Use fewer instances of the letter "i": toward writing style anonymization

  • Authors:

  • Andrew W. E. McDonald;Sadia Afroz;Aylin Caliskan;Ariel Stolerman;Rachel Greenstadt

  • Affiliations:

  • Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA;Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA;Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA;Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA;Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA

  • Venue:
  • PETS'12 Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Privacy Enhancing Technologies
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

This paper presents Anonymouth, a novel framework for anonymizing writing style. Without accounting for style, anonymous authors risk identification. This framework is necessary to provide a tool for testing the consistency of anonymized writing style and a mechanism for adaptive attacks against stylometry techniques. Our framework defines the steps necessary to anonymize documents and implements them. A key contribution of this work is this framework, including novel methods for identifying which features of documents need to change and how they must be changed to accomplish document anonymization. In our experiment, 80% of the user study participants were able to anonymize their documents in terms of a fixed corpus and limited feature set used. However, modifying pre-written documents were found to be difficult and the anonymization did not hold up to more extensive feature sets. It is important to note that Anonymouth is only the first step toward a tool to acheive stylometric anonymity with respect to state-of-the-art authorship attribution techniques. The topic needs further exploration in order to accomplish significant anonymity.