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I feel like I see these comments basically verbatim and it's freaking me out. The whole "I share your concerns, but hear me out: anonymity is bad." It's basically identical wording every single time.

I think people who say this should back it up by posting their full name, date of birth, SSN or other ID number, and address. A phone number would also be helpful so we can call and verify that they made the post. Otherwise they're not being honest.

> I think people who say this should back it up by posting their full name, date of birth, SSN or other ID number, and address. A phone number would also be helpful so we can call and verify that they made the post. Otherwise they're not being honest

But this isn't (intellectually) honest, either?

Maybe you can justify asking that they post under their real name, but asking for the kind of information that's required to steal their identity isn't the same as asking them who they are.

Never once did I say that "anonymity is bad", but people in this thread and piling on as if that's what I said. I said there are drawbacks, and that those drawbacks are real.

> Online anonymity has significant, real-world drawbacks.

Do please be specific about those. Provide concrete examples and justify for the class why those involved couldn't have voluntarily done away with anonymity for that particular interaction.

Hypothetically someone can browse a tor site in one tab, post on 4chan in a second one, all while accessing online banking in a third. The bank can use hardware backed 2FA to verify you. Where's the issue here?

> Do please be specific about those.

Here is one example: It's likely that we will never know who was behind the attempted backdoor in the xz library, which was almost successful in making a huge number of Linux installations worldwide vulnerable to remote exploitation. [1]

That malicious contributor is protected by online anonymity. Now, I know that it's probable that a state actor was behind "Jia Tan", meaning they could have been supplied with a fake ID as well, but that's still a higher barrier.

I don't think (and have not stated) that anonymity is worthless - it definitely is, especially if you're persecuted minority or under other kinds of threat. I just don't think it's helpful to pretend that it is completely unproblematic.

[1]: https://tukaani.org/xz-backdoor/

> > and justify for the class why those involved couldn't have voluntarily done away with anonymity for that particular interaction.

The project in question could have chosen to verify identities if they deemed it worthwhile to do so.

> The project in question could have chosen to verify identities if they deemed it worthwhile to do so.

But isn't this exactly what various social media companies are doing now? Choosing "to verify identities" because they have "deemed it worthwhile to do so?"

And don't tell me "the difference is scale", unless you're prepared to explain exactly what difference that makes.

It's about the freedom to do so and being forced to do so

When financial institutions in the USA are not even adding basic things like... approve transaction on phone, keeping most things pull based based on knowing a few magic numbers vs. push based and other really basic things, this really doesn't hold water. Things being anon doesn't even register in the day to day of what is bad with the internet, vast majority of it is from very non-anonymous sources, influencers, apps or institutions.

In many other countries, these are enforced by central bank, bank association or legislations.

In USA, small business, small bank and credit unit are often used as excuse to push back these kind of rules.

> Online anonymity has significant, real-world drawbacks.

Online anonymity has significant, real-world benefits which every doxxed person ever will list for you.

And drawbacks, too. Imagine if you could only dox someone else by doxxing yourself at the same time.

I don’t think that is really a sufficient defense? The amount of focus pointed at the person matters for this.

> An information leak 30 years ago was bad, but it had a fairly limited impact radius. Today it can lose you your house, your savings, your relationships, and even your life ("swatting" comes to mind).

So you are afraid of minor information leaks getting you killed, but you’re also trying to tell us that online anonymity is a bad thing?

Come on. This argument isn’t even coherent from paragraph to paragraph.

> I don't think it's reasonable to keep dreaming of the 90s or 00s when the internet was a comparatively innocent place

This is such a strange argument as the internet was most definitely NOT an innocent place, even relatively speaking, in that period.

I think there is a lot of nostalgic history rewriting in these claims. Much like political movements that claim that the past was a better time, it’s easy to only remember the good parts of how things were in the past.

> As society is more and more digitized

How about this is actually the real problem? Online banking is not worth an omniscient global surveillance state, let alone the immense amount of leverage gained by this digitization.

Theres no putting that genie back and most people wouldn't want to.

> Sticking our head in the sand crying "git gud" while millions get scammed out of their life savings...

The solution is called a durable power of attorney and then moving significant assets to different financial institutions with e-statements. Or the heavyweight option is a living trust.

Mandatory identity verification or locking down software really have no bearing on this problem. Scammers leverage generic apps in the app stores just fine.

This problem most certainly is a part of the global turn towards fascism, which is ultimately based on frustrated people demanding easy answers and then empowering those who are able to give them easy answers by lying to them.

Perhaps the first step is to actually listen to the frustrated people. Maybe at least some of their problems are real.

I've definitely listened to the frustrated people, as well as even sharing many of their frustrations. And their (our) problems are definitely real. I still stand by what I said.

To show you that I'm maybe not just blowing smoke out of my ass on this topic, here is me personally dealing with a scammer-adjacent problem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47125550