

On Anonymity - inmygarage
http://amandapeyton.com/blog/2012/04/on-anonymity/

======
jtheory
Right on -- I've found I have to use 3-4 different browsers for normal,
everyday usage, because it seriously creeps me out when, for example, I open a
YouTube video for my daughter in the wrong browser, and the banner at the top
reminds me that "this YouTube account is managed by [my employer]", if I
happened to use the "work" browser that needs to be signed into my work Google
Apps account.

I'm not even sure that my employer has any access to my YouTube history. I'm
sure he's not interested anyway. BUT whenever I pick the wrong browser and see
that banner I feel invaded. So, there's a browser that's work-only, and has
all of the cookies for that identity only. And it's not my default, so to open
work URLs sometimes I have to cut & paste.

I used to get the same cold water shock whenever I visited a random site and
saw the Facebook like button with "0 of your friends like this!" I don't WANT
to know what sites my Facebook "friends" visit and/or like. I don't want all
of THEM looking over my shoulder either, or Facebook looking over my shoulder
either, for that matter. I don't get that shock anymore -- Facebook has its
own browser entirely, and its cookies are aggressively deleted from other
browsers (and "aggressive" is needed; it's hard to keep them off!). This fix
also cut down my Facebook usage from multiple visits a day to maybe once a
fortnight, but so it goes.

Same recoil whenever yet another site asks me to link the to Facebook (or link
up all of my "friends"). Even Skype keeps prompting me.

I'm quite sure there are friends who can't find me on this or that site, even
though I have an account, because I give every site different email addresses
when I sign up. I have never, ever heard from a friend that this
inconvenienced them (that my primary email seems to be registered nowhere).

There should be a third button, after "Connect to Facebook" and "No thanks;
not yet", that simply says "FUCK no", and maybe a registry I can join so they
can all stop asking me.

Er... strike the registry idea, though. What email address would I put?

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victork2
I totally agree with that. When I build my websites I systematically refuse to
use the whole "social" stack. I don't really care if I have less users or if
they have to register, I think these things matter more than the extra effort
you have to put in to think about an alais.

Sadly this article illustrates also the hypocrisy of these claims because down
below you can see "Post your comment with Disqus" and not a single
alternative... Ironic isn't it ?

~~~
icebraining
Disqus lets you post as a "Guest" with any name you want. In fact, it's the
default choice in the "Post as..." dialog, at least if you're not logged in.

~~~
waxjar
Well, I had a nice comment typed up but wasn't able to actually send it
without registering. Which coincidentally my comment was about :s

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hippee-lee
I don't think she is naive and its a good thing to be optimistic. She touched
on a core issue that social networks will have a hard time addressing in the
coming years. Perhaps it is because its they tried hard to mimic how
relationships worked in the moment and people change, moment by moment. I
think the problem that needs to be solved is that people change organically,
moment by moment until they are a very different person because of the many
small changes that occur through the years.

There are no tools that I know of to provide this context of individual change
for those who read what we have written or recorded on video years after the
fact. And speaking only for myself, I have changed a little since yesterday
and a lot since my early twenties.

Does that make sense? If we think about leaving a legacy for people we can't
know but will be able to speak to in ten or thirty years, how do we provide
them the insight into the significant or cumulative changes that influenced
changes our beliefs? It's not like we can sit down with them over a beer and
say, "That thing I wrote about social issue X, well I used to believe Y about
it and then really significant things happend to me and I completely changed.
I know it's weird."

I believe these are very difficult tools to build because they have to capture
some of the more ephemeral aspects of humanity in a way thats easy for the
producer to manage and the consumer to quickly comprehend.

~~~
kijin
I think gradual change is less of a problem than simultaneous multiple
personas, at least from the point of view of an online identity system.

As long as you're comfortable with letting other people know that your views
on some social issue was different in the past, you can change as much as you
want and still have all of your different selves tied to a single online
identity. Companies that track your preferences can also learn to give more
weight to your recent activities, profile you based on your background, etc.
They will never be able to capture exactly who you are at any given moment,
but they can be reasonably accurate on a timescale of months. If there's
enough demand, they could even produce a timeline showing your changing
preferences over several years or even decades. For example, it would be
really interesting to chart a person's movement through the Political Compass
[1] over his lifetime, instead of just representing him as a point on the
graph.

On the other hand, if you want to use different personas simultaneously, the
identity system breaks down immediately. Advertisers, of course, hate that. It
might be possible to target ads for someone who changed from X to Y over a
period of 5 years. But how do you target ads for someone who pretends to be
several contradictory things at the same time?

[1] <http://politicalcompass.org/>

~~~
hippee-lee
My line of thought was from a single persona who articulates an honest
reflection of their view at the time. It won't matter if the opinion is right
or wrong if social mores change, even if i changed with them, it's a
reflection of who I was at that moment. But who we are changes moment to
moment, day to day and year to year. What I am trying to get at is people,
perhaps my great grandchildren or people I never meet and interact with will
come across something I have written and never updated, or forgotten about
entirely and then gone on about my day. Those people will need a tool to place
that into a larger context or they will misunderstand how I got to the place I
ended up. And I just want to be clearly understood, now and a hundred years
from now.

What if social mores have drastically changed since that time and I have
changed too? What if I am dead and gone, how do I let them know that as I
evolved as a person going through life, my beliefs and my opinions have
changed.

The tool that would let me do that is a tool I would love to have. Social
networks do not have good tools for this yet.

------
codezero
I'm ready for the negative karma, I guess... but I just have to wonder why
people insist that identity isn't singular or that it can't be singular.

What is the apprehension? I understand the privacy concerns but when it comes
down to identity being multi-faceted, that seems like a social issue rather
than a personal one.

What I mean by that is that the only reason it is multi-faceted is because
someone who likes to do X and also Y, for some reason doesn't want the people
in group X to know that they also like Y and vice versa. Why? Not because X
and Y aren't both part of their identity, but because members of X might scoff
at their participation in Y.

Your identity is singular, it's you, you know who you are, but by segmenting
your identity, you're just trying to hide part of who you are from others
because either you are worried about how others will perceive you or how you
might be treated differently if others know you as you know yourself. That's
too bad.

Pseudonyms and anonymity are great for letting you try new things and fail
without spoiling others' perception of your actual identity, they let us get a
feel for new environments, but they are not a new or segmented identity, they
are just a channel through which we can experiment with and get feedback on
our identity.

Just a thought, I'm sure others have much more comprehensive ideas about this
so if I'm way off, sorry.

~~~
yuhong
Personally, I agree that it is not ideal, though I know in the real world it
is necessary as a workaround sometimes, though in the long term I agree that
the problems really should be fixed if possible.

~~~
codezero
Yep, it's definitely a workaround, but I feel like people writing essays about
it see it as a fundamental necessity to protecting their personal
identity/identities.

They can't possibly use site X if they can't use it as both Bill Jones and
Vampomire Phantasmogram, and therefore, site X is violating their personal
rights (not their preferences).

~~~
kijin
It's not always clear what is a "right" and what is just a socially encouraged
preference. Do people have a "right" to keep their employer oblivious of their
sexual orientation? Would people care about making it a "right" if they lived
in a society where nobody discriminated on the basis of sexual orientation? If
society is screwed up in such a way that enough people need to use workarounds
to do innocuous things, at some point it might make sense to say that people
have a right to use those workarounds.

If there were a single identity provider that supported multiple personas, and
if it only exposed a persona of your choice and not your underlying identity
to websites that used it (so that only you could associate your various
personas with one another), and if this identity provider were highly
trustworthy (preferably using cryptographic tricks to tie the provider's own
hands), maybe it will be OK to ask everyone to sign in using that identity
provider.

~~~
EvilTerran
Sounds to me like you should get to work on that hand-tied identity provider
idea of yours.

------
antninja
I think that what "real names only" people don't understand is that unique
real names are designed for a physical world in which we can say and do things
behind walls and closed doors. The internet doesn't have walls or distances.
There is no separation between the work office and the dance club. A Google
search and our boss knows who are our friends, what are our political
opinions, and all things we can keep private in the physical world. The use of
pseudonyms recreates the distances necessary for our privacy.

~~~
BillPosters
Yep I like that thinking - no walls and distances on the internet. To take
your example a step further, a google search and our boss sees what dance club
we attended, sees photos of our last messy night there, and see our comments
on pillreports (in a hypothetical case of having a bit too much fun one full
moon, and posting about it before the sun comes up). There's a time and place
for real names, and it's not most of the time online.

------
jtchang
This is why so many schemes that promise "single sign on" fail. People have
lots of identities (and complexes!).

OpenID and the like all try to link them all together. For me it just doesn't
sit right: especially online. The whole point being I can have multiple
personas.

No one is really anonymous anymore. It is getting much harder to preserve but
I think sites that allow you to have personas will flourish in the future.

~~~
starwed
OpenID lets you create an identity that spans multiple sites. There's
absolutely nothing preventing you from creating multiple OpenIDs, so I don't
see what your problem is with it.

~~~
kijin
You're right about OpenID.

What I really feel uncomfortable about is integration of identity systems into
browsers, like "Log in to Chrome" or Mozilla BrowserID. Sooner or later, the
only way to use multiple identities even across different websites might be to
use multiple browsers, or at least a bunch of incognito windows.

~~~
mcpherrinm
I think your fears are a bit unfounded. While I haven't tried "Log into
Chrome", BrowserID lets you choose which persona you want to use. Sure, this
means you have to have a bunch set up, but somebody could definitely write a
plugin to allow the automatic creation of throwaway BrowserIDs, akin to
mailinator emails.

Also, Firefox lets you have as many browser profiles as you want -- I already
use this to manage online identities, of which I have more than one, and
segregating is useful.

~~~
kijin
Yes, it's definitely possible to do that. But switching between Firefox
profiles is nowhere near as convenient as logging into two different sites
with two different identities in two tabs next to each other, which is really
easy to do if you don't share identities across sites. As I said, juggling
multiple incognito windows is not fun. If anything, juggling multiple profiles
is even less fun.

But I guess I'm just ranting here, since it is well known that convenience and
privacy don't always go together.

~~~
StanS
"But switching between Firefox profiles is nowhere near as convenient..." -
don't switch, run them in parallel. I use 6 different profiles and often have
most of them open at the same time.

~~~
EvilTerran
Huh... I don't seem to be able to do that. "firefox -P" just brings up a new
window if I've already got a FF window open.

~~~
mcpherrinm
You need a -no-remote switch too.

I think the interface for profiles is pretty terrible, but it's pretty
powerful.

~~~
EvilTerran
Ah, thanks!

And, now knowing of -no-remote, I've managed to find
<http://kb.mozillazine.org/Command_line_arguments>

------
skizm
Totally agree with this. Identity has its place online, for sure, but I would
definitely like the option to be an anon and still participate in discussions
online.

As it is I refuse to link my social accounts to any new web/mobile apps and
always opt for an email sign up if one is available. Sadly this has kept me
away from some good apps (canv.as beta, turntable.fm, and a few more) but oh
well. Life went on before whatever app I am missing out on.

~~~
wahnfrieden
(Disclaimer, I work at Canvas) Just so you know, we removed the Facebook
integration for signup. We primarily had that to put off having to deal with
that abuse vector early on (trolling with duplicate accounts) and to add some
sense of accountability. It's gone swimmingly since we removed it though and
we probably could have even earlier on.

~~~
BillPosters
Good of you to say, and it's good to hear things are going swimmingly since
you removed it.

The whole idea of accountability is in my opinion flawed when it comes to
casual contributions from internet participants. The word "accountability" is
heavy-handed, and has a presumptuous tone of expectation of wrong-doing, an
ever-looming threat of penalty if one steps out of line.

"Say the wrong thing, and YOU YES YOU will be held ACCOUNTABLE."

Real name enforcement is an ALL CAPS effort to force "accountable" behavior at
the expense of privacy or just comfortable contributions from users. When our
words end up set in stone online, and when many of us are not professional
writers, signing one's real identity to a casual opinion may be a hazardous
activity.

This is the internet. We don't need to be so uptight. On the whole,
communities behave respectfully when the community is respected and valued,
regardless of public display of real names.

------
forrestthewoods
There's a lot to be said for non-anonymous services. A classic Penny-Arcade
comic strip sums up the internet well. Normal Person + Anonymity + Audience =
Fuckwad. [http://images.inquisitr.com/wp-
content/2010/01/215499488_8pS...](http://images.inquisitr.com/wp-
content/2010/01/215499488_8pSZr-L-2.jpg)

It's why you can't play games on Xbox Live without being called a faggot
either over voice chat or in private message. It's why websites such as Fat,
Ugly, or Slutty exist. <http://fatuglyorslutty.com/>

~~~
falcolas
And then there's CAD's take which reminds us that removing anonymity doesn't
somehow magically get rid of the trolls.

<http://www.cad-comic.com/cad/20100707>

And there's real life that reminds us that even when you are faced with
someone in real life, that shitty things can happen.

But so can good things, both in person and on the internet, with or without
anonymity.

------
kijin
About 6 months ago, Chris Poole (moot) put it brilliantly: Our identities are
multi-faceted, both online and in real life, and it's wrong to expect people
to use a single identity for everything.

I was absolutely expecting to see a link to moot's statement, and was slightly
disappointed when I didn't find one.

<http://mashable.com/2011/10/18/chris-poole-4chan-web-2/>

[http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/4chans_chris_poole_face...](http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/4chans_chris_poole_facebook_google_are_doing_it_wr.php)

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kylemaxwell
~s/anonymity/pseudonymity

You can establish multiple personas and associate various speech and behavior
with each, but those are pseudonyms rather than actual anonymous behavior.

Still: anonymous (or pseudonymous) speech is a core component of free speech,
and it's a liberty we need to preserve both legally and technically.

~~~
EvilTerran
Anonymity is just the degenerate case of pseudonymity where you never re-use a
pseudonym, anyway.

------
alaaibrahim
Actually, I don't do Facebook comments, I don't like the idea of having things
that I post linked to my facebook profile.

~~~
manveru
Since I deleted my facebook account a few years ago, Facebook comments are a
"we don't want your opinion" sign for me.

------
littletables
I'm just wondering how someone can have an online experience such that when
they come across a website that allows anon comments, they are so taken aback
that they write an entire blog post.

Not that I don't agree with her sentiment. I do. I guess it's even more
refreshing to hear her POV when her experience of the internet seems naïve.

It's too bad we don't hear why she's decided to keep Disqus after coming to
her conclusions.

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zerostar07
Disqus allows you to post both as a guest and with a disqus alias that does
not collect much personal info. I hope they never change that.

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Tichy
You still use disqus on that blog...

