1
Whenever you write something in Google Docs, the platform records your keystrokes in small batches and saves them for the lifetime of the document. This allows Heat Signature to work retroactively on something you’ve already written.
When you write, you betray your humanity in the tiny pauses, insertions and deletions that constitute the labor of writing even a short message. These patterns can’t identify who you are, just that you are a ‘who.’
2
When you submit a document, the Chrome extension (on your local machine) retrieves that data and scrubs the letters before sending it anonymously to the Heat Signature servers.
3
Our model uses a combination of simple heuristics (was the text pasted all at once?) and advanced machine learning (does it appear to be retyped from elsewhere?) and returns an evaluation of whether the document was written by a person from scratch.
4
The extension generates a private report with the results and a public URL.
5
If someone else wants to verify that your text is original, they can paste it into this URL to see if it matches the cryptographic fingerprints on Heat Signature’s servers.
