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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Why is anonymity online so important?

We have never had the amount of anonymity we do today. Being able to communicate to large numbers of people while remaining anonymous was something that was just not that practical before the internet. Society functioned just fine then. So why is it so important now?

Not that I support what this troll is doing of course. But I fail to see why a start of affairs that basically only existed for a small group of people from 1970-2000 is so crucial to civilization now that the internet is just an extension of real life and not a playground for the technological elite.

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Because for the first time in history, every action you take in fundamental aspects of your life--your communications with others (email), what you read (everything online), what you watch (Hulu, etc.), what you listen to (Pandora, etc.), and so on--can and will be traced and recorded, perhaps indefinitely. (See Room 641A, the NSA's Utah data center, etc.) People could go back and see exactly what you did online for years and possibly judge/punish you for it should laws or social mores change in a decade or two, which is not entirely out of the question--just look how things changed in a decade after 9/11. Things like Guantanamo Bay or open extra-judicial assassination of US citizens would have been unimaginable to us before that event, and yet here we are today.

Worse, it could be done on a massive automated scale. Before if an agency wanted to find a potential criminal, they'd have to expend time and manpower looking things up. In the coming years a computer could data-mine your online activity going back a decade, including email, to decide if you were a threat or not. Perhaps it's not possible today, but someday, it will be--and this stuff is being recorded now.

Laws and societies change. The hard information on your history kept in easily-processable racks in vast data centers doesn't. That's the big worry for me.

Anonymity has always been easier than it is now. Before sophisticated record keeping, you were anonymous to any stranger or new acquaintance. Moving to a new town was an opportunity to become a new person. Anything you published could be pseudonymous or anonymous. Letters and phone calls were essentially anonymous, unless you specifically announced your identity.

With modern technology, all that is slipping away, or already gone.

I am wondering if you ever lived in a small town. There was no real anonymity.

I've never lived in a small town, but if literary accounts are to be believed, it was hell for precisely this reason.

This misses his point entirely. Sure, everyone in a small town knows each other, but it used to be that when you moved to a NEW small town (or anywhere else for that matter), almost nothing followed you. You could re-invent yourself, move past old failures. Now you have a constant and easily accessible record of your life online, which anyone can look up. There is no space you can go to that people can't easily find records of who you used to be. THAT is a loss of anonymity.

I take your response as "no" to the question if you have lived in a small town.

I grew up in a small town and my Dad knew everybody in the county and the next one, whether they were in town or in the countryside. And likely a couple of generations back. Several families moved to California, and the social network reached there.

A cousin of mine had a brother that fled home. He eventually tracked him down using old shoe leather techniques.

My experience and that of my family does not match this theory of "loss of anonymity."

Now, modern suburbs are more likely to be anonymous, and perhaps that is where this theory comes from, but it does not come from small towns.

Yes... your dad knowing people in the county next door is exactly the same as having your online history available to everyone on the other side of the globe.

I take it you have been fortunate enough to never have to deal with online stalking/harassment that made the jump to meatspace.

Perhaps it is that experience that has rendered the status quo unable to satiate. "The needs of society" can kindly go stuff itself, I need anonymity.

>Being able to communicate to large numbers of people while remaining anonymous was something that was just not that practical before the internet.

Come on now. That's only because for the average person being able to communicate to large numbers of people at all was something that was just not that practical before the internet. And to the extent you could communicate, it wasn't that hard to do it anonymously: Sit down in a public phone booth to make your phone calls. Write a letter to the editor under a pseudonym or write letters to as many people as you like and drop them into a public mailbox. Post a message on a bulletin board at the local library while nobody is watching. Provide a recording for broadcast to a journalist with a reputation for protecting sources.

The novelty is being able to trace the source of a communication through the corporate intermediary that carries it and back to the actual speaker. And even that is a lot of hand wavy hocus pocus that makes poor assumptions about the relationship between paying for an internet connection and being the one responsible for what gets sent through it.

<rant>

Just the other day, I was googling for something in the library. I can't see so well, so I crank up the text size. It's quite readable to others sitting a few feet behind me.

On a whim, a stranger walks up behind me, addresses me by name, and tries to strike up a conversation. He wanted to know where the bathroom was or whatever, but he addressed me by name. I never saw him before.

"Wait wait wait. How'd you know my name?" I ask. "Who are you?"

"Oh, don't you see? It's right there in the corner of your browser window."

I looked, and sure enough, if you're signed in to Google Plus, Google will grace all of its web pages -- all of them, including gmail, search results, etc -- with your first and last name, as decided by your profile's display name. It's right there in the corner.

Since then, I learned my lesson: stay signed out of Google + when I'm browsing in pulbic places unless I want strangers to walk up to me and know who I am.

Sometimes I prefer to remain anonymous. Sometimes I feel like the increasing pressure to always use real names for services isn't a good thing, especially when those companies turn around and expose that valuable information in odd ways like Google is doing.

The option to exercise anonymity is one of the best defenses I have against these kinds of events.

That or I can simply stay signed out all the time...which is equivalent to not using the service.

You fail to see the importance of anonymity because you're set on proving that anonymity is of little use or harmful.

A historical comparison is irrelevant and fallacious - we didn't have modern surgery hundreds of years ago and despite people dying society ticked on. If all you see is the forest you can pretend the pain of the trees doesn't matter.

And the internet is just a playground for the technological elite too (you need a computing device after all) so I suppose you see no need for it either.

> And the internet is just a playground for the technological elite too

The internet is not a playground for the technological elite, not any more. It's a place where my mother in law trades baby pictures with my mother.

As internet use becomes ubiquitous in the real world, and the boundaries between "meat space" and internet space evaporate, the anarcho-idealism of the technological elite that got onto the internet early is evaporating too.

This is to an extent lamentable, but you can't expect the "wild west" to continue to exist after the land stops being the frontier. That isn't to say that anonymity isn't important, it is, but it's just one concern to be balanced against many.

>This is to an extent lamentable, but you can't expect the "wild west" to continue to exist after the land stops being the frontier.

The internet has never been the wild west. Twenty years ago it was a bunch of middle class scientists and mathematicians discussing philosophy and writing code. It's about as far away from any kind of real danger as you can possibly imagine.

The result of the "wild west" metaphor is to imply that we need to have some cowboys come in with blankets and other "gifts" for all those wild Indians who once occupied it so that they can hurry up and die out and make room for Walmart and Cable TV and upstanding members of the Chamber of Commerce.

But the internet isn't a dangerous place. It isn't even a place. It's just a thing that lets computers and users all over the world communicate with one another. About the worst thing that the average person is even capable of doing with it is to lie to someone else or infringe copyright, or maybe (if we're the sort of people with an interest in keeping our comrades compliant members of The Party) they could distribute or gain access to some "subversive propaganda" from the likes of Jane Fonda or Adam Smith or whoever we don't like this year in this part of the world.

The internet isn't the dangerous thing, it's the rest of the world -- the dangerous thing is an internet without anonymity. Because if people know who you are then saying the wrong thing or reading the wrong thing can get you killed (or fired or harassed or wrongfully imprisoned). And all not knowing who said something really does is the same thing as the First Amendment: It requires you to respond to speech with speech instead of with punishment.

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