Comment by tibbon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tibbon | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I didn't quite get the need for anonymity until I was at SXSW and watched danah's opening talk (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kl0VANhnvxk) and talked to her a bit more about it afterward.

I realized how incredibly privileged and rare my situation is that I can live my life fairly openly online with little fear of repercussion.

- As a heterosexual no one questions my sexual orientation online, or will harass me for it. Photos of me with a significant other won't cause an issue with anyone.

- I don't have, nor have I ever had an abusive relationship in which I must distance myself from someone.

- I'm fortunate enough to live in a country that (generally) allows me to do whatever online and I don't need to fear for my life. I am also a native born citizen here and don't have any immigration issues to deal with.

- I don't fear for my job because of what I say online (my work situation is very understanding and isn't nosy). Of course, not everyone works in technology.

- I have no children to protect

- I also feel that I understand the internet rather well and generally have a feeling for the direct repercussions of something that I do.

These (and many other things) aren't true for everyone. I felt silly for not realizing it beforehand, partially because danah had hung out at my house at hackathons and such even, and I just didn't get it until her presentation.

Also you're not female. Have a feminine name in a male-dominated environment adds to suspicion (is that a guy masquerading as girl?) and (mostly harmless and unintended) gender-bias comments or, what I feel is even worse, special attention.

The larger reason I don't post publicly with my real name is that, quite frankly, what I have to say in public needs to be in context. If you google my name and it comes up with a bunch of comments, and you don't take the time to read the context then it's very, very easy to come to a false conclusion of a person's beliefs.

Disclaimer: I use my real name in g+ but I don't post publicly and disable my posts to be shared. I'm no dissident but I value my searchable-privacy and so do my friends. I post more in g+ than I ever did in Facebook because of the circles feature.

Last quick note: I've had seemingly innocuous content that was searchable on my name used against me, a long time ago. I've since taken great care to remain anonymous and have found that my use of public forums is far more free and enjoyable and I have no issues at all speaking with others whose names I do not know (HN as a case).

I can't tell you how heartening it is to read your post, because it means that people can realize the error of something like this and change their beliefs.

People who keep claiming that "we live in public" and that everything is out there anyway are extremely naive.

And are usually adult, white, heterosexual males in technology (like me). It wasn't until I got married that I realized how naive some of the beliefs that I had held my whole life.

Is there any evidence that having a strong online presence under your real name increases danger to your children?

Having a strong online presence means putting up pictures of what's important to you. That means that pictures of your kids are out there and traceable to you.

Personally, I don't think that it increases any danger to kids, I use my real name and post pictures of my adorable kids all the time, but I respect those who feel differently.

> Having a strong online presence means putting up pictures of what's important to you. That means that pictures of your kids are out there and traceable to you.

It does? I have a blog, a well-used Facebook profile, an active twitter account, and I comment on Reddit and HN all the time—but the last picture of me that exists on the public internet is from 2005. All the photos I actually want to share with my family are in a shared folder in my Dropbox account.

I guess I have a strong mental separation of my public and private lives; I would never talk about my family on my blog, nor would I talk about my job on Facebook.

My wife hates Facebook - people keep on tagging her and our kids in photos, thus reversing our efforts at keeping our photos private. She only logs in so she can remove the tags.

There really should be a "Don't ever let people tag me." option in social networks.

There is an option on facebook to prevent anyone else from tagging you in their photos. Its in you account privacy setting.

Google+ lets you approve all tags.

You have to approve being tagged in Google+. Yet another reason why I'd rather see them succeed than Facebook.

Interesting. I don't even try to differentiate my work and family stuff. A good story is a good story, so I share family stories at work and work stories with my Facebook friends. Flickr photos are for everyone (I even had an ad agency contact me and buy the rights to use one of my kids' pictures in an ad campaign).

Part of what the original article was talking about is that having a "real names only" policy makes it harder to keep that strong separation of public and private lives.

When I go to tech events like SXSWi, there might be 100 photos of me generated in a single night and posted online by others. It all depends what it means for you in being hyper-active on the web and in the tech scene.

If I had a kid that I was bringing along with me occasionally, there could easily be photos of them on there too. A real danger? Probably not. But what if I had an ex with a restraining order against them, and they didn't know where I, or my kids were living? That could be a potential issue if they were name searchable, geotagged, etc.

I guess the real point is that I can't imagine all of the situations, because they probably don't apply to me right now. You can find my address, phone number, email, employment history, favorite coffee shop, online easily. Yet, I'm ok with that. Not everyone would be, and that's understandable.

I think the implication is that his children would also have to use their real names (but I don't know how the bill actually deals with minors).

So is there evidence that children are at a higher risk of being kidnapped (or some other bad thing) if their info is public? There was some tabloid scaremongering to this effect in the early days of the Internet, but there are now enough kids online that there should be enough data to confirm or refute this myth.

For most people, I doubt it. But I'm certainly glad my mother's phtotos weren't online when I was in high school. Bullying is always an issue.

There is a place for anonymous and public social networks. There are dozens of online forums and websites for gay teenagers, for example. People at risk just treat the internet the same way they treat the analog. Talk to people you can trust, in places that are private (and anonymous).

Thank you for that link.

My feelings on this matter were set when I was a young child. I read about the Nazi era in germany, and why homosexuals were much less likely to survive than jews.

The answer was, ironically, due to how liberal Germany was about homosexuality in the 1920s. Many gay people came out of the closet, there were magazines and national organizations to support various groups of gay and lesbian people and their interests.

When the nazis came to power, they went to the offices of these magazines and groups and got the lists of all the members, and then they went and systematically executed every one of them.

Now, we don't live in a nazi regime, of course. But there are many, much less severe, things that can be done to people, from employment discrimination to harassment.

The old saying, "On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog" describes a feature, not a bug. It lets dogs participate with people, without fear of being harassed by cats, or whatever. It also keeps the topic on the topic at hand, not on the question of whether dogs should be allowed on the internet.

Privacy is good for the community. It is good for everybody. Even if you don't have a fascist government that wants to spy on you.

A lot of these policies really strike me as White Supremacism 2.0. To quote Wikipedia:

"White supremacy, as with racial supremacism in general, is rooted in ethnocentrism and a desire for hegemony."

In other words, white supremacism isn't about white people per se. Rather, it's about promoting one culture as the dominant one while trying to suppress all other cultures. That's exactly what these policies are doing.

Hegemony is very distinct from the white supremacist movement. While white supremacists probably promote hegemonic practices, this does not mean that some engineer who didn't take the time to think about people in circumstances very different from his/her own is a white supremacist. Sadly, dominant members of a hegemonic culture (read: pretty much every culture) participate subconsciously to reinforce the hegemony simply by not being aware of it.

I understand that you don't like the Real Name requirement, but pulling out the Big Gun Labels like this is akin to calling Larry Page the New Hitler. It's not accurate, and all you're going to do is make people angry.

Oddly enough, a lot of who used to be "white suprematists" are these days are more of the non-hegemonic cultural-separatist types, heavily influenced by postmodernism and postcolonial theory in the "right of Peoples to self-determination" sort of sense (at least those associated with the 'New Right' theorists). You end up with strange spectacles like French nationalists getting along well with right-wing Turkish nationalists, Japanese nationalists, or Israeli nationalists--- they all agree that they'd like to observe each other peacefully from a distance, in each group's pure, mono-ethnic country, each with their Glorious Histories and whatnot, maybe with the occasional bit of tourism, but definitely no immigration.

So is your argument that the system does not promote cultural hegemony, or that it is not intended to promote cultural hegemony? Because the latter, while it may be true, is largely irrelevant. I think it's entirely possible that you can get forces that promote hegemony as an unintended consequence of seemingly innocuous design decisions, or else as an emergent phenomenon of complex systems.

I'm not trying to call Larry Page the new Hitler, rather I'm just pointing out that there is an existing word for what Danah Boyd and others are describing.

ender7 (an ironic name) did not refute the idea that the system promotes hegemony. His issue appears to be with your conflation of hegemony and white supremacy.

Your argument is a classic logical fallacy- "white supremacists want hegemony. We have a hegemony. Ergo, the system is run by white supremacists"

From a real name policy to "White Supremacy" is quite a leap.

I think back on planet earth, what's more likely is that the people who created these systems are insisting on real names to solve one sort of problem without thinking about the other problems it may cause, rather than "a desire for hegemony" or "promoting one culture as the dominant one".

Your parent's point of view is the current extension of political correctness taken to it's extreme. That is to say, the world is steadily being encroached by the idea that not expressly considering a minority in a decision is the same as actively campaigning against them.

Or - and this is taking the opposite polemical position to yours - that designing systems without empathy is reprehensible. I lean more to the latter but that doesn't mean what you claim is entirely false either.

It's not as simple as anyone paints it, and what's more, it's an area where short-term economic incentives are often drastically misaligned with both goals of personal autonomy and, more arguably, long-term success of a community and product.

But unrestrained personal autonomy gets you 4chan. The real problem is trying to flatten the richness of human experience to fit through TweetBook+ (or whatever comes next). No easy answers and the problem ain't going away.

I think you should look at the HN community as a model, rather than 4chan. Consistent pseudonyms, tied to karma seems to work. No?

Until an account starts getting its posts auto-killed.

When you say "consistent", what's your position on multiple pseudonyms (or "restarts")?

Well, Mark Zuckerberg has claimed that people that don't use their real name are Bad People(tm). (1000 thanks to whoever can conjure up a link to that quote) Personally, that seems like he's attacking anyone that opposes his idea of trying to force people into using real names.

The same can't be said of other systems (Google+, Quora, etc) to my knowledge.

Here's a link:

http://michaelzimmer.org/2010/05/14/facebooks-zuckerberg-hav...

Zuckerberg thinks that anyone that has two identities for themselves has a 'lack of integrity.'

I think "cultural imperialism" is the term you want.

White supremacy did not invent hegemony. It's a fallacy. There are people who say that places like Africa or North America was peaceful before the europeans. Unfortunately they were both very active places where people would kill their neighbours. It's a part of humanity, one we need to fight against.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com