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How the Web's Relationship With Anonymity Has Changed
A story at the NY Times explores how the internet's involvement with anonymity has evolved over the past two decades. Quoting:
"Not too long ago, theorists fretted that the Internet was a place where anonymity thrived. Now, it seems, it is the place where anonymity dies. ... The collective intelligence of the Internet’s two billion users, and the digital fingerprints that so many users leave on Web sites, combine to make it more and more likely that every embarrassing video, every intimate photo, and every indelicate e-mail is attributed to its source, whether that source wants it to be or not. This intelligence makes the public sphere more public than ever before and sometimes forces personal lives into public view. ... This erosion of anonymity is a product of pervasive social media services, cheap cellphone cameras, free photo and video Web hosts, and perhaps most important of all, a change in people’s views about what ought to be public and what ought to be private."
I would challenge people to find out where I live or work. I think anonymity is still alive for those who care.
That someone online only masking their IP address is "anonymous" and yet they use their real name.. or don't even need to hide it. And yet my Grandma doesn't have a computer or IP address and isn't "anonymous" but just keeps to herself. If someone is online and keeps to themselves but as well doesn't go out much.. they are anonymous?? That's a little stupid.. I don't mean the people that cause problems.. authors had pennames before that.
It's society. Banks stopped accepting money unless they can trace where it comes from. Even shops want to follow you around. Surveillance cameras pop up in societies that never knew them. Your ISP has to spy on you as well. Governments pass laws to make companies spy on people if those companies do not do so voluntarily.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
Wonder what would happen if one published an anonymous pamphlet like they used to do in the past ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Sense_(pamphlet) ).
slashdot / gmail / bbc / youporn (and the rest) / amazon. My internet history is sad sad sad.
20 years ago, people happily published their names, addresses and phone numbers in public directories. In those days, anyone could be found by anyone. You'd only need to visit about 2 Sarah Connors before you found the one you wanted.
You're David Davidson unless I'm mistaken.
Korma: Good
http://mailinator.com/
You're welcome.
Whoever believed otherwise was an ignorant fool.
Whatever you post online has to be assumed to be there forever. If you at some point posts embarrassing photos with one account, at another time posts something linking that account to another account, then somewhere online posts something linking the second account to your real identity... guess what? Your real identity is now easily linked to those pictures you posted while drunk all those years ago. It's not going to look good on your resume, is it?
It don't even have to be yourself posting something you want to keep hidden... most of us have thoughtless "friends" who uploads stuff that can be linked to you. A former coworker got into lots of trouble because another coworker brought a camera to an office party - stuff that you find funny after ten beers is a lot less funny when you sober up and realize that your boss have found the pictures while browsing Facebook.
The only way to keep your anonymity is to be careful and aware of what you do online at all time, and be paranoid to boot. Or possible be so uninteresting that no one will bother to dig too much to get your information.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
Except (for now) with open wifi.
Unless you bought your laptop from a major vendor and the WiFi operator gets your MAC address.
You want to be completely anonymous? Get an old laptop, a live DVD and an old WiFi card, pay cash. Remove the HDD, throw it out. Use the live DVD for your OS. Never connect to the Internet anywhere unless you are on a random open WiFi connection that isn't near a camera, a hiking trail might be a good place. Use anonymous proxies through that connection for all your Internet access.
Then do whatever it is you really need to be anonymous for, throw the WiFi card into a river and shred the DVD.
If you need to repeat, burn a new DVD and buy another WiFi card.
That's as close as you can get to being completely anonymous on the Internet.
However, so long as people didn't abuse it, we were willing to accommodate it. People with unpopular political views, whistleblowers, people hiding from an abusive ex-significant other, etc. Perfectly good reasons to hide your identity, and we were happy to let you partake in civil participation with the internet community, even though we have no idea who you actually are. We're still willing.
However, those people don't comprise Anonymous as we currently know it. A small, but loud segment of the internet population has decided to use the same
virtual anonymity to conduct more nefarious affairs. At first things were relatively harmless. Some people got abused, but juvenile pranks that are short term and relatively simple to recover from will not justify the attention span of those who could make a difference. But at some point, someone crossed the line. It might have happened a long time ago, or more recently, but at some point, someone important (someone who can cause a lot of harm while trying to do something good), will have realized that when it becomes important to stop some of these people, knowing who they actually are is helpful, and sweeping legislation will eventually get passed to make sure that government agencies, oppressive or otherwise, will be able to determine your identity with relative ease.
So great. The person or people who are causing grief for Sony, the FBI and the CIA can be more easily caught in the future. Unfortunately, so can the Chinese citizen who just wants to dream out loud of the hope for a better life. And if the government can do it easily, so can a lot of other people, even if they're not supposed to. The lulz are short term. The people involved will either get caught or grow up in a short period of time, but the ramifications will last forever.
The sad thing is, even though it's ethically and legally challenging, there is a time and a place where a large anonymous mob could be useful. Nobody sheds any tears when Westboro encounters some annoying resistance. All I'm saying is, if you're going to use Anonymity as a sword rather than a shield, it would be prudent to pick your battles wisely.
Play with my webcams and lights here
I'd argue the opposite. Internet use is always inherently anonymous. Yes anyone can trace your IP to a physical location if they are persistent enough, but nothing on the internet ever really proves who was using the computer or internet connection at any given time. Maybe webcams go some of the way to providing proof, but of course video can be faked. You need independent evidence not related to the internet to remove anonymity.
Korma: Good
Anonymity only has it's appeal (to me) because the information that is available to groups/people (the information that identifies who I really am, not just what I tell them) is wholly incomplete. If I could deal with internet interfaces as I dealt with friends or coworkers i.e. have an established, complete record of history, I would be fine with the amount of information I present. Since I am a curious person, and that search query for the anarchists cookbook five years ago was just to find out what the heck it was. It doesn't mean I'm building bombs. So don't judge me on an errant fluke of history. If the CIA walked in my door, or Google, or my ISP, and would like to discuss my shopping patterns, web browsing patterns, or anything, I WOULD LOVE THAT. THAT COULD HELP BOTH OF US. But instead they rely on collecting malformed traces and bits of information here and there. That's not me. So don't keep records of it.
Since you pay your internet bill to your ISP and they are forced to log everything, they can track you down really quick. If you on the otherside want some privacy you can make it really hard for them to find you by using proxyservers, thor network, etc. Always Sign messages with an alternate identity when protected and never use this identity if unprotected. If talking about private communication use signatures and encryption. And then there is a factor luck: how extremely carefull your are, your friends may be not so carefull and everybody makes mistakes sooner or later. But in the long run, if they want to track you nomatter what, they can, and they will find you. The only thing you can do is discourage them.
lulzsec? Pretty sure there are already companies with very public faces who have been happily doing this for years now. What worries me is that there is so much information that has nothing to do with my online activities floating around, well, online.
ANYBODY in the neighborhood can get on their computer, set their browser to "anonymous" mode (so that no records are kept), and access whatever. The IP address and ISP account don't mean squat.
Until the people with guns show up, lock you up and start scanning MAC addresses, traffic and signal strength. Then they find the computer, lock the other person up and retrieve the data from "anonymous mode" in about 20 minutes.
This of course depends on what they're doing. Transferring music and movies, not going to happen. Trying to do something more serious, is going to happen.
The perfect storm of apathy, lack of understating and short slightness of the masses, what I find ever funnier was that some people thought the internet was going to be different, Books, Radio,TV all get controlled in the end, well it will be a little bit different, there will be two internet’s.
One that is corporate/government approved and the crypto-anarchy overlay. They will keep pushing the line until people have had enough, but by then it will be to late for the masses to catch up.
transparency.
Best Slashdot Co
NT
20 years ago, people who abused the information in those directories (telemarketers, stalkers, T-100s) where relatively rare. As the abuse increased, so did the desire for anonymity. And even back then, there were some who were willing to pay extra to be "unlisted".
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
If information naturally wants to be free, then it will necessarily kill anonymity. If it's on the internet (read: information is stored in digital format in some network accessible database) it's simply too easy for it to be copied and spread and revealed. If you want to remain anonymous, stay off the internet. If you want to participate in the internet, you gotta accept that whatever you do, however tightly held to your chest, will eventually leak and be exposed to the rest of the network.
And I don't think that this phenomenon is necessarily a bad thing.
Or better yet, train their employees to realize that just because someone knows where you work, doesn't mean they're who they claim to be.
Hell, what happened to the rule of thumb that you never give this sort of detail to people who call you, only to people you call?
theorists fretted that the Internet was a place where anonymity thrived
Wait, why would they fret over that? Why is it presumed to be a bad thing?
Me thinks the whole article starts off from a really biased angle full of misconceptions.
This is why I created the Free Speech Engine.. So that people can experience the ramifications/benefits first hand.
Oh, boy, you're so wrong.
Just enough to thwart search engines. Any competent hacker or court order could break it.
Still never post anything you dont your mother to see -Tony Weiner.
I just heard rant from a founder of MoveOn.org about web filtering caused by personalization. He suggests it is practically censorship when portals tell you what they think will elicit a commercial response rather than a totally objective search result. They dont really need your name and tax-id number to "know" you, just your surfing history.
to police states - with an exception for the security organs and death squads, of course.
Funny, but I saw where my local PBS station is broadcasting even now a documentary about Louis Brandeis. I set up to record it after reading about him in the wikipedia. It seems he was instrumental in creating the notion of a right to privacy. I haven't seen the documentary yet, but it might be interesting to learn about his take on the subject. He was a brilliant man it seems, with the highest grades of anybody to graduate from Harvard, and he graduated at age 20 according to the wikipedia, so some of his stuff may be over my head.
As for human nature. I think that evolutionarily speaking, we haven't had a lot of pressure for privacy. People used to live in small hunter gatherer groups where everybody must have known everybody else's business, the ultimate small town situation. The notion of personal privacy is rather a new thing in human terms, but I think a very valuable thing. It goes with the notion of individualism, and with what I would call (in what I admit is a vague hand waving fashion) the "principles of the enlightenment". Those 'principles of the enlightenment' are, in my opinion, a very, very important invention in human history, but, because they are new, mankind's (that is, human nature's) grasp of the concept is very shaky, and very prone to be forgotten. So, the notion of privacy is kind of under attack, and most people, casually letting it slip away as they explore the wonderful new toy of the internet, may not realize what they are losing until it's too late. That's my concern.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
I love anonymity. I've seen two infuriating breaches. First, I just set up a Facebook account and never realized that sites with Facebook login support automagically log you in for comments. So, now an account I finally broke down and set up to allow old friends to find me is another anti-anonymity agent.
Second, Google "duped" me into associating my gmail address with my YouTube account. They then started scraping my email account for addresses and actually dumping videos from these people into my YouTube start page. Thankfully, the reverse isn't enabled by default.
I also wonder about Google profiling my searches. I read a lot of online news and I shudder to think of some of the context searches I've done on anything from murder to terrorism. I can just see that kind of info being used in a court case; "Just look here, three days before that bombing he was googling about C4!"
The great thing about the internet and the forums I love is that everyone is equal behind a keyboard; regardless of age, race, sex, etc.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
I will. I'm impressed with how much genuine info people have found. But so far it's only from slashdot posts.
I do so all the time when I'm at airports where there's only 15 minutes of free wireless. "Okay, system, my new MAC address is 00:00:00:00:00:01", rinse and repeat. I mean, I assume you're being a bit silly on purpose (considering the "burning a new DVD" bit..."My gods, this person used the same browser and OS version as.....millions of other people! Now we know who they are!"). But there *are* some extreme measures I could imagine taking that, while these things are very much in the realm of diminishing returns, would have some positive impact on privacy. One hilariously overzealous idea would be, rather than getting a new wireless card all the time, simply making sure have a wireless card that has entirely open-source drivers, then going through and patching those drivers to be as tight-lipped as possible, or even adding random (or pre-programmed switchable presets that mimic the most common) elements for certain replies. Paranoia, whoo!
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!