, for example. Still, this is an interesting development, and I am sure we will see more efforts in this direction.
Cynthia Murrell, September 11, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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