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Comment by yaddayadda | Hacker News Reader

> "... when I type "aunt", readers have no idea how I pronounce it ...".

From the language survey, there were quite a few questions dealing with word choice (e.g., coke, soda, pop). There are also algorithms that can predict, with varying levels of accuracy, the writer's gender [1]. Combine these with browser font identification [2], geolocation [3], and other comparable data, and lying or omitting data isn't going to provide much in the way of anonymizing you or your data.

[1] http://www.hackerfactor.com/GenderGuesser.php

[2] https://panopticlick.eff.org/

[3] http://html5demos.com/geo

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Why would you trim the majority of my comment which is essentially in agreement with what you have written?

I get that you are just elaborating on data leakage, I just don't understand the style you chose to do it in. "identity characteristics leak out all over the place" isn't exactly a brazen declaration of how easy it is to stay anonymous.

I read your comment as saying that you could lie in text about identifying information and things that might betray you in a f2f interaction, such as regional accents, weren't as important in textual interactions.

My intent was more that it is straightforward to be aware of several of the most blatant leakages. Combating dialect analysis is a lot tougher, but the quiz likely used 25 of the highest value differences (many of the choices are laser specific: http://www4.uwm.edu/FLL/linguistics/dialect/maps.html ).

Context also matters a lot. If there is no obvious path to an IP or browser interaction, all that stuff goes away.

What would be interesting is a look into passive elicitation of information. Its easy to falsify something when you know someone is looking to use a single data-point against you. But tryly powerful social engineering would manipulate your confidence, and extract high-information-content data passively (when you are not expecting it), and to do this they need to instill confidence that you <are not being ovserved or monitored>. Yet they still may need to promt information flow, to feed the analysis. Which is sort of the art of interviewing, but now in a bit more 21st century context.

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