Specifications

SASCHA SEGAN
We need less anonymity on the Internet.
And we need more privacy. And the two
should go together.
The vast, lazy culture of message-board
anonymity is a perfect example of “slack-
tivism”—an easy but false solution to the
problem of our eroding right to true pri-
vacy, which will take real grit and courage
to solve.
Face it, all “anonymity” saves you from
is accountability before your peers. It lets
people release the worst in themselves
through trolling and online fraud, and
disconnects people from a reality where
you’re held responsible for the stupid
things you say. It dramatically lowers the
reliability of Internet communication, as
people can lie without real consequence.
It makes Internet-based activism a joke
when any online petition can be signed by
a thousand sock puppets. Internet users
need to face up to the 21st-century truth:
What’s online can’t be separated from “real
life.” It’s all real. It’s just life.
Losing the weak anonymity of handles
and the false differentiation between “real-
ity” and “cyberspace” would stamp out all
sorts of worthless, childish behavior. Take
the jerk who has a second wife on Sec-
ond Life, to the dismay of wife #1. There
is no “second life.” There’s only one life,
bigamist. Even Second Life the company
is starting to figure that out, demanding
identity verifi cation to access some parts
of the service. Or take the loser who IM’d
me trying to impersonate a celebrity for
no apparent reason. Or all the folks who
post on message boards just to inflame
passions, not to engage in genuine dis-
cussion. Wonder if they’d do that if their
names were attached? And the plague of
spam would certainly slow if rules requir-
ing the authentication of e-mail senders
came into force.
Meanwhile, you may have a false ano-
nymity, but you have no privacy—not
from Google’s database of Web searches,
private addresses, and phone numbers,
nor from goverment agencies’ searches of
your ISP’s records. False anonymity leads
to a complacency where we forget that we
don’t have privacy where it really counts—
because we’re able to act like idiots in front
of strangers who don’t matter. You may
think you can pretend to be somebody
else on the Internet, but the Department of
Homeland Security doesn’t see the distinc-
tion between you and your cyber-self.
Getting rid of the Internet’s lazy ano-
nymity habits will actually aid the cause
of privacy, because it’ll finally bring the
issue of online privacy into the day-to-
day world. Do you want to protect your
message-board postings from prying eyes?
Well, right now they can be probed by any
law-enforcement tyro with a grudge. With-
out the imaginary shield of weak anonym-
ity, people will have the incentive to rise up
and demand some laws that would actually
protect privacy—against our peers, our
corporations, and our government. We can
have a real societal debate over what infor-
mation should be public and when people
should be accountable. My vote: If I want
something I write not to be indexed and
not to be searchable, or if I want to delete
something I wrote anywhere, I should be
able to do so. With the duty of accountabil-
ity should come the right to power over
your own words.
Real privacy would help the people
who actually need to be anonymous on the
Net: corporate whistle-blowers, teenagers
seeking advice from Planned Parenthood,
that sort of thing. Just as in the non-Net
world, there are limited situations where
people need to be anonymous. But we
should start from a presumption that peo-
ple should be honest about who they are
unless they have a real need for anonymity.
Those who truly require it, the few Deep
Throats, are outnumbered by self-serving
agenda-pushers, cowards who don’t live
up to their words. Opinions worth having
are worth putting your name to. Do you
see people walking down the street in ski
masks and wigs to hide their identities and
calling themselves “xxLuvNKisses906xx?”
I don’t, and I live in New York City.
Or how about, let’s open a ghetto. If
people want to flame each other with
handles without a real reason for doing so,
they can do so on a limited set of message
boards, which will quickly devolve into
sludge. Perhaps each purveyor of message
boards can have one free-for-all forum
allowing that sort of nonsense. On the rest
of the Net, we’ll be grownups.
My proposal here applies only to the
U.S. and Canada. People who live under
more oppressive regimes can post all the
anonymous stuff they want; they have my
blessing. But we, luckily, live in a place
where the government and Web fi rms will
respond to the people, if the people get
angry enough. And if the people sign their
own names.
MORE SEGAN ONLINE Have a comment
on Sascha’s latest PC Labs-tested and rated
reviews of mobile gear at go.pcmag.com/
segan? Speak up, but use your real name.
“Anonymity” lets people release the worst in themselves
through trolling and online fraud, and disconnects
people from a reality where you’re held responsible for
the stupid things you say.
Less Anonymity, More Privacy
NOVEMBER 6, 2007 PC MAGAZINE 63