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Comment by ChrisMarshallNY | Hacker News Reader

I gave up anonymity. I just learned to lean into taking control of my ID. Some time ago, I realized that there's no way for me to participate online, without things being attributed to me.

I learned this, by setting up a Disqus ID. I wanted to comment on a blog post, and started to set up an account.

After I started the process, it came back, with a list of random posts, from around the Internet (and some, very old), and said "Are these yours? If so, would you like to associate them with your account?"

I freaked. Many of them were outright troll comments (I was not always the haloed saint that you see before you) that I had sworn were done anonymously. They came from many different places (including DejaNews). I have no idea how Disqus found them.

Every single one of them was mine. Many, were ones that I had sworn were dead and buried in a deep grave in the mountains.

Needless to say, I do not have a Disqus ID.

Being non-anonymous means that I need to behave myself, online. I come across as a bit of a stuffy bore, but I suspect my IRL persona is that way, as well.

That's OK.

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These are called “chilling effects,” they cause people to self censor when it comes to socially controversial positions. Historically, this would include womens suffrage, black rights, gay rights, various religious positions…

It’s not okay to be tracked so thoroughly that people stop feeling they can explore controversy online

On top of that: anonymity should not be required to explore controversy at all. That’s the chilling effect. The issue is that as a society we have failed royally to internalize tolerating freedom of expression. Instead we choose to censor and silence people who wish to explore controversy even though we have laws in place that protect one’s freedom to express themselves however they desire without damaging recourse to their life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.

Anonymity is certainly a tool that can be used in dire situations when there are real credible threats and the stakes are high. However it takes a certain type of courage to express oneself freely which would be really nice to see in the majority of all other situations. Instead of exploring controversy anonymously, we should aim as a society to explore it normally and simply build up the intellectual maturity and capacity to tolerate controversy like adults and not children…

In short, I don't want to live in a society where everyone is anonymous. That doesn't sound very social at all and doesn't work at scale. I want to live in a society where I can build strong respectful adult relationships with people and not immediately judge, shun, and twitter mob someone who says they don't 100% agree with my lifestyle. Tolerating differences in viewpoints and lifestyles is true diversity. Diversity is not finding people with different physical features who all actually think the same and putting them on a magazine cover or in the same office together.

> In short, I don't want to live in a society where everyone is anonymous.

You wear a name tag to the pub, or supermarket?

You don’t keep your phone with you?

Or always pay cash?

That doesn’t help if every other phone in the vicinity of the business gets a ping from your phone.

Being gratuitously anti-social in a pub or supermarket already has consequences, name tags or not (you'll get kicked out). It doesn't matter if people know your name or not, they'll recognize your face, and you might not be welcome back.

Being gratuitously anti-social online might also have consequences (your account gets banned), but if creating another anonymous account is free and easy, then the consequences are trivially ignored.

You could make a distinction between anonymity and ease-of-creating-new-accounts, but usually the two are tied together.

No, but I also don't wear a mask that covers my face and I don't use a voice changer to scramble my speech.

In meatspace, people use different modes of identification than just a name, so names aren't as important to figuring out who's who.

the cameras that track your every movement inside a supermarket (plus the software that labels your image with a unique identifier) have you pinned down pretty well already, no need for nametags.

Only in some places.

more places than you would expect though.

Don’t forget the Bluetooth beacon trackers.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/14/opinion/bluet...

I don’t, yet I am still not anonymous. If someone at the supermarket asked me my name I would tell them.

> You wear a name tag to the pub, or supermarket?

Yes, but I don't realize it.

I wonder which elements of your "lifestyle" would get you shunned, or disinherited, or imprisoned, or killed for your family's honor. I enjoy almost perfect intersectional privilege, and one of those privileges has been to use my full real Googlable name on all my social media accounts, specifically because I want to be accountable for what I say, and because I've always believed that nothing about my real identity imperils me. (I'm a little less sure, recently, that liberal atheists and our allies will be safe from the American pogroms to come. Too late now!)

I don't want to live in a society where exploration and discussion of taboo ideas risks my livelihood. Short of somehow inducing massive change in the way most people think about things, anonymity is the only way to achieve that.

I don't feel I have any difficulty airing positions I feel online without anonymity. I sometimes end up arguing, but rarely in bad faith. I stand by what I say, though my views now may be different to those of previous me and I'm happy to debate that too. If you can't stand by a position, maybe you shouldn't air it.

It isn't about not standing by a position, it is about the potential of attracting the attention of a small extremist minority that will spend outsize effort trying to destroy your life.

I'm glad that you feel secure enough in your position in life that you think you can weather such an attack, but not everyone is so lucky. Implying anyone who needs anonymity is simply holding an unreasonable position is simply not fair.

> Implying anyone who needs anonymity is simply holding an unreasonable position is simply not fair.

Neither of us did.

From the GP:

> If you can't stand by a position, maybe you shouldn't air it.

The implication of this is pretty clear.

Fair point.

But context is king. The context of that particular quote, is that it came immediately after this:

> I stand by what I say, though my views now may be different to those of previous me and I'm happy to debate that too.

They were clearly talking about themselves, and a rule they apply to themselves.

That said, one of my "cleanup routines" for writing and posting, is I look for instances of "you," and often change it to "I" or "me."

I would have probably written it like so:

> If I can't stand by a position, maybe I shouldn't air it.

BTW: I apply the same philosophy to my own posting.

There's a very valid argument for online (and offline) anonymity, and I don't like the specious "If you aren't doing anything wrong, then you shouldn't have anything to hide." argument.

I just find using that as a fig leaf for trolling and stalking people is rather annoying, as that behavior actually puts the people that really need it, at risk.

Standing up for my Principles can sometimes be quite scary. I've risked losing jobs, for refusing to carry out orders that were unethical, and I am routinely attacked, here (but politely -this is HN, after all), for holding some of the views I hold.

> But context is king. The context of that particular quote, is that it came immediately after this

Yes, the context was a switch from first person to second person. The most reasonable and likely interpretation is not that it was an accident, but that the second person was intended to convey a statement about what people in general should do. E.I: "If one can't stand by a position maybe one shouldn't air it."

It is true that there is a trade off between anonymity and culpability, but that doesn't mean we don't need both. To my mind, we need anonymity to protect smaller scale participants and accountability for larger scale participants to limit abuse of power. I don't know how you achieve that in practice.

That works well amongst equals. It fails when some have more power than others and can use that to hurt those others for things they disagree with.

E.g., this is why true democracy needs secret ballots. Perhaps you and I aren't afraid to vote in public. But a democracy needs everyone to give their honest vote, not only those who have nothing to fear.

Cool screen name. Eddings fan?

Definitely agree. I have my approach to life, the universe, and everything, and it is unreasonable to project my values and whatnot onto others.

Many times, the favor is not returned, though.

> Eddings fan?

Yup :) (1)

Also an online privacy fan with (what probably amounts to) strict views. Eg.: privacy is a bit of a misnomer. It puts the focus on the person who can be wronged. In other crimes, we don't do that. A burglar is not the one whose house was burgled; a robber is not the one who was robbed.

Privacy isn't about me or my rights; it is about other people and limits on theirs. You're not allowed to take other people's money, why should you be allowed to take other people's data?

(1) Aside: I keep rereading the books. I found others that move me more, but I tend to move beyond them. Eddings writings manage to keep entertaining me. Not necessarily high-brow, but definitely entertaining and the entertainment doesn't peter out after the 3rd or so book (all too common in fantasy in my experience).

(1) Same here. Every couple of years. I also read The Elenium/Tamuli series.

I tried the Elder Gods series, and it was ... awful. The Redemption of Althalus was readable, but couldn't hold a candle to the other books.

The intra-party banter is what makes them. I tend to call it "popcorn fantasy" but mean that positively (and the length of time he takes to set up the "who's turn is it to cook" gag is simply masterful).

Last time I played a Rogue in an AD&D game I used Silk as an archetype, and it worked out very nicely.

Not only that, but benign positions today might be totally taboo in 20 years, and when that time comes, they will be just an Internet search away. You have no idea whether something harmless you say today will be used to paint you as a terrible person decades from now. I think back to some of the stuff I said 20 years ago which at the time were entirely uncontroversial, that I'd get fired for if I said today.

There needs to be a middle ground though. When people air opinions they're unwilling to change, any criticism(no matter how justified) will feel like a personal attack, and bad faith arguing will tend to be the result.

In other words, stand by your position, but also learn when to admit you were wrong.

In my case, that happens all the time. You probably won't have to search too far, to find me apologizing, admitting error, or finding a way to make amends.

It's a fundamental tenet of my way of life. I promptly admit when I'm wrong.

I've found the best way to avoid having to make amends, is to not cause the offense, in the first place. I tend to be fairly careful about keeping it in the "I," all the time (but no good deed goes unpunished -I am often told that "I'm making it all about me").

I do find that I get attacked, sometimes, right out of the blue, for stating personal philosophies and/or experiences. My fave is when I am told that something that happened to me "didn't actually happen." I assume that is because it is an inconvenient truth, for others. My experience, dealing with tech industry ageism, is a common fulcrum for that kind of response.

I've found the best way to avoid having to make amends is to not cause unintentional offence, certainly, and I've got (annoyingly) slowly better at it over the course of my life.

Sometimes, though, I absolutely -do- intend to offend somebody, and in that case I own it.

> When people air opinions they're unwilling to change

That's the thing, there are a lot more positions these days that people seem to be unwilling to change.

That is a very naive point of view.

Its not standing by a decision, its the unknown risk of an adversary using information you thought private against you. Whether its abortion clinics, or prospective employers vetting your background. You won't know which opportunities were missed as a result of something in your record that may have happened 20 years ago. You'll probably think it isn't happening, until it impacts you personally, and then its too late. That's exactly how it happened in East Germany with the wall.

https://www.stopspying.org/pregnancy-panopticon

To give an example of this, I lived in a municipality where most community-driven things were organized on Facebook, including government-driven initiatives.

I won't participate in them using my real name, because I once witnessed the mayor of the town doxx and lead a campaign to harass a single mother because she disagreed with the majority party that's run the town for the last 40 years. She got dogpiled on by hundreds of residents for participating in a discussion on Facebook.

It wasn't an isolated incident either, other people have had the same experience and even felt the need to move after it happened because some people took it to an extreme and felt the need to harass them for months afterwards.

You don’t have laws against that sort of abuse of power?

Laws only work when law enforcement and criminal justice cares to enforce them and/or when the wronged party has enough resources to sue in a venue where law enforcement and criminal justice will care.

Maybe, but the entire county is run by the good ol' boys network. Good luck getting the police to investigate or charge the mayor, and good luck in court.

Part of the chilling effect is the incentive against pursuing justice in cases like this. The single mother was already publicly targeted and made unsafe, chances are that the public targeting will get even worse if she pursued justice against her harassers.

These same people in power who led this campaign against her have sycophants in the local media who have no problem using their wide reach to smear dissenters like they do every election season, even for minor Board of Ed elections.

Laws are nice on paper, but only if someone actually enforces them.

The enforcers seem to have a lot of time and resources for enforcing those laws on minorities.

Chilling effects are not unequivocally bad though. When the speech in question is advocating for stripping away the civil rights of or committing genocidal acts against certain groups of people, I'd much rather that speech be chilled.

On the other hand, absolute freedom (and convenience) of expression for each of our disembodied and anonymized selves is problematic in the opposite way.

To bypass the sources of those chilling effects by remaining anonymous may in fact only allow them to grow stronger.

That's okay, as long as there is no police state hunting you.

That's okay, as long as you aren't a member of any persecuted minority, and as long as you don't have any interesting political views to share.

You are absolutely correct.

It’s fine, for me. I actually know folks that it would not be OK.

I am not giving advice; merely recounting what I have experienced, and the personal choices I have made, based on those experiences.

I've on a number of occasions expressed opinions because I believe they needed to be expressed and I knew the other folks holding those opinions wouldn't be ok to do so, whereas I probably would (and have largely survived that so far).

A small use of privilege but I hope a useful one overall.

That's a good point.

Don't forget the other part - being non-anonymous online makes it easy for stalkers and other bad actors to take it to the extreme. We need anonymity for lots of reasons.

I have ... interesting ... friends. I'll bet I know scarier people IRL, than I'll find online.

Also, what impressed me about the Disqus incident, was how fast it came back with that list.

In the US, at least, true anonymity takes a lot of work. For example, if you own a house, people can use tax records to find out who you are, unless you do what rich people do, and use shell companies. I also own a couple of [small] companies. I maintain a UPS box, because they get a lot of junk mail (and some business junk mail comes to my home address, anyway).

That's just one of hundreds of ways we can be found. Many predate teh Internets Tubes. My mailbox gets stuffed with junk mail. Some of it is quite specific. They use these mechanisms, and have been, for decades. I have known folks in the collections industry. They can find people surprisingly easily. There was one guy who used to be a skip tracer, and he wrote a book called How to Disappear[0]. It's a fairly sobering read (and probably quaintly anachronistic, these days).

The Unabomber actually did it correctly. He only got nailed, once he posted something publicly.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/How-Disappear-Digital-Footprint-Witho...

This reminds me of a post I saw on /r/fatfire about how to buy a house anonymously. I have it bookmarked in case my company ever takes off.

https://old.reddit.com/r/fatFIRE/comments/l0wd5i/update_to_p...

Also just because there is a law doesn't mean there are consequences codified, and this is most true regarding states laws that “require” an LLC registered in their state. Remember that states are in competition for business, there are hurdles for them to do annoying things. The best example I’ve seen in one state is that a local LLC branch is required after your foreign LLC gets sued, and the limited liability is active and retroactively applied at that point in time. But hey maybe your anonymous LLC deters people from suing to begin with.

(This is different than there being a law codified and not being enforced)

"Anonymous" LLCs are going away. FinCEN will be requiring reporting of everybody with ownership greater than 25% starting in probably 1-2 years from now. The fucking feds won't let us have anything without stalking our every move.

Yes, their proposed implementations of that act look pretty onerous and unnecessarily difficult to comply with

But I’m fine with one agency of the federal government having a private database, shareable for some investigations, which is the direction its going

I hope it gets handicapped or repealed

My name being Matt S Trout, abbreviated on various documents as 'MS TROUT', I regularly get junk mail addressed to 'Ms. Trout'.

Once, my housemate got junk mail addressed to 'Mr. <firstname> Trout' as a result. He was a trifle annoyed by this but his partner found it hilarious.

Anonymity is a broad term though. I would be incredibly surprised (and fascinated) if anyone on HN can find my true identity from my account, even with an e-mail address in my profile. I also know that Google (and therefore powerful bad actors or law enforcement) can easily figure it out, since I've logged in to this e-mail address from the same devices as my private e-mail address.

If I'd need full privacy, I'd have to add many more levels of security in my daily life that I don't find necessary. I just don't want people (or a SWAT team) to show up at my door because I triggered someone on the internet. That's why I post from multiple different accounts on different platforms. Though, I'm sure, in the future some form of AI will be able to link them all based on writing style and similarity of content of my posts. Guess I'll have to find another way to remain somewhat anonymous then.

  > some, very old
  > I had sworn were done anonymously

How in the hell did they do it ? I presume you changed IP and user-agent many times over since then... How ?

I have no idea. This was before all the machine learning stuff came into fashion.

Perhaps same email address?

They keep all the data posted since the early days of the internet, and are applying machine learning to it now (and will continue to into the future).

That's chilling.. The only long-going thread of attribution would rely on stylometry - a good fit for ML though..

Likely they drop a cookie with a session ID. I believe (but have no knowledge) that Disqus presents in an iframe, so the cookie persists whenever it loads on a page. So they can attribute all posts from that common session id. That said, chrome does not sync cookies, so this method only works as long as cookies don't get cleared (or computer replaced etc).

So it might be something else, given the implied age of the comments.

3rd party cookies perhaps? I'm actually very curious how this was possible too

I wouldn't presume anything. But email, phone number, cookies, other machine finger printing stuff, wifi and other location giveaways are also possible.

With a sticky fingerprint. I’ve built a system like this for managing trolls. You fingerprint the user and associate it with an IP. There are multiple mechanisms that can contribute to the fingerprint (cookie, user agent, supported media codecs, etc. See https://github.com/fingerprintjs/fingerprints for an example implementation).

Then if another user registers with the same fingerprint we link the accounts together.

In our case the whole thing is also requiring human moderator input to actually keep the whole thing going though.

Your link 404s. I believe this is what you meant to include: https://github.com/fingerprintjs/fingerprintjs.

There is also a premium verson: https://fingerprint.com/

I once helped nuked a user who was a persistent sexual harasser with access to multiple /16 ranges - but their device config (browser and etc.) was unique to users of the service in question, so we just hellbanned that.

(apologies for the level of vague here but I don't believe it's fair to anybody else involved to be less vague - including the user in question, who seemed relatively young and I hope has grown up since)

About the proposed clues in the sub-thread :

- cookies are temporary. Even 'ever-cookies' wouldn't have survived brower upgrades.

- email, tel : the parent insists having had privacy opsec so reusing those over time would not fit in this view

Luckily for you, you're not the only Chris Marshall in NY. I personally know a physicist with the same name in the same state.

I ran into one, at a FlashPix conference (dating myself -no one else will), last century.

He worked for Kodak, at that time. I used to have his card, with his smiling mug on it (Kodak used to have picture business cards).

One advantage of having a fairly old and robust online (and offline) ID, is that it actually makes it harder for people to assume your ID, as there is so much "prior art," pointing to your real persona. It makes it fairly easy to short-circuit hijacks.

Of course, it all becomes problematic, if I decide to go around pissing everyone off, or poking bears.

But, if I piss off people that have the willingness and ability to do me harm, they'll find me, anyway.

I don't choose to live a life in a shack in the woods, typing manifestos. I want to be a part of Society, and reap the benefits of participation.

It also helps me to help others. A lot of my life, these days, is around helping others. Hard to do, if I'm hiding in a dumpster.

The only hijack attempt I've ever experienced was some card fraudsters I pissed off creating a fake paedophile blog under my full name (and then spamming a large chunk of IRC with links to it for a year or so).

Happily for me everybody I've seen comment on it laughed it off as "I wonder what happened to make them that angry but I'm sure they deserved it" - with a few exceptions of people I've previously pissed off who basically said "nah, he's an asshole moderator but there's no way he's a paedo".

And, well, sometimes I -am- an asshole, and some of those times I deeply regret. But reputation can be useful in general.

You don’t need to give up privacy. You just have to pay for it. If you want search engine privacy, Optery offers it as a service.

https://www.optery.com/

It’s a YC company. My only affiliation is that I’m a customer.

I have a discount code if anyone is interested. I wasn’t sure if I could just paste it in the comments

I’m getting nothing but PHP errors just visiting that page

Not sure what you’re seeing, but it still works fine for me

Maybe ping them?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30605010

Are you sure it’s not an issue on your end Cole?

Just tried again and it’s working now. Regardless, I’m not sure how it could be my end when the site was spitting PHP errors listing filepaths on their server.

What prevents them from selling the database of their paid users to the highest bidder?

No clue. You’re going to have to ask

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=beyondd

I’m assuming that YC frowns on their funded companies doing unsavory things?

Didn't YC literally invest in a ponzi scheme?

As someone who applied to every YC company in my region, I find their funded companies do lots of unsavory things. I stopped buying from one because they were using deceptive marketing, and I stopped applying to one after the Glassdoor talked about the long hours and racist incidents.

There's a kind of YC culture where they believe nice guys do well [1]. And they're likely biased towards funding nice people. But after they're funded, they don't really have any control over the company.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/good.html

>I’m assuming that YC frowns on their funded companies doing unsavory things?

Only if it leads to unsavory revenue reports.

This is also my strategy for similar reasons. I don't ever want to be confused that the future is watching what I do online, so I post using my name.

Yeah for you and right now, it’s okay. Eventually something will happen to you where you will reevaluate your risk tolerance.

I’ve already been through plenty (long, sad story. Get your hanky).

I don’t foresee changing my stance, for myself. However, I’ve been around long enough to know that the way I see (and do) things does not apply to others.

I would not prescribe my way to others. I’m merely recounting my lived experience, and the personal decisions that I made, based on them.

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