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Recursingyesterday at 10:10 PM1 replyview on HN

See the classic Gwern post: https://gwern.net/death-note-anonymity

Which quotes Tao on using deliberate disinformation to preserve anonymity.

> …one additional way to gain more anonymity is through deliberate disinformation. For instance, suppose that one reveals 100 independent bits of information about oneself. Ordinarily, this would cost 100 bits of anonymity (assuming that each bit was a priori equally likely to be true or false), by cutting the number of possibilities down by a factor of 2100; but if 5 of these 100 bits (chosen randomly and not revealed in advance) are deliberately falsified, then the number of possibilities increases again by a factor of (100 choose 5) ~ 226, recovering about 26 bits of anonymity.

Intentionally adding writing "tics", scheduling posts to appear between 2am and 6am in your timezone, or pretending to have a different gender/location/age should help a lot in staying pseudonymous for a while longer.


Replies

pixl97yesterday at 11:18 PM

Possibly, but it can be very difficult to conceal age or location reliability, especially as your corpus of text grows. And of course that is with just the text, when you start adding in other bits of digital information it gets even more difficult.