Death Note Anonymity analysis by Gwern.

I think it would be valuable to read for people here, especially newbies and “privacy bros” to understand how privacy (anonymity) actually works.

Given a perfect weapon, can you commit a perfect crime?

The answer is surprisingly close to no.

Everything you do bleeds information.

A perfect crime is one that wasn’t even noticed. If a perfect crime gets noticed it immediately reveals the following: you are smart and you have the knowledge and weapons to commit a perfect crime, and in a murder you must have had a motive, instantly ruling out 99% of the human population.

On the web you can be tracked using almost anything: browser window size, word choice, times you are online, internet connection delay, negative qualities like not giving your language will exclude the majority of people who do.

In fact, just this post alone is sufficient to narrow me down to less than a million (maybe even a few thousand) people.

Edit: This is actually about anonymity, privacy is slightly different, but I think this is still relevant to privacy.