It mentions style as being among the data points used, along with personal details, though if your hidden account is used for things like whistleblowing or niche erotica, you may not be mentioning telltale biographical details at all often, while you can’t help writing the way you write, with numerous unconscious choices between alternative ways of phrasing things, which will be the bulk of what it has to work with.

Of course, that doesn’t mean you couldn’t slip up, so if you don’t want your posts traced back to you, also look out for any details you’re leaking and file the serial numbers off them (and perhaps rig up a way of delaying your posts outside of your waking hours).

They’ll also need to add Australia, Israel and Azerbaijan, given that they are in Eurovision.

This seems to mostly scale up stylometry (the method of identifying authorship by writing style), a long-established technique. It unmasked the Unabomber in the 90s, as well as the anonymous author of a scandalous book about the Clinton administration. Indeed, one technique some writers use of dodging this is to deliberately write in character in a contrived style (there was an information-security poster on Twitter whose style was modelled on Taylor Swift, for example).

As all things are an arms race, a countermeasure to this would be a locally-hosted language model that can rephrase text into a more neutral style. Install it on your phone, select the text you’ve written and get it to rewrite it, getting something without any regionalisms, turns of phrase or other peculiarities of your writing style that you wouldn’t notice but would identify you given a large enough corpus of your writings. A voice changer for text, if you will.

That looks wonky in English. Nobbling your translations for the sake of people incapable of understanding that words work differently in other languages is like putting “REMOVE FROM BOX BEFORE EATING” on pizza cartons.

Ladies and gentlemen, the art of the deal.

Rationalists and/or Randroids?

Which is great news if you’re a Mossad agent tasked with figuring out a target’s life patterns