Obfuscation

Obfuscation

A User's Guide for Privacy and Protest

Finn Brunton, Helen Nissenbaum

Given a small amount of text, stylometry can identify an author. And we mean small—according to Josyula Rao and Pankaj Ratangi, a sample consisting of about 6,500 words is sufficient (when used with a corpus of identified text, such as email messages, posts to a social network, or blog posts) to make possible an 80 percent rate of successful identification. 16 In the course of their everyday use of computers, many people produce 6,500 words in a few days.
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