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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?"
Give people the choice of creating a "Real Name" account with proof or a "Pseudonym" account, and make this choice visible to everyone else.
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.
Our local newspaper publishes almost everything online. It also allows people to make comments. A few years ago, they decided to deal with the level of uncivil comments by requiring everyone to establish an account before posting. After a few months, it was mostly back to normal, but marginally better. Then this summer, they switched to requiring a Facebook or Linked-In login, and almost all commenting stopped--not just the problem comments, all comments.
They killed the commenting system by trying to force real identities.
Few social networking sites... almost none... are really able to figure out your real name. They might ask you to give a "real name"... and you can do that... but it doesn't have to be your real name.
You can be Bruce Wayne... Or George Washington... or whatever. How are they going to stop it? Pull a credit card off you? Who is paying for social networking? Exactly.
There are a lot of data bases with a lot of information on everyone. But how much of that information is actually accurate? The dirty little secret is that most of the information in those databases is garbage.
Which is good for us. Keep filling it with garbage. When the data miners open wide, stuff their mouths with trash and keep shoveling until they're full. They'll believe they have some means to filter fact from fiction but they're welcome to try.
This is the price of an automated system. Computers as we all know are stupid. Very easy to lie to them. And are we under any legal obligation to not lie to these people? No we are not. And even if we were, and I'd love to see a lawyer try to get a jury to convict someone of such a thing, then would it be worth the effort even to set an example? Not really.
Lie and keep lying.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
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?
I'm not sure "anybody" has to "do anything" at all - there are many models for communication and people can - for the moment, anyway - use whichever ones they like.
I'm an old Usenet fan, but am perfectly aware the ability to nymshift led to a culture of spamming and verbal harrassment that are basically unacceptable and that helped kill Usenet as a communication platform (not totally; I'm still on it, as are others, but it's a shadow of its former self).
Slashdot allows a pseudonym and if you want to advertise your website or Twitter feed, you can do so. You can also be anonymous if you like.
Reddit allows pseudonyms and even throw-away accounts, and many people think that's been a big part of its success. On the other hand, Facebook requires you to use a real name. At first, that kept people honest, but now we've seen it's not that hard for spammers and scumbags to set up fake accounts and Facebook is somewhat powerless to stop it. So that did or did not work.
My point is just that there are many existing models, and they compete for attention. If your transgendered lawyer wants to run a podcast, s/he'll decide whether to do it under her own name on Facebook or using a pseudnym elsewhere. The platforms compete. Bloggers who want to get name recognition can use their name; bloggers who want anonymity can blog under a fake name.
There's a good debate waiting about the merits of the different platforms. And it's essential Netizens fight against any effort to do away with anonymity at the policy level. But for the moment I'm not convinced there's a crisis of any sort, or any need for people to "act now" to "save the internet."
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
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.
Not on Slashdot (my account predates getting married and having kids... back in the days when I only had myself to worry about and didn't think anything bad could come of having my real name out there), but on my blog/Twitter/etc. My wife and I use pseudonyms because we often discuss parenting issues and will post photos of our kids. We don't want someone tracking us or our kids down, though, so we don't use real names and obviously don't use our address or name of our kids' school. It's not impossible to track us down, but it makes it hard for some random Internet stalker (yes, I've encountered at least one) to call my work to "report" me to my boss for crimes she imagines I committed. (Said Internet stalker has harassed lots of people online and has contacted at least 1 person's employer because he used his real names/place of business online.)
One of the big reasons why I don't use Facebook or Google+ (besides lack of time to be on a million social networking sites), is that they require that you use (and reveal to the world) your real name. (If they really wanted to require real names but support pseudonyms, it wouldn't be hard to devise a system where your real name was hidden to all and your pseudonym was displayed instead.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
If you have a big online presence, people will be able to figure out who you are.
I used to follow a pediatrician who would often rail against the conventional wisdom - he happened to be very science-based and would not put up with patients who demanded scrips for viruses, etc. He would blow off steam on his blog.
Over time he started to leak info about himself - where he went to school, some nearby towns, etc. I left a comment or two advising him to stop doing that.
A bit later he started talking about a court case he was involved in. This was about the time the "hunt was on" for @FakeSteveJobs and I was curious to see what was possible - I did a few google searches and it wasn't too hard to figure out who he was, since court filings are public.
A month or so later, he disclosed that opposing council's staff had done the same, and used his blog posts to force a settlement.
My take away: if you're going to do something like this, never include any personal details and/or never cross paths with the legal system. But if I lived near his town, I'd definitely take my kids there.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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.
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.
You make far too much sense to be posting on slashdot. Maybe you should run for office; we need people like you in leadership positions.