We're all unique 🥰 and trackable
What better than the US Air Force to study the homogeneity of a cohort. A technical note from the US Military in 1952 called The “Average man”? shows us it doesn’t take many parameters to make out someone in a crowd. Stature, chest circumference, sleeve length etc., men were considered to be part of the average if they were within 0.3*σ (rounded to the nearest centimeter). Around ¼ to ⅓ of all men fit in the average for each parameter. After only 10 parameters, no one is in the combined categories:
Of the original 4063 men 1055 were of approximately average stature of these 1055 men 302 were also of approximately average chest circumference of these 302 men 143 were also of approximately average sleeve length of these 143 men 73 were also of approximately average crotch height of these 73 men 28 were also of approximately average torso circumference of these 28 men 12 were also of approximately average hip circumference of these 12 men 6 were also of approximately average neck circumference of these 6 men 3 were also of approximately average waist circumference of these 3 men 2 were also of approximately average thigh circumference of these 2 men 0 were also of approximately average in crotch length
Two points I find interesting:
How far above the average were the two men on that last parameter?
It reinforces the idea that an actor with relatively little data would have a real easy time identifying someone on the internet. Cookies and fingerprinting are everywhere. IP, browser version, screen size, tabs that open on startup, logins, cursor movements, language, country, hidden pixels, typing speed, ISP, VPN server, crotch length etc. Even with a VPN and Brave browser, meant to hide your unique characteristics, protect you from cookies, and make the internet more annoying to get into than an NSA database, tools like LLM Chatbots and Google Workspace know us more intimately than ever. They’re greedily trying to keep all the information for themselves (e.g. Google trying to eliminate third-party cookies), which gives them immense power to sway opinions. But man are they convenient.