Randi Zuckerberg Runs in the Wrong Direction on Pseudonymity Online

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/08/randi-zuckerberg-runs-wrong-direction-pseudonymity

by protomyth • 15 years ago

135 59 15 years ago

eff.org

kefs2• 15 years ago

Relevant TED Talk:

Christopher "moot" Poole: The case for anonymity online

http://www.ted.com/talks/christopher_m00t_poole_the_case_for...

pilgrim689• 15 years ago

I enjoyed that. To be honest though, he does not make a very strong case for anonymity. That is not to say that there is not a strong case for anonymity, but anecdotes like "they saved a cat" and "they protested scientology" are not it. I think people have organized protests on Facebook before.

kefs2• 15 years ago

I agree, it wasn't very in-depth.

More relevant quotes from 'moot' here:

http://venturebeat.com/2011/03/13/4chan-moot-christopher-poo...

orbitingpluto• 15 years ago

TL;DR Your right to privacy interferes with my revenue stream.

bdhe• 15 years ago

In these sort of arguments I don't really understand why civility in and of itself is valued. It only makes sense in a social situation that affords civility. For that you can make "giving up anonymity" opt-in, rather than opt-out (which is mostly what is being done a lot, from forums that force you to use FB accounts to tor users in various countries who have no easy way to opt-out of foregoing anonymity).

It is rather silly to quote civility when the alternative, the lack of anonymity, has terrible "real-world" consequences, as mentioned in the article.

the argument willfully ignores the many voices that are silenced in the name of shutting up trolls: activists living under authoritarian regimes, whistleblowers, victims of violence, abuse, and harassment, and anyone with an unpopular or dissenting point of view that can legitimately expect to be imprisoned, beat-up, or harassed for speaking out.

Can someone explain the rationale of placing civility ahead of the above consequences?

reso2• 15 years ago

The argument is that online anonymity itself also creates real-world consequences, such as character assassinations, harassment, and downright internet crime.

If "Civility" means "being nice to each other", why shouldn't we value it, in and of itself?

VladRussian2• 15 years ago

>online anonymity itself also creates real-world consequences, such as character assassinations, harassment, and downright internet crime.

anonymity itself doesn't create crime or harassment. Like in the real life, it only makes it easier to perpetrate one. With this being said, why wouldn't we all wear GPS and RFID enabled collars at all times with our name, identification number and scan barcode being promptly visible on the collar?

Nice device, goes well with Guchi pants:

http://www.extremtrac.com/e/products/personal%20tracking%20s...

myhf• 15 years ago

Civility doesn't mean everyone being nice to everyone. It means everyone being nice to the privileged few who can afford clean identities.

neutronicus• 15 years ago

I think, for a lot of people, "civility" means "ritualized groveling before people more powerful than themselves", and they're unwilling to make it anything more than completely optional.

ameasure3• 15 years ago

Anonymity is about much more than people trolling each other. Anonymity is what allows a guy to mug you and then disappear into the wide world without consequences. It's what allows a child rapist to buy a nice house next to an elementary school. It's what allows a known terrorist to board a plane and crash it into a building.

I don't deny there are many great benefits to anonymity, especially on the internet, but people should be aware of the costs. Anonymity can allow people to do bad things and get away with it.

gsoltis• 15 years ago

Likewise there are costs to a loss of anonymity. Consider political dissidents living under oppressive regimes, or whistleblowers afraid of retaliation. So in a very real way, preventing anonymity does allow and is currently allowing people to do bad things and get away with it.

geuis• 15 years ago

I don't even know where to begin with telling you everything that is wrong with all that you just said.

Instead of initially refuting them one-by-one, which only creates an argument on your terms, let me set the tone of an argument on my terms.

You present a strawman's argument instead of valid points worthy of serious debate in regards to the original statement. You make a weak, passing reference to anonymity being about more than trolling and then reference emotionally loaded examples to support said references.

Now, to refute your points individually.

1) Muggings often happen in public and private settings. You can be on a busy street, or in an ally, a public place, or even your own home. Two of my friends (who are here on HN too) were mugged in Rome a couple of months ago. Those fellows got away with their stuff and never caught, I believe. I've also had friends who were mugged in other situations, were able to give descriptions of their attackers, and those criminals have been arrested later because the public and police are on the lookout for them. The lack of anonymity doesn't prevent you from being a victim of crime. Many crimes such as mugging are committed by repeat offenders who are well-known to law enforcement. Being anonymous or not does not prevent crime from happening.

2) You reference the supposed possible threat implied by children being attacked at some future point by an anonymous deviant. This is a common tactic most often used to prop up weak arguments by appealing to the possible fear in parents. Statistics and reality quickly discount this notion. First, most acts of sexual abuse against children are committed by relatives. Not random strangers. Secondly, due to the extreme lengths over the last 20-30 years that this fear tactic has been used in the U.S., today we have massive online publicly available databases of people even remotely associated with sexual acts against children. The possibility of someone with such a history moving into a neighborhood near a school is more remote than at any time in history.

There was even a story the other day on MSNBC where a happily married couple met in high school. He was a few years older than his then girlfriend, she was 15 and he was 17-18. Her father didn't like him and reported him to the police after it was revealed they had started having sex. Despite that they have been married for years and have 4 children together, to this day this man is still labeled as a sex offender.

The restriction of anonymity and freedom for the majority should not be severely restricted simply because of an unfounded fear tactic, which is what you imply.

3) Third, you reference the 9/11 attacks. This is the most emotionally charged topic to happen in the last 10 years. One that the U.S. has spent tens of thousands of lives and TRILLIONS of dollars to "combat". There was nothing that was anonymous about the men that boarded those planes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hijackers_in_the_September_11_a...

To quote, "Within minutes of the attacks, the Federal Bureau of Investigation opened the largest FBI investigation in United States history, operation PENTTBOM. The suspects were identified within 72 hours because few made any attempt to disguise their names on flight and credit card records. They were also among the few non-U.S. citizens and nearly the only passengers with Arabic names on their flights, enabling the FBI to identify them and in many cases such details as dates of birth, known or possible residences, visa status, and specific identification of the suspected pilots."

The failure to prevent 9/11 lies more in the faults of the U.S. security apparatus then any ingenuity on the behalf of the hijackers. Read up under the Pre Attacks section I reference in the link above.

Finally, to refute your last point and to sum up my argument, there are more costs to being known rather than being anonymous. Being known makes it difficult or impossible for the innocent to seek freedom, to examine their rights, or in many cases to even conduct financial transactions. To set up a panopticon surveillance apparatus to closely monitor a population for their "security" reduces the cultural and financial health of that society.

People that are extremely publicly known get away with horrific crimes often, right in front of everyone. This ranges from murder to sexual assault to massive financial crimes.

Its more expensive morally and socially to be watched than it is to be anonymous.

ristretto3• 15 years ago

Civility is really important if you want to have any meaningful exchange of opinions. However it is idiotic to claim that the only way to afford it is via real identity. I imagine an adaptible text algorithm that removes profanities and hate speech would even make youtube comments useful.

reso2• 15 years ago

I'm willing to bet that's AI-Complete.

wcarss• 15 years ago

Thought experiment.

Imagine there's a service (HackerNews, 4chan, whatever) that you use. It gives you the opportunity to opt-in to real identity, at which point, you will only post with your real identity, and only see posts with your real identity.

If you opt out, you may still post and discuss, but you remain pseudonymous. You may share your details and information, or you may share nothing. You can see all comments and reply to anything, but the people who are real-identified don't see your posts or replies to theirs.

If you let this system run, I strongly believe that the number of people posting with real identities would be a fraction of a percent of the community, often doing it to make a specific point and then logging back out.

The "open internet", without enforced identity, is just a more interesting and useful place to visit than Facebook, or any other "exclusively real identity" destination.

(note: I replied to parent because this is related; I don't disagree with it at all)

intellection• 15 years ago

Authoritatively do not go there with Nym.

zenica• 15 years ago

I wonder how this relates to exponential growth in "Persona Management Software". I heard for some companies having thousands of Facebook accounts under control. And apparently they are "real" and non-anonymous as it gets.

My question is: how are they going to distinguish puppets from real people?

r00fus• 15 years ago

> My question is: how are they going to distinguish puppets from real people?

As long as it benefits their bottom line, I'd say: never.

If you follow the money, it rarely fails... especially when we're talking about the amoral concepts that corporations are designed to be.

Cherian_Abraham• 15 years ago

If you are not offended in five minutes after leaving your doorstep, then you dont live in a free country.

Facebook being the Identity provider of the net is a scary thought. As does anyone that big.

daeken• 15 years ago

I have released many pieces of software which could've brought a shitstorm down on me, legally and otherwise. I've decided in every case to do so under my real name, as I felt that I was in the right and if others disagreed, the downside for me was low (I have no house to lose, no family to support, etc). Others in the same exact position would've chosen to release these things under a pseudonym, as they had more on the line; this is a reasonable choice, and one that should be respected. In an environment where everything has to be tied to your name, you don't just crush malicious actions, you crush anything controversial. That's not alright.

protomyth• 15 years ago

I would hate to see a tradition in political discourse older than the US be given up for advertising dollars. How would a modern version of the Federalist Papers work with no pseudonyms?

testymctest• 15 years ago

In real life people use their real names ... doesn't stop idiots being idiots.

jrockway• 15 years ago

I think anonymity on the Internet has to go away. People behave a lot better when they have their real names down. … I think people hide behind anonymity and they feel like they can say whatever they want behind closed doors.

That's nice that you feel that way. Why do I need to care, though? I can say whatever I want behind closed doors.

vaksel• 15 years ago

i think anonymous should take this as a challenge, and hunt down everything negative there is to know about her online.

I'm sure if they look hard enough they can dig up plenty of dirt on her.

But even if they do, it wont' be all of it, since noone is that stupid as to use their real name online. If she has even a single account online that uses a pseudonym or a username she is a hypocrite

tptacek• 15 years ago

Let's definitely harass people who express viewpoints we don't agree with.

VladRussian2• 15 years ago

>People behave a lot better when they have their real names down.

right from the KGB and Stasi manuals.

nate_meurer• 15 years ago

Yep. Replace the word "civility" with "harmony", and you have the official position of the Chinese government as well, almost word-for-word.

kapitalx• 15 years ago

Having the ability to speak anonymously allows for people to speak their true mind and show their true personality rather than hiding behind the fear of lash back.

william42• 15 years ago

One word. /b/.

slowpoke• 15 years ago

I've met some of my best (online) buddies on /b/ or in /b/-related activities (though I don't go there anymore).

Yes, it's a raging shithole of trolls, mouth-frothing idiots and general retardation, but there're probably just as many decent people there. They're just not as vocal. This applies to many places, by the way, not just /b/.

Also, generally speaking, /b/ is the worst kind of example that you can probably think of. This makes for an interesting argument though: it can hardly get worse than /b/ - it's the absolute superlative of anonymity induced uncivility.

dbuxton• 15 years ago

I was talking about something similar earlier today with a friend from high school. We were talking about how it was totally un-cool to disagree with the "consensus" about which girls were hot and which were not. We were imagining what it might have been like if we'd felt able to speak our minds.

I'm not a huge believer in the whole "social media toppled authoritarian regimes" stories that have been going around after Tunisia/Egypt but I do think that to the extent real anonymity is possible it has the potential to help people living in places where dissent is both stigmatised and punished by allowing them to realise that others feel the same way.

This Steven Pinker talk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-son3EJTrU (I think; I don't have Flash so can't check it's the right one) talks about why this type of communication is essential to free societies and why freedom of assembly is protected in all free societies.

On the same general topic researchers in public health give people some wiggle room on truth telling by introducing random noise into their responses in order to improve the aggregate quality of information you get from asking them questions about controversial topics (drug use, sexuality): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randomized_response

tl;dr: anything that helps people tell the truth rather than timidly conforming to social norms is a good thing

djb_hackernews• 15 years ago

That quote makes me feel like she(he?) didn't really understand what they were saying. It looks almost identical to a word jumble. I know it was a free form panel, but jeez, you are the marketing director of Facebook, you should be a better communicator than that.

jamesu• 15 years ago

A while back i decided to forego my pseudoname in order to look more professional.

This has led to many problems: for one, conflicts. It seems every other month people mistake me for someone else with the same name. Either that or yet another person "mistakenly" uses my gmail address to sign up for a web service.

My last name is also difficult for some people to pronounce. With a pseudoname, this was not an issue. Not to mention my pseudoname was pretty easy to remember... people even still use it!

Really as far as i know, my lack of a pseudoname has not made me appear any more professional than before, so i'm finding it hard to find a good reason why i should even use my real name on the internet. In fact pseudonymity is a great tool to segregate online identities in this age where people will write and store prejudicial information about you for extremely long periods of time (forever if it gets to archive.org).

One_adm122• 15 years ago

Who the fuck cares about Randi Zuckerberg. Without Mark would we give a shit what she says?

harryh• 15 years ago

I only regret that I have but one upvote to give to this comment.

corin_• 15 years ago

Her views are relevant because of her position (until yesterday) in Facebook, her surname is just a nice addition to attract more readers, not the reason for the story.

One_adm122• 15 years ago

Once you start letting people use pseudonyms, then what? Are we going to start letting dogs use pseudonyms too? Where does it stop?

mark242• 15 years ago

Coincidence?

"Randi Zuckerberg to leave Facebook..."

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20087785-93/randi-zuckerber...

I think someone likely said, "enough is enough" and forced her out.

DanielBMarkham• 15 years ago

Yuck. This argument is consistently framed as a false dichotomy: either get rid of pseudonyms or keep them.

Why not both? Some places, like Google+, might be nom-de-plum-free. Some, like reddit, might not. Why make it one way or the other?

I can easily foresee an internet that has parts that are "real person only" and parts that are the wild west. For that matter, some parts, like banking access, might be even more locked down. I don't think we have to make some massive decision for all of it. Let it evolve and bifurcate as it needs to.

wmf• 15 years ago

The problem occurs when one of these real name zones becomes a monopoly.

rue• 15 years ago

This scheme is fine, provided that it's possible to easily maintain multiple identities, pseudonymous or not.

dmethvin• 15 years ago

Randi is right. Only scumbags like Ben Franklin are sleazy enough to use pseudonyms. http://www.pbs.org/benfranklin/l3_wit_name.html

gallerytungsten• 15 years ago

Facebook is (so far) arguably the most successful example of "permission marketing," a concept in which the marketer learns about the mark, in order to more effectively sell them some crap they don't need (and perhaps something they do need, just to be fair.)

Of course, anonymity is a powerful defense against this type of marketing, particularly when it isn't particularly "permissive" in the first place. Facebook's repeatedly sneaky approach to eliminating privacy is part and parcel of that effort.

So naturally, "permission marketers" think everyone should be identified as it helps them make more money. That's really what it's about: the bottom line.

Terretta• 15 years ago

I think the by far more massive example are the custom coupons at the grocery. People who complain about cookies or Facebook have no problem swiping their affinity card at the grocery. That affinity program knows more about them than Facebook does, and much more money is involved.

ristretto3• 15 years ago

The argument for political dissidents in nonfree countries is valid but old (in many cases the regimes will catch the dissidents regardless). The value of pseudo-identity is not just anonymity, but the ability to have multiple identities. We shouldn't be forced to use one identity for the various areas of the internet, just like the comments and actions i make on HN are totally unrelated to my facebook community or my twitter community. Single-identity is a vehicle for tracking people, and i can only think of evil reasons to track people across communities. Even in real life, we dont carry our real identities around, you don't tell your full name to the cashier in the supermarket or to people in the street. If you get into a fight, you don't start by exchanging phone numbers.

In fact, offline real identity is less dangerous: unless you kill their mother, people you don't interact with will forget you in a matter of months. The internet is permanent.

But why am i wasting my time, facebook people think like infants anyway.

tapp• 15 years ago

Your comment re: multiple identities is exactly right. I don't understand why people seem so surprised to hear this sentiment coming from her, though - Mark is already on record on that topic:

“Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”

Facebook's policy from the top down seems to be that you are only ever entitled to one identity - period. If you were foolish enough to be born into an environment where expressing yourself solely through that one identity can get you in to trouble and/or killed, that's your own fault.

trotsky• 15 years ago

Computer security is and will continue to be so imperfect that it will remain extremely difficult for anyone to mandate real identity use on the broader internet. All the anti-censorship tools would work just as well against western governments and websites as they do against the middle east and asia. Wifi is ubiquitous and very hard to manage. People's identities are trivial to steal and would be a cinch to use if no money was changing hands. Hacking the client, password reuse, selling dead accounts, proxies and vpns from locations that don't require name use, off shore hosting.

Sure, many people wouldn't bother and just adapt. But clearly groups like Anon, 4chan, most of irc, #antisec and numerous others would avoid it all and go elsewhere. It's often repeated that the kids will hang around until something new is cooler. I imagine AnonymouSabu could do a pretty good job of jump starting a new social network all by himself if he got banned from twitter. Even if you have nothing to hide you'd probably head there if your friends are there.

Second is how practical PKI with identity management is on a nation scale. To make a serious run at 100% real identity all the time you probably need to go full public/private key, smartcard+pin, IP packet tagging for egress outside the nation's great firewall and so on. With less than all that it'd simply be too easy to avoid.The problem is, PKI with identity management is a really hard problem to do well. One of the largest PKI deployments in the world is the DOD. They wrangled for years on deployment, already have strict security protocols and a managed environment. None the less they had to shut the entire system down not that long ago and revalidate every identity because they had so many bad cards in active use.

Sure, the government probably isn't the best at that, hence why the Obama ID plan looks to open standards and a federated group of ID providers - presumably firms like Google, Facebook, Bank of America, Verisign and Verizon. The problem is that many of these firms are ill equipped to manage something you depend on for all aspects of your life, day in day out. I've edited out a bunch of specific examples, but suffice to say few or none of them have all the pieces needed to manage such an important, hands on and support reliant business.

On paper it all seems achievable, but in practice it seems highly unlikely to me that you'll see universal required ID. Facebook would like to see it for any number of business reasons, but when it comes down to it it probably matters little what they think.

All that because somebody related to someone who figured out how to help college students hook up thinks people might be a bit nicer in blog comments? Yah right.

majmun• 15 years ago

nonsense. some of things that post comments or use Internet don't have real identity.

hussong• 15 years ago

The 'Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory' is a hypothesis at best. One that has been refuted by empirical evidence of pro-social behavior under anonymity many times.

For all practical purposes, it's not even a well-formulated hypothesis, and most people (even journalists) never bother to look at any of the findings, it's just a popular meme.

Okvivi• 15 years ago

In my past life I've worked on the Google Maps identity story when Google Hotpot launched (allowing you to set a maps nickname, while still having friends on Google Maps). I feel that identity on the web is a harder problem than most people realize.

My personal opinion is that you have to strike the right balance between

+ establishing trust in the production of content (you want other people to trust what you post, build an identity). Producing anonymous/pseudonymous content is fine, but how can I, as a consumer of that content (reader of reviews) can make sure I can trust it?

+ offerring users the protection they want from entities bothered by the content you produce. This can range from the extreme cases of freedom of speech, minorities, sensitive issues (medical, sexual orientation) to the more trivial examples of bad reviews for restaurants where the owners might track you down.

+ incentivizing the production of high quality content and discussions (see the quality of YouTube comments for a case of user generated content gone wrong :-) ).

+ making it easy for users to deal with this identity complexity. Understanding that even though you are logged in with your GMail account you are posting as a Nickname, understanding what others can or cannot infer about you.

It's a complicated problem full of tradeoffs any way you want to go. + Go with real-name all the time and you upset the people that are not comfortable exposing their real name. + Go with pseudonymity and you lose the benefits brought by having an identity on the web. + Go with a compromise and you have to deal with complicated user experience problems.

Randi Zuckerberg Runs in the Wrong Direction on Pseudonymity Online

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