Fingerprinting

Fresh owners are not enough if the content itself identifies the writer. How Arkognito guards against it.

A fresh owner hides who wrote a record. The record itself can still give the writer away: an unusual size, an odd lifetime, an exact timestamp, a precise location, or a rare combination of ordinary values. Arkognito removes the signals it can and warns about the rest.

Removed automatically

Signal	What Arkognito does
Payload size	Padded to 512 B, 1 KB, 4 KB or 16 KB
Encryption	Encrypted and plain records of the same input are the same size
Lifetime	Rounded up to 1 h, 1 d, 7 d, 30 d or 90 d
Creator	Always a shared relayer
Position in a batch	Shuffled; spent markers shuffled separately
Timing	Batching plus a random client delay
Tag	Every tag is the same length with a fresh IV

Warned about

check() runs on every write and returns warnings; with strict: true the write is refused instead.

const warnings = ark.check({ attributes, expires, payload })

Code	Flags
timestamp	Numbers that look like exact unix times, or time-named attributes
precise-location	Coordinates with more than 4 decimals (about 11 m)
postal-code	Postal-code attributes, which identify people in small areas
free-text	Long strings with spaces in attributes; put text in the payload
expiry-rounded	The lifetime will be rounded up to a bucket
expiry-too-long	Longer than 90 days
payload-too-large	Will not fit in 16 KB
rare-combination	Fewer than rarityK (default 3) existing records share these attribute values

The last one is a k-anonymity check: a record with district: "tiny-village" stands out even with a fresh owner if nobody else in the app wrote from there.

Safer values

import { coarse } from "arkognito"
import { dec } from "@arkiv-network/sdk/attr"

coarse.day(Date.now())   // "2026-10-13"
coarse.hour(Date.now())  // "2026-10-13T09"
dec(coarse.geo(18.520430)) // "18.52": about 1 km
coarse.bucket(37, 10)    // 30

What no code can fix

Content that identifies a person by itself, such as the only report ever filed from a small village or a payload that names someone, stays identifying. Design your schema so that what is public is coarse, and put anything personal in an encrypted payload.