On Anonymity | Hacker News Reader

On Anonymity

amandapeyton.com

120 pointsinmygarage51 comments

Right on -- I've found I have to use 3-4 different browsers for normal, everyday usage, because it seriously creeps me out when, for example, I open a YouTube video for my daughter in the wrong browser, and the banner at the top reminds me that "this YouTube account is managed by [my employer]", if I happened to use the "work" browser that needs to be signed into my work Google Apps account.

I'm not even sure that my employer has any access to my YouTube history. I'm sure he's not interested anyway. BUT whenever I pick the wrong browser and see that banner I feel invaded. So, there's a browser that's work-only, and has all of the cookies for that identity only. And it's not my default, so to open work URLs sometimes I have to cut & paste.

I used to get the same cold water shock whenever I visited a random site and saw the Facebook like button with "0 of your friends like this!" I don't WANT to know what sites my Facebook "friends" visit and/or like. I don't want all of THEM looking over my shoulder either, or Facebook looking over my shoulder either, for that matter. I don't get that shock anymore -- Facebook has its own browser entirely, and its cookies are aggressively deleted from other browsers (and "aggressive" is needed; it's hard to keep them off!). This fix also cut down my Facebook usage from multiple visits a day to maybe once a fortnight, but so it goes.

Same recoil whenever yet another site asks me to link the to Facebook (or link up all of my "friends"). Even Skype keeps prompting me.

I'm quite sure there are friends who can't find me on this or that site, even though I have an account, because I give every site different email addresses when I sign up. I have never, ever heard from a friend that this inconvenienced them (that my primary email seems to be registered nowhere).

There should be a third button, after "Connect to Facebook" and "No thanks; not yet", that simply says "FUCK no", and maybe a registry I can join so they can all stop asking me.

Er... strike the registry idea, though. What email address would I put?

I totally agree with that. When I build my websites I systematically refuse to use the whole "social" stack. I don't really care if I have less users or if they have to register, I think these things matter more than the extra effort you have to put in to think about an alais.

Sadly this article illustrates also the hypocrisy of these claims because down below you can see "Post your comment with Disqus" and not a single alternative... Ironic isn't it ?

Yep. I use disqus because there isn't an alternative that does a good job of keeping out spammers. I guess that's another angle entirely - that we use the "social stack" as a way to band-aid more obvious and pressing problems like "FREE IPAD TAKE THIS SURVEY" etc.

Sure there is -- Mollom. http://mollom.com/

Disqus lets you post as a "Guest" with any name you want. In fact, it's the default choice in the "Post as..." dialog, at least if you're not logged in.

Well, I had a nice comment typed up but wasn't able to actually send it without registering. Which coincidentally my comment was about :s

That's a site owner setting, and this site owner -- despite the article content -- appears to be denying anonymous posts.

You can use Disqus anonymously if you want. Also it is much better than the alternatives at detecting spammers.

From a WordPress installation on which, even with Akismet enabled, I've had on average about 3-400 spams per day I have zero spams now.

I don't think she is naive and its a good thing to be optimistic. She touched on a core issue that social networks will have a hard time addressing in the coming years. Perhaps it is because its they tried hard to mimic how relationships worked in the moment and people change, moment by moment. I think the problem that needs to be solved is that people change organically, moment by moment until they are a very different person because of the many small changes that occur through the years.

There are no tools that I know of to provide this context of individual change for those who read what we have written or recorded on video years after the fact. And speaking only for myself, I have changed a little since yesterday and a lot since my early twenties.

Does that make sense? If we think about leaving a legacy for people we can't know but will be able to speak to in ten or thirty years, how do we provide them the insight into the significant or cumulative changes that influenced changes our beliefs? It's not like we can sit down with them over a beer and say, "That thing I wrote about social issue X, well I used to believe Y about it and then really significant things happend to me and I completely changed. I know it's weird."

I believe these are very difficult tools to build because they have to capture some of the more ephemeral aspects of humanity in a way thats easy for the producer to manage and the consumer to quickly comprehend.

I think gradual change is less of a problem than simultaneous multiple personas, at least from the point of view of an online identity system.

As long as you're comfortable with letting other people know that your views on some social issue was different in the past, you can change as much as you want and still have all of your different selves tied to a single online identity. Companies that track your preferences can also learn to give more weight to your recent activities, profile you based on your background, etc. They will never be able to capture exactly who you are at any given moment, but they can be reasonably accurate on a timescale of months. If there's enough demand, they could even produce a timeline showing your changing preferences over several years or even decades. For example, it would be really interesting to chart a person's movement through the Political Compass [1] over his lifetime, instead of just representing him as a point on the graph.

On the other hand, if you want to use different personas simultaneously, the identity system breaks down immediately. Advertisers, of course, hate that. It might be possible to target ads for someone who changed from X to Y over a period of 5 years. But how do you target ads for someone who pretends to be several contradictory things at the same time?

[1] http://politicalcompass.org/

My line of thought was from a single persona who articulates an honest reflection of their view at the time. It won't matter if the opinion is right or wrong if social mores change, even if i changed with them, it's a reflection of who I was at that moment. But who we are changes moment to moment, day to day and year to year. What I am trying to get at is people, perhaps my great grandchildren or people I never meet and interact with will come across something I have written and never updated, or forgotten about entirely and then gone on about my day. Those people will need a tool to place that into a larger context or they will misunderstand how I got to the place I ended up. And I just want to be clearly understood, now and a hundred years from now.

What if social mores have drastically changed since that time and I have changed too? What if I am dead and gone, how do I let them know that as I evolved as a person going through life, my beliefs and my opinions have changed.

The tool that would let me do that is a tool I would love to have. Social networks do not have good tools for this yet.

I'm ready for the negative karma, I guess... but I just have to wonder why people insist that identity isn't singular or that it can't be singular.

What is the apprehension? I understand the privacy concerns but when it comes down to identity being multi-faceted, that seems like a social issue rather than a personal one.

What I mean by that is that the only reason it is multi-faceted is because someone who likes to do X and also Y, for some reason doesn't want the people in group X to know that they also like Y and vice versa. Why? Not because X and Y aren't both part of their identity, but because members of X might scoff at their participation in Y.

Your identity is singular, it's you, you know who you are, but by segmenting your identity, you're just trying to hide part of who you are from others because either you are worried about how others will perceive you or how you might be treated differently if others know you as you know yourself. That's too bad.

Pseudonyms and anonymity are great for letting you try new things and fail without spoiling others' perception of your actual identity, they let us get a feel for new environments, but they are not a new or segmented identity, they are just a channel through which we can experiment with and get feedback on our identity.

Just a thought, I'm sure others have much more comprehensive ideas about this so if I'm way off, sorry.

Personally, I agree that it is not ideal, though I know in the real world it is necessary as a workaround sometimes, though in the long term I agree that the problems really should be fixed if possible.

Yep, it's definitely a workaround, but I feel like people writing essays about it see it as a fundamental necessity to protecting their personal identity/identities.

They can't possibly use site X if they can't use it as both Bill Jones and Vampomire Phantasmogram, and therefore, site X is violating their personal rights (not their preferences).

It's not always clear what is a "right" and what is just a socially encouraged preference. Do people have a "right" to keep their employer oblivious of their sexual orientation? Would people care about making it a "right" if they lived in a society where nobody discriminated on the basis of sexual orientation? If society is screwed up in such a way that enough people need to use workarounds to do innocuous things, at some point it might make sense to say that people have a right to use those workarounds.

If there were a single identity provider that supported multiple personas, and if it only exposed a persona of your choice and not your underlying identity to websites that used it (so that only you could associate your various personas with one another), and if this identity provider were highly trustworthy (preferably using cryptographic tricks to tie the provider's own hands), maybe it will be OK to ask everyone to sign in using that identity provider.

Sounds to me like you should get to work on that hand-tied identity provider idea of yours.

I think a lot of people don't experience it as singular.

The extreme is actors. You will here a lot of them talking about their characters in the third person. Even if they are the only one in the world to play that character, even if they have created the character, they experience that fraction of their identity as so distinct that "I" doesn't mean that.

Most people don't experience it as that fragmented, but I still think it's common for people to have in-person identities that feel very separate to them. I know that's true for a lot of consultants and therapists; their client-facing persona is quite distinct.

People are used to acting one way around their work colleagues, another around their parents and relatives, another around their buddies they've known since college, and yet another way around their children. Behaviour changes, vocabulary changes, language changes, even accent changes depending on what identity you're presenting.

Identity isn't singular. It's the product of you interacting with other people. You don't present yourself in the same way to the local shopkeeper as you do in bed with your lover. To suggest that you have the same identity in both situations, that you present yourself in the same way, is completely absurd.

I don't think of identity in the same way as you. I suspect you strongly believe there is some "real you" inside your head, with some solidity and independence from your immediate surroundings. But I don't believe that myself for a moment; not just personally, but the science doesn't support it either. The Milgram experiment and Stanford Prison experiment show that people's actions are strongly influenced by their roles and relative social positions. The thing you think of as "self" isn't as unyielding as you seem to think; I believe it's largely illusory, in the much the same way that perceived free will is mostly narrative storytelling wrapped on top of unconscious actions - look at the research around split brains etc., e.g. http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/literally-psyched/2012/0...

Identity simply is not always singular. If it was then the study of psychology would likely be much simpler.

To further participate in this discussion on the question of 'apprehension' we're going to have to request access to your Facebook, Gmail, and MySpace account if it still exists. Thank you for your cooperation.

Consider temporal identity then: are you the same person you were X years ago? Will you be that same person X years from now?

Do you want to be responsible and attached to every fragment of thought, every random event, that you post, or someone else posts about you, forever?

I think that what "real names only" people don't understand is that unique real names are designed for a physical world in which we can say and do things behind walls and closed doors. The internet doesn't have walls or distances. There is no separation between the work office and the dance club. A Google search and our boss knows who are our friends, what are our political opinions, and all things we can keep private in the physical world. The use of pseudonyms recreates the distances necessary for our privacy.

Yep I like that thinking - no walls and distances on the internet. To take your example a step further, a google search and our boss sees what dance club we attended, sees photos of our last messy night there, and see our comments on pillreports (in a hypothetical case of having a bit too much fun one full moon, and posting about it before the sun comes up). There's a time and place for real names, and it's not most of the time online.

This is why so many schemes that promise "single sign on" fail. People have lots of identities (and complexes!).

OpenID and the like all try to link them all together. For me it just doesn't sit right: especially online. The whole point being I can have multiple personas.

No one is really anonymous anymore. It is getting much harder to preserve but I think sites that allow you to have personas will flourish in the future.

Now imagine if one of those cyber-stalking startups is successful at large-scale stylometric identification. :P

On the Feasibility of Internet-Scale Author Identiﬁcation: http://randomwalker.info/publications/author-identification-...

OpenID lets you create an identity that spans multiple sites. There's absolutely nothing preventing you from creating multiple OpenIDs, so I don't see what your problem is with it.

You're right about OpenID.

What I really feel uncomfortable about is integration of identity systems into browsers, like "Log in to Chrome" or Mozilla BrowserID. Sooner or later, the only way to use multiple identities even across different websites might be to use multiple browsers, or at least a bunch of incognito windows.

I think your fears are a bit unfounded. While I haven't tried "Log into Chrome", BrowserID lets you choose which persona you want to use. Sure, this means you have to have a bunch set up, but somebody could definitely write a plugin to allow the automatic creation of throwaway BrowserIDs, akin to mailinator emails.

Also, Firefox lets you have as many browser profiles as you want -- I already use this to manage online identities, of which I have more than one, and segregating is useful.

Chrome has the same idea of personas.

Yes, it's definitely possible to do that. But switching between Firefox profiles is nowhere near as convenient as logging into two different sites with two different identities in two tabs next to each other, which is really easy to do if you don't share identities across sites. As I said, juggling multiple incognito windows is not fun. If anything, juggling multiple profiles is even less fun.

But I guess I'm just ranting here, since it is well known that convenience and privacy don't always go together.

"But switching between Firefox profiles is nowhere near as convenient..." - don't switch, run them in parallel. I use 6 different profiles and often have most of them open at the same time.

Huh... I don't seem to be able to do that. "firefox -P" just brings up a new window if I've already got a FF window open.

You need a -no-remote switch too.

I think the interface for profiles is pretty terrible, but it's pretty powerful.

Ah, thanks!

And, now knowing of -no-remote, I've managed to find http://kb.mozillazine.org/Command_line_arguments

Yup. I've used a separate browser for YouTube ever since Google required me to link it to my 'Google account' (that I use for GMail).

BrowserID allows you to select one of your multiple ids when logging in to each site. It's more of a replacement of the process of signing up with email/password to each site rather than an "identity".

Totally agree with this. Identity has its place online, for sure, but I would definitely like the option to be an anon and still participate in discussions online.

As it is I refuse to link my social accounts to any new web/mobile apps and always opt for an email sign up if one is available. Sadly this has kept me away from some good apps (canv.as beta, turntable.fm, and a few more) but oh well. Life went on before whatever app I am missing out on.

(Disclaimer, I work at Canvas) Just so you know, we removed the Facebook integration for signup. We primarily had that to put off having to deal with that abuse vector early on (trolling with duplicate accounts) and to add some sense of accountability. It's gone swimmingly since we removed it though and we probably could have even earlier on.

Good of you to say, and it's good to hear things are going swimmingly since you removed it.

The whole idea of accountability is in my opinion flawed when it comes to casual contributions from internet participants. The word "accountability" is heavy-handed, and has a presumptuous tone of expectation of wrong-doing, an ever-looming threat of penalty if one steps out of line.

"Say the wrong thing, and YOU YES YOU will be held ACCOUNTABLE."

Real name enforcement is an ALL CAPS effort to force "accountable" behavior at the expense of privacy or just comfortable contributions from users. When our words end up set in stone online, and when many of us are not professional writers, signing one's real identity to a casual opinion may be a hazardous activity.

This is the internet. We don't need to be so uptight. On the whole, communities behave respectfully when the community is respected and valued, regardless of public display of real names.

I actually went back when you guys removed facebook authentication and made an account. It is a nice little time waster although at the moment 90% of the content looks like reddit's "AdviceAnimals" subreddit.

There's a lot to be said for non-anonymous services. A classic Penny-Arcade comic strip sums up the internet well. Normal Person + Anonymity + Audience = Fuckwad. http://images.inquisitr.com/wp-content/2010/01/215499488_8pS...

It's why you can't play games on Xbox Live without being called a faggot either over voice chat or in private message. It's why websites such as Fat, Ugly, or Slutty exist. http://fatuglyorslutty.com/

And then there's CAD's take which reminds us that removing anonymity doesn't somehow magically get rid of the trolls.

http://www.cad-comic.com/cad/20100707

And there's real life that reminds us that even when you are faced with someone in real life, that shitty things can happen.

But so can good things, both in person and on the internet, with or without anonymity.

Are you trying to imply that those 15 year olds on voice chat on xbox live won't be calling each other "faggot" in real life? Because if so you're being very naive. Even saying xbox live is anonymous is wrong really, their gamer tag is tied as their identity online.

And at the same time, there are places like HN, which can be as anonymous as it gets and is one of the best places in the web I know, and at least partly because of it.

About 6 months ago, Chris Poole (moot) put it brilliantly: Our identities are multi-faceted, both online and in real life, and it's wrong to expect people to use a single identity for everything.

I was absolutely expecting to see a link to moot's statement, and was slightly disappointed when I didn't find one.

http://mashable.com/2011/10/18/chris-poole-4chan-web-2/

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/4chans_chris_poole_face...

Actually, I don't do Facebook comments, I don't like the idea of having things that I post linked to my facebook profile.

Since I deleted my facebook account a few years ago, Facebook comments are a "we don't want your opinion" sign for me.

~s/anonymity/pseudonymity

You can establish multiple personas and associate various speech and behavior with each, but those are pseudonyms rather than actual anonymous behavior.

Still: anonymous (or pseudonymous) speech is a core component of free speech, and it's a liberty we need to preserve both legally and technically.

Anonymity is just the degenerate case of pseudonymity where you never re-use a pseudonym, anyway.

I'm just wondering how someone can have an online experience such that when they come across a website that allows anon comments, they are so taken aback that they write an entire blog post.

Not that I don't agree with her sentiment. I do. I guess it's even more refreshing to hear her POV when her experience of the internet seems naïve.

It's too bad we don't hear why she's decided to keep Disqus after coming to her conclusions.

Disqus allows you to post both as a guest and with a disqus alias that does not collect much personal info. I hope they never change that.

You still use disqus on that blog...

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