From Steve Swift, Alton, Hampshire, UK
I was fascinated by your article on how your personal writing style betrays identity (25 November, p 36). Over a decade ago, while working for IBM, I created a website where employees could submit complaints anonymously.
These were usually forwarded to the person's manager. While I “guaranteed” that the system was anonymous, it was obvious to me that my manager could always detect something I had written.
So I experimented with obfuscation mechanisms. I took a complaint and passed it through Google's nascent English-to-French translation. Then I passed the French back through the French-to-English translator.
Perfect! No manager would be able to attribute the result. But unfortunately, that was because it was meaningless drivel. No doubt if I repeated my experiment now, with Google's much improved translators, the obfuscated text would be almost perfect.
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