>In 10 years or so, we will have the tech to fingerprint anyone just by their writing style (some companies even claim to be able to do that already today).
...given a large enough corpus of text. I doubt that you're able to pick up much from a dozen 1 sentence replies on reddit, for instance. You could even use some sort of neural network based sentence transformer to scramble the structure without significantly altering the meaning.
It only takes 33 bits of information to identify 1 person out of 7 billion. How many bits did you lose just by talking about neural networks in that one sentence? How many bits did you lose from the timing/time zone of your comment? By the language of your comment?
As a low tech solution, you can always compose the contents in a separate window and paste it in when you're done. Hardened browsers (eg. Firefox with resistfingerprinting) can frustrate attempts by throttling key events (key events get coalesced into 1s/5s/10s intervals).
First time I hear about this (edit: Firefox with resistfingerprinting) and I'm the kind of person who finds this interesting.
Which means anyone who does this will probably have made themselves unique, or - I guess- at least narrow down the scope of possible users more than the typing speed would do.
This is another browser stupidity. Dont send anything until the submit button is pressed. It's the browsers job to implement the text edit box and spell check, not every website.
Being able to see keystrokes in Javascript is pretty useful for things like autocomplete. Say you want to send an invoice to "Foo Bar, Inc.". Do you really want to type that every time? Do you want to type "Foo" and then click submit, and then be taken to search results? Why make a 700ms task into a 5s task, especially when you're doing it hundreds of times a day.
There are hardened browsers that will make the script wait for a while to get the key events. That seems like the right solution; most people using controlled enterprise apps don't have to deal with huge amounts of input lag, while people that are paranoid won't be profiled by their typing cadence.
>How many bits did you lose just by talking about neural networks in that one sentence? How many bits did you lose from the timing/time zone of your comment? By the language of your comment?
uhh, probably 2 or 3 at most? Given the demographics of Hacker News (technical background, mostly American), probably half the site have the attributes you have listed.
...given a large enough corpus of text. I doubt that you're able to pick up much from a dozen 1 sentence replies on reddit, for instance. You could even use some sort of neural network based sentence transformer to scramble the structure without significantly altering the meaning.