Randi Zuckerberg Runs in the Wrong Direction on Pseudonymity Online
eff.org
eff.org
It is rather silly to quote civility when the alternative, the lack of anonymity, has terrible "real-world" consequences, as mentioned in the article.
the argument willfully ignores the many voices that are silenced in the name of shutting up trolls: activists living under authoritarian regimes, whistleblowers, victims of violence, abuse, and harassment, and anyone with an unpopular or dissenting point of view that can legitimately expect to be imprisoned, beat-up, or harassed for speaking out.
Can someone explain the rationale of placing civility ahead of the above consequences?
If "Civility" means "being nice to each other", why shouldn't we value it, in and of itself?
anonymity itself doesn't create crime or harassment. Like in the real life, it only makes it easier to perpetrate one. With this being said, why wouldn't we all wear GPS and RFID enabled collars at all times with our name, identification number and scan barcode being promptly visible on the collar?
Nice device, goes well with Guchi pants:
http://www.extremtrac.com/e/products/personal%20tracking%20s...
Like a smart phone?
FBI can turn on a phone's microphone: http://news.cnet.com/2100-1029_3-6140191.html
A German politician got a telecom company to hand over phone location data: http://blogs.dw-world.de/spectrum/?p=907
Pretty animation of phone tracking: http://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-data-retention
Imagine there's a service (HackerNews, 4chan, whatever) that you use. It gives you the opportunity to opt-in to real identity, at which point, you will only post with your real identity, and only see posts with your real identity.
If you opt out, you may still post and discuss, but you remain pseudonymous. You may share your details and information, or you may share nothing. You can see all comments and reply to anything, but the people who are real-identified don't see your posts or replies to theirs.
If you let this system run, I strongly believe that the number of people posting with real identities would be a fraction of a percent of the community, often doing it to make a specific point and then logging back out.
The "open internet", without enforced identity, is just a more interesting and useful place to visit than Facebook, or any other "exclusively real identity" destination.
(note: I replied to parent because this is related; I don't disagree with it at all)
I don't deny there are many great benefits to anonymity, especially on the internet, but people should be aware of the costs. Anonymity can allow people to do bad things and get away with it.
Instead of initially refuting them one-by-one, which only creates an argument on your terms, let me set the tone of an argument on my terms.
You present a strawman's argument instead of valid points worthy of serious debate in regards to the original statement. You make a weak, passing reference to anonymity being about more than trolling and then reference emotionally loaded examples to support said references.
Now, to refute your points individually.
1) Muggings often happen in public and private settings. You can be on a busy street, or in an ally, a public place, or even your own home. Two of my friends (who are here on HN too) were mugged in Rome a couple of months ago. Those fellows got away with their stuff and never caught, I believe. I've also had friends who were mugged in other situations, were able to give descriptions of their attackers, and those criminals have been arrested later because the public and police are on the lookout for them. The lack of anonymity doesn't prevent you from being a victim of crime. Many crimes such as mugging are committed by repeat offenders who are well-known to law enforcement. Being anonymous or not does not prevent crime from happening.
2) You reference the supposed possible threat implied by children being attacked at some future point by an anonymous deviant. This is a common tactic most often used to prop up weak arguments by appealing to the possible fear in parents. Statistics and reality quickly discount this notion. First, most acts of sexual abuse against children are committed by relatives. Not random strangers. Secondly, due to the extreme lengths over the last 20-30 years that this fear tactic has been used in the U.S., today we have massive online publicly available databases of people even remotely associated with sexual acts against children. The possibility of someone with such a history moving into a neighborhood near a school is more remote than at any time in history.
There was even a story the other day on MSNBC where a happily married couple met in high school. He was a few years older than his then girlfriend, she was 15 and he was 17-18. Her father didn't like him and reported him to the police after it was revealed they had started having sex. Despite that they have been married for years and have 4 children together, to this day this man is still labeled as a sex offender.
The restriction of anonymity and freedom for the majority should not be severely restricted simply because of an unfounded fear tactic, which is what you imply.
3) Third, you reference the 9/11 attacks. This is the most emotionally charged topic to happen in the last 10 years. One that the U.S. has spent tens of thousands of lives and TRILLIONS of dollars to "combat". There was nothing that was anonymous about the men that boarded those planes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hijackers_in_the_September_11_a...
To quote, "Within minutes of the attacks, the Federal Bureau of Investigation opened the largest FBI investigation in United States history, operation PENTTBOM. The suspects were identified within 72 hours because few made any attempt to disguise their names on flight and credit card records. They were also among the few non-U.S. citizens and nearly the only passengers with Arabic names on their flights, enabling the FBI to identify them and in many cases such details as dates of birth, known or possible residences, visa status, and specific identification of the suspected pilots."
The failure to prevent 9/11 lies more in the faults of the U.S. security apparatus then any ingenuity on the behalf of the hijackers. Read up under the Pre Attacks section I reference in the link above.
Finally, to refute your last point and to sum up my argument, there are more costs to being known rather than being anonymous. Being known makes it difficult or impossible for the innocent to seek freedom, to examine their rights, or in many cases to even conduct financial transactions. To set up a panopticon surveillance apparatus to closely monitor a population for their "security" reduces the cultural and financial health of that society.
People that are extremely publicly known get away with horrific crimes often, right in front of everyone. This ranges from murder to sexual assault to massive financial crimes.
Its more expensive morally and socially to be watched than it is to be anonymous.
1) Muggings - If you get mugged by someone you know, it's very easy to find them and punish them. It's no coincidence that muggings tend to happen in big cities where the chances of a mugger attacking someone they know is very low (anonymity).
2) Sexual predator - If a priest rapes a child and the child tells people about it (i.e. removing some of the priest's anonymity regarding his actions) the priest is likely to be investigated and thrown in jail. If you know a sexual predator lives next to the school your kid goes to (i.e. he has lost some of his anonymity) you might take additional protective measures that could prevent your children from being assaulted. Whether this is the most common scenario, or whether it is fair for sexual predators to be publicly identified, are completely separate issues. I am simply illustrating a cost.
3) Terrorists - If you were the pilot of a plane and knew that some of your passengers were members of an extremist group that had plotted to destroy airlines in the past (i.e. some of the passengers had lost some of their anonymity) you would probably kick them off your plane. Whether or not this relates to 9/11 is not the point, this is simply an example of a cost of anonymity.
As for your last point: I never said the costs of anonymity outweigh the benefits, I simply showed that there are costs.
Everyone around them would know their history, and name then therefore watch them to a close degree. As it is now, we simply try to prevent convicted pedophiles from being near unsuspecting children and parents.
---
With a terrorist, the argument is the same. If one knows that party A is a known terrorist, and has thoroughly checked them out then why not allow them to board a plan. 100% security isn't demanded---if it were, then we'd simply lock up every known terrorists before they committed any additional overt acts, then never release them.
---
Of all your cases, the mugging is the only one that makes sense because it refers to a lack of anonymity deterring a potential criminal rather than it being used as advanced warning for the potential victim.
I submit that it is not. How would your non-anonymous world stop a madman like Anders Breivik? He did not hide his views. He was a known user of white supremacist sites, and a known affiliate of white supremacist groups. However, no one, not even the fringe groups that he affiliated with could predict that he would carry out his horrible actions.
Breivik was not anonymous. That fact, however, did nothing to stop him from carrying out his crime.
Perhaps some of the misunderstanding is due to the broad definition of anonymity I'm using. Anonymity as I use it is the inability to link a person's actions to their identity. This type of anonymity breaks a lot of our social institutions. For example, if you don't know that a person committed a crime it's hard to arrest them.
If Anders Breivik was anonymous he would still be wandering Norway because no one would know that he was responsible for the murders. Some of the information I've read suggests that he wanted (or at least expected) to be caught. In such situations anonymity may actually discourage crime. I would guess, however, that most criminals would rather not be caught.
That anonymity is the source of crime isn't my argument, it's his.
Clearly, you can be identified as an 'enemy' and still be dangerous. A good example is during time of war, soldiers are often uniformed and standing in ranks. There is no doubt about which 'side' someone facing you is on, and yet they are no less dangerous because of it.
Anonymity doesn't remove danger, but merely identifies that danger exists.
Wouldn't it be interesting if you could flag something to notify you if you're walking by a white supremacist?
Facebook being the Identity provider of the net is a scary thought. As does anyone that big.
right from the KGB and Stasi manuals.
Christopher "moot" Poole: The case for anonymity online
http://www.ted.com/talks/christopher_m00t_poole_the_case_for...
More relevant quotes from 'moot' here:
http://venturebeat.com/2011/03/13/4chan-moot-christopher-poo...
That's nice that you feel that way. Why do I need to care, though? I can say whatever I want behind closed doors.
I'm not a huge believer in the whole "social media toppled authoritarian regimes" stories that have been going around after Tunisia/Egypt but I do think that to the extent real anonymity is possible it has the potential to help people living in places where dissent is both stigmatised and punished by allowing them to realise that others feel the same way.
This Steven Pinker talk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-son3EJTrU (I think; I don't have Flash so can't check it's the right one) talks about why this type of communication is essential to free societies and why freedom of assembly is protected in all free societies.
On the same general topic researchers in public health give people some wiggle room on truth telling by introducing random noise into their responses in order to improve the aggregate quality of information you get from asking them questions about controversial topics (drug use, sexuality): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randomized_response
tl;dr: anything that helps people tell the truth rather than timidly conforming to social norms is a good thing
My personal opinion is that you have to strike the right balance between
+ establishing trust in the production of content (you want other people to trust what you post, build an identity). Producing anonymous/pseudonymous content is fine, but how can I, as a consumer of that content (reader of reviews) can make sure I can trust it?
+ offerring users the protection they want from entities bothered by the content you produce. This can range from the extreme cases of freedom of speech, minorities, sensitive issues (medical, sexual orientation) to the more trivial examples of bad reviews for restaurants where the owners might track you down.
+ incentivizing the production of high quality content and discussions (see the quality of YouTube comments for a case of user generated content gone wrong :-) ).
+ making it easy for users to deal with this identity complexity. Understanding that even though you are logged in with your GMail account you are posting as a Nickname, understanding what others can or cannot infer about you.
It's a complicated problem full of tradeoffs any way you want to go. + Go with real-name all the time and you upset the people that are not comfortable exposing their real name. + Go with pseudonymity and you lose the benefits brought by having an identity on the web. + Go with a compromise and you have to deal with complicated user experience problems.
Yes, it's a raging shithole of trolls, mouth-frothing idiots and general retardation, but there're probably just as many decent people there. They're just not as vocal. This applies to many places, by the way, not just /b/.
Also, generally speaking, /b/ is the worst kind of example that you can probably think of. This makes for an interesting argument though: it can hardly get worse than /b/ - it's the absolute superlative of anonymity induced uncivility.
Sure, many people wouldn't bother and just adapt. But clearly groups like Anon, 4chan, most of irc, #antisec and numerous others would avoid it all and go elsewhere. It's often repeated that the kids will hang around until something new is cooler. I imagine AnonymouSabu could do a pretty good job of jump starting a new social network all by himself if he got banned from twitter. Even if you have nothing to hide you'd probably head there if your friends are there.
Second is how practical PKI with identity management is on a nation scale. To make a serious run at 100% real identity all the time you probably need to go full public/private key, smartcard+pin, IP packet tagging for egress outside the nation's great firewall and so on. With less than all that it'd simply be too easy to avoid.The problem is, PKI with identity management is a really hard problem to do well. One of the largest PKI deployments in the world is the DOD. They wrangled for years on deployment, already have strict security protocols and a managed environment. None the less they had to shut the entire system down not that long ago and revalidate every identity because they had so many bad cards in active use.
Sure, the government probably isn't the best at that, hence why the Obama ID plan looks to open standards and a federated group of ID providers - presumably firms like Google, Facebook, Bank of America, Verisign and Verizon. The problem is that many of these firms are ill equipped to manage something you depend on for all aspects of your life, day in day out. I've edited out a bunch of specific examples, but suffice to say few or none of them have all the pieces needed to manage such an important, hands on and support reliant business.
On paper it all seems achievable, but in practice it seems highly unlikely to me that you'll see universal required ID. Facebook would like to see it for any number of business reasons, but when it comes down to it it probably matters little what they think.
All that because somebody related to someone who figured out how to help college students hook up thinks people might be a bit nicer in blog comments? Yah right.
This has led to many problems: for one, conflicts. It seems every other month people mistake me for someone else with the same name. Either that or yet another person "mistakenly" uses my gmail address to sign up for a web service.
My last name is also difficult for some people to pronounce. With a pseudoname, this was not an issue. Not to mention my pseudoname was pretty easy to remember... people even still use it!
Really as far as i know, my lack of a pseudoname has not made me appear any more professional than before, so i'm finding it hard to find a good reason why i should even use my real name on the internet. In fact pseudonymity is a great tool to segregate online identities in this age where people will write and store prejudicial information about you for extremely long periods of time (forever if it gets to archive.org).
My question is: how are they going to distinguish puppets from real people?
As long as it benefits their bottom line, I'd say: never.
If you follow the money, it rarely fails... especially when we're talking about the amoral concepts that corporations are designed to be.
Of course, anonymity is a powerful defense against this type of marketing, particularly when it isn't particularly "permissive" in the first place. Facebook's repeatedly sneaky approach to eliminating privacy is part and parcel of that effort.
So naturally, "permission marketers" think everyone should be identified as it helps them make more money. That's really what it's about: the bottom line.
For all practical purposes, it's not even a well-formulated hypothesis, and most people (even journalists) never bother to look at any of the findings, it's just a popular meme.
Why not both? Some places, like Google+, might be nom-de-plum-free. Some, like reddit, might not. Why make it one way or the other?
I can easily foresee an internet that has parts that are "real person only" and parts that are the wild west. For that matter, some parts, like banking access, might be even more locked down. I don't think we have to make some massive decision for all of it. Let it evolve and bifurcate as it needs to.
In fact, offline real identity is less dangerous: unless you kill their mother, people you don't interact with will forget you in a matter of months. The internet is permanent.
But why am i wasting my time, facebook people think like infants anyway.
“Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”
Facebook's policy from the top down seems to be that you are only ever entitled to one identity - period. If you were foolish enough to be born into an environment where expressing yourself solely through that one identity can get you in to trouble and/or killed, that's your own fault.
"Randi Zuckerberg to leave Facebook..."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20087785-93/randi-zuckerber...
I think someone likely said, "enough is enough" and forced her out.
I'm sure if they look hard enough they can dig up plenty of dirt on her.
But even if they do, it wont' be all of it, since noone is that stupid as to use their real name online. If she has even a single account online that uses a pseudonym or a username she is a hypocrite