What are email risks?

[Seth David Schoen]

Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson writes:

> Combine that sort of stuff with analysis of writing style, vocabulary, etc.
> and you might be able to correlate two e-mails as originating from the same
> person with some degree of accuracy.
> 
> I'm not aware of any research into the trackability of such things, as
> e-mail generally isn't considered anonymous anyway, but a lot of the work
> that has gone into fighting spam would actually have implications here as
> well.

Hi Bjarni,

There is a stylometry item in the anonbib where they do statistical
analysis of features of writing style:

http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/sec2000/full_papers/rao/rao.pdf

I bet these techniques have gotten more powerful as the field of
machine learning has developed, although I don't know if there are
more recent studies of what this means for anonymity.

-- 
Seth Schoen
Senior Staff Technologist                         schoen at eff.org
Electronic Frontier Foundation                    https://www.eff.org/
454 Shotwell Street, San Francisco, CA  94110     +1 415 436 9333 x107
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