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Can Internet Pseudonymity Be Saved?
jfruh writes "Imagine that you're a lawyer who also runs a popular sexual fetish podcast. Or that you're a blogger on political issues and you want to determine for yourself who you're going to get into political arguments with. Or you're a transgender woman who isn't out to your real-life associates but you want to explore your gender identity online. Or that you're a female gamer who wants to play World of Warcraft without being hit on or harassed. All of these people have perfectly good reasons for wanting to use a pseudonym online. And yet more and more websites are making it difficult or impossible to do so, often for perfectly legitimate reasons of improving civility and stopping anonymous abuse. How can pseudonymity — one of the key foundations of early internet communities — be saved?"
Are you implying that you're sure one isn't? If it's necessary to err either on the side of protecting anonymity or the side of sacrificing privacy unnecessarily, it should be the former.
I've always wondered about some web of trust available for this. For example:
I have a website, and want people to comment. Someone decides to authenticate with a keyID. My server checks what certificates are associated with the public key. One cert from a semi-trustworthy source shows the anon ID is actually associated with a live person. Another cert from a decently trustworthy source shows the person is a frequent poster at a website. Still another shows that the ID has been in use on sites on a daily basis without any site bans for a few years.
With this info in mind, even though I have no clue whom the person is, I can reasonably assume that it will be either someone good at ID theft, or someone that likely won't be trolling/spamming.
A reputation based system would be useful. The public key can be anonymous, but with CAs (of varying trust levels), I can find that the person has been proven to be not a bot, has a positive reputation on various sites, is known by friends and people I do trust, etc. Of course, on the other hand, I get a key that has absolutely zero certificates on it, I'd probably not bother to allow it on.
Who are you to say what those reasons should be?
They're not doing it to improve civility or stop anonymous abuse. These can both be solved by other, less intrusive mechanisms. Even Slashdot manages it: penalise anonymous users a lot, penalise new members a little bit, and require users to establish a reputation to gain full participation. If they lose that reputation, their ability to participate drops off. The real reason that they want real names is because it makes the information that they harvest and sell to advertisers more valuable if it's tied to a real name and address.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
If your pseudonym is persistent, reputation still matters. It does not matter whether your pseudonym can be connected to your meatspace identity; reputation is still reptuation.
The real problem with online harrassment, trolling, etc is that people lend credence to transient identities. Not a problem here, because we have persistent pseudonyms and transient identities. Transient identities get treated with skepticism and ignored if they're being abusive. Persistent pseudonyms which have earned a reputation are granted wider latitude to make their case.
The problem is not pseudonymity, or even transient identities and anonymity. It is that most public fora do not make it easy to distinguish between a member in good standing and a drive-by-troll.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
If I choose to, that's reason enough. No need to go any further anto it.
Every single person doesn't need a solid defensible reason in order to be able to conclude there are, in fact, plenty of good reasons why you would like to have pseudonymous use of the internet.
That there are people who will be doing it for shady purposes doesn't invalidate that not everything everybody does do they want tied to their real world names and published for the world to see.
You can be not breaking any laws and still want some privacy.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
This seems like an attempt to appease everyone without actually understanding the issue.
To the extent "banning" pseudonyms pleases some people, it does so by letting them retaliate. After you say something that displeases anyone in a position of power---an employer, a bitchy parent of a child in school, a litigious person, a government spook---they can use your non-pseudonymous name to find you in another area and retaliate. It's possible to retaliate across time as well as forum: when you seek employment, your employer in the position of power can Google your name and look for distant past speech. And the proportion of retaliation is entirely up to the person in the position of power.
If only we could enable this retaliation for things "everyone" agrees are bad, like "trolling," and not for being gay or having a political view that some people don't like.
We can't do that. What we can do is have a class of people who's much less vulnerable to retaliation than everyone else. Surprise: these people think you're "hiding behind" your pseudonym. This is the chief effect at work here, and your plan makes it worse, not better.
If you are going to make a prescription it should be the opposite one: revealing your "real name" should be forbidden on the forum because even when only some people do it, it increases the power imbalance. proposed rule: If you use a name intended to look real, or claim that something is your real name, or reveal your real name in the text of your comment, you're banned.
Actually, its the real world that is dangerous. The Internet is pretty harmless until it leaks into my real life.
A pseudonym is my way of being a member of a community without linking that membership to my real life. It differs from pure anonymity in that I can still damage my on-line reputation by being a jerk-wad.
Have gnu, will travel.
The internet is a dangerous place. People have been lulled into believing that this is not the case.
No lulling involved. Only a massive increase in user base that was not raised on the idea that the Internet is an unknown outside of your normal neighborhood.
People who rode the rising tide of the Internet from early on learned where you could share your identity and where you needed to maintain anonymity. Those who jumped onto the bandwagon in the past decade have failed to recognize that such a distinction was even necessary.
I work with children in a different capacity, and in a country where the public perception is that every rock hides a pedophile. As someone who works with children, I need to be constantly on my guard and display all the sexuality of a banana. I also need to maintain the most perfect PC image, and never say anything that could insult any ethnic or religious minority. If it became public that the school hired someone who considers religion in general a dangerous delusion, it could expose them to legal action - and they'd fire me in a heartbeat to save themselves.
A potential employer is in no more powerful a position as you are. They need workers, you need a job.
Bull. Fucking. Shit. Please read section 2.5 for a succinct explanation of why this is patent nonsense. This argument has been closed. Your position is simply erroneous. You are deluded, or being intentionally misleading when you repeat this piffle.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
I'll never forget what my grandfather taught me about free speech, after he helped liberate one of the camps he spent nearly 2 years in a full body cast thanks to one of the rag tag "werewulf" squads at the end of WWII dropping a wall upon him so if there was ANYBODY that had the right to hate Nazis it was him...yet he supported the right of the Nazis to march in Illinois. He said "that is what made us better than them, we let anybody speak, even though we don't agree with them".
I took his words to heart several years after he was gone when I was living in Dallas and saw skinheads recruiting, trying to feed on anti-Mexican sentiment. I just went to a store down the street and made up my own little sign, it said "ask me about the camps" and told those who stopped and asked what my grandfather had saw, the bodies piled up like cordwood, traincars overflowing with broken bodies, people so starved you couldn't tell male from female. needless to say the skinheads weren't too happy about that but one of the cops sent to keep an eye on the skinheads just parked his butt right next to me and said "he has as much right to speak as you do" and that ended that.
This is why I have fought against so called "hate speech" and "hate crime" laws as they aren't only trying to make some speech verbotten but they also seem to be designed around the concept of "protected classes" such as how they say nothing if you burn a bible but will throw you in jail if you burn a Koran. in America you should not be able to EVER ban speech, if you don't like what they are saying? Make your own sign and come up with a legitimate counter-argument,freedom of speech is too important to allow the politically correct to decide what is and is not acceptable.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.