Ask HN: How can you provide complete anonymity and identity on the internet? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How can you provide complete anonymity and identity on the internet?

10 pointsmattrighetti8 comments

Nowadays you always have to add some kind of personal information to use a service or browsing the internet in general. This creates the potential threat to be identified, tracked, spied and so on.

Is there a way/study that proposed a model for complete anonymity in the internet that would still make you able to identify yourself (e.g. a kind of ID card that would not make the previous issues possible)?

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Tor browser has solved 100% of my ‘browsing the internet’ issues.

From Hacker News, Reddit, YouTube to newspapers, blogs and podcasts, if it’s not Tor friendly I simply skip it.

Haven’t had any regrets for years.

I'd love to pay for a full set of services like this - email, phone, VPN, payment gateway.

Sometimes you want a consistent identity to play a game, review your company on glassdoor, or praise Satan with, but you don't want to make an entire set of fake emails, phone, and so on. Scammers already have ways to do this, and it would be nice to have something semi-centralized that can report you for crime, but you can trust at about the same level that someone would trust LastPass.

I don’t know the answer, but I will offer that complete anonymity on the Internet will result in the purest form of evil that we have yet to see. In a public space, it’s best if people (and organizations) know that they are accountable for their actions; otherwise, the anonymous act purely in their own best interest. You can already see this happening in both the physical and virtual worlds. It’s very dangerous and a threat to civilization.

The things that I’ve pointed out are not less evil though, we can see the results in the past years

What if the answer includes a way for the anonymous to be accountable for their actions? What if some mechanism could enforce this?

The purest forms of evil that we know about predate the internet. Not to mention, removing anonymity also removes a real resource for individuals.

I was depressed a lot as a young person and considered suicide. I’d never share these feelings offline. Online, I was able to connect with individuals that I can speak truthfully to.

Also, anonymity makes me take every post at value. For example, if you’re biased against a religion, political affiliation, race, etc, you might find that you ignore posts made by those you’re biased again. Anonymous posters don’t have this worry - I don’t know who you are. Thus, the only thing I can judge is your words. Not past words, but words here and now.

There’s positives and negatives but in this case the negatives far outweighs the positives.

> The purest forms of evil that we know about predate the internet.

Correct, but they didn't say that it was only available through that means.

This is a difficult and complex topic. I've been thinking about it for years.

Going from Plato's The Republic and the dialog about the Ring of Gyges, I don't think pure untrammelled anonymity is worth the possibility of the evil that can be done. Look at Twitter, psyops and the power of a hand full of people with programming chops, a chip on their shoulder and time on their hands. Empires will fall and millions will die because of the apparent mob of opinion that's really only a thin shell.

Fully Homomorphic Encryption [1] (FHE) would be one of these services. You could let someone else on the internet do computations for you, without him being able to see what the input/output of these computations are. The idea behind FHE is that the whole computation process will be fully encrypted, and therefore anonymous, while containing usable personal data. From the server side you can apply algorithms like:

  // With FHE the server side cannot see the outcome of the if/else statement.
  if (encData.authenticate('John Doe')) {
    encData.result = addEncryptedResult(doStuffWith(encData.input), encData.pubKey);
  } else {
    encData.result = addEncryptedResult("Authentication failed.", encData.pubKey);
  }
  sendBack(encData);

For example, you can use FHE on your income. Send the encrypted data to someone else (could be anyone). They compute the tax reduction computations for you, without seeing who you are, what you earn, and what your tax returns are. Because every computation this person performs is fully encrypted and release the results openly. You download the encrypted results and, because you have the private key, find your tax returns. (I can probably come up with a better example if I think a bit longer)

The only downside of FHE is that it's way too slow to be practical. When I studied the Brakerski-Gentry-Vaikuntanathan scheme in 2011 I remembered that it took hours to compute 3 + 4. Speed has increased a lot in FHE, but it's not at a practical level yet.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption

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