Thoughts on privacy and being anonymous on the internet

[ultranos]

I'm watching the latest from RaceFail 2009, and I'm agreeing with abyssinia4077 on it needing to be renamed HumanityFail 2009. (The ever-amazing rydra_wong has the links. Here's the SparkNotes version.)

Now, I thought it'd died down to a quiet simmer and went to focus on other things (aka "omglabs"). But the events of this past week have drawn be back in, and, quiet honestly, are pissing me off. And I managed to pin down exactly what made me see red: actions that are flagrantly against my moral and ethical code of behavior online.


To put it succinctly: outing the private identity of a person online, linking their online handle/pseudonym to their legal name is in no way okay. Hell, if the Electronic Frontier Foundation has anything to say about it, it's not only ethically reprehensible but possibly illegal.

Why? Because it's harmful. Because there really are crazy people on the internet, and not the good kind of crazy. Because people can, and have, lost their jobs, been physically threatened, been stalked, etc because of their legal identities being linked to their online identity. It's dangerous.

This is why preserving online anonymity, if someone chooses to use a pseudonym, is Rule One of Online Behavior 101. (Rule Zero being "Don't be a fucking asshole". Arguably, Rule One and most subsequent rules, are in fact subsets of Rule Zero.)

----
I came to online fandom in a way that's possibly different from a lot of people on my flist. I've only really been vaguely "active" in fandom for about the last year and a half. However, I've been lurking and skirting the edges of various fandoms for over ten years. At the time, I was very, very young. It was not safe for me, at age 11-12, to be hanging around spaces online and using my real name. Even if it was simply Sonic the Hedgehog comic/SatAM fanfic fandom. And then, the boards at the GHZ when I was 12-14, talking about Sonic Team works and other games, I was used to the idea of a pseudonym.

Maybe that's a bit of difference. Coming into the internet from the gaming sectors. There it's pretty much unheard of to use your real name. Hell, even the editors of EGM (the print magazine) used handles and nicknames. It's not only an accepted practice, it's the norm.

When I first was allowed to go on the internet (Netscape Navigator with a 14.4Kb modem, whoo!), I wasn't supervised. The family computer was right in the family room, so as long as someone was on the first floor of the house, they pretty much had line-of-sight. But my parents knew I was smart and laid down the rules. And Rule One was "Do Not Give Out Personal Information".

For me, it's because I was a kid. There's always the story in those days of the crazy people online who would like nothing better than to hurt children. And I understood this, and was incredibly aware, way back in 1996, of my own vulnerability.

As I grew up, I'm still aware of that vulnerability. But now, it's not so much with my age. I've discovered that, depending on where I am, "Ultranos" has seen a lot differently than otherwise. The most telling example is how, in gaming circles, I'm nearly always first assumed to be male. And, at times, I'm granted certain privileges or courtesies because of this (it's gotten a lot better in recent years).

And I have to admit, I've been glad I have this name. "Ultranos" is not my first handle, but it's the one I've used for almost ten years. It's my gaming name, when I go play online games of SupCom or have to register for SMT:Imagine. I don't even think about it anymore. It's not because I'm ashamed of things that go on in this blog or anything like that. It's just, well, caution. Since my personal LJ and this one have a large number of people on it who know me in meatspace (I don't like the term "real life", as if "online" is somehow completely orthogonal to and has no interaction with life outside the computer), I know that it is impossible for me to completely separate both. I just try to keep my legal name outside of both and not post too many personal details because of that.

Yes, I'm vaguely worried about potential employers finding out about my activities online, but in the sense that I hate the idea of that invasion of privacy. I'm a huge proponent of privacy online. It's why I screamed about FISA. It's why I'm glad whenever the really invasive attempts at DCM die horribly (Sony, I am LOOKING AT YOU). To me, privacy and anonymity online are sacrosanct. Employers should not get to act as Big Brother and invade personal lives. What you do on your own time is your own business, as long as it isn't illegal.

----
The discussion that sparked RaceFail'09, way back in January, was good. It was good because it was needed. It was painful, but there were things that needed to be said. And I'm saying this as one of the people who was hurt, who has the old hurt. And I'm saying that, because I made the choice to say one thing and not engage as others have done, I could step away and watch and listen (because there is still a lot that I must learn, because I know that my situation is not unique but it also is not universal). And to those who kept engaging in discourse, I salute you and feel so damn guilty that I did not choose keep speaking right along with you. (Even though it was because I thought you spoke more eloquently than I could.) Because you have ended up hurt worse than I.

I watched from the sidelines instead and now I feel like I have to apologize a bit if the IP address I come from half the time has given your opponents ammunition for their contortions of logic fail (for anyone who knows ANYTHING about IPs, it's blatantly obvious where I'm coming from). *wry grin* On the other hand, I have some very nice statistics for you to shove in your detractors faces about that if you ever have need of it. (Such as, oh, the economic, class, and racial make up of the university I attend and how possibly assumptions they might make about those are blatantly false and how the administration has taken action against those types of things.)

----
It's funny, because I'm having to re-read Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash for class. And, to be honest, when I tried to read it at age 16, I couldn't get through it. Now, though...I'm noticing things I didn't notice before. And it's because of the discussion.

Stephenson did race in Snow Crash. Hiro is mixed black and Korean (and an Army brat). Juanita is Latina. Da5id is Jewish. It's laid right out there in the first chapters. And Stephenson mentions flat-out how growing up like that, their experiences were different. How these are different characters defined by by their experiences and their upbringing.

It's pretty much what people have been saying about writing CoC for the past few weeks. It's not perfect, no, but it's a sight better than other things.

And you want to know the really, really hilarious thing about this? Snow Crash was written after Stephenson said "fuck it". He'd tried the writing thing, and his first attempts just weren't selling. And then, he said "fuck it. I'm going to write a book. And when it doesn't sell, I'm going to get on with my life and stop this writing thing". This is Snow Crash. If Stephenson can do this well after giving up, what the hell is everyone else's excuse?


ETA: Edited to fix broken lj-user tag. My inability to type bodes poorly for the paper I have to write.

Comments

[holdouttrout.livejournal.com]

Man. There are some really skeevy things in Snow Crash (I'm thinking about gender roles and rape, and questionable consent and female desire more than race, because I definitely didn't have that lens when I was reading it), but it is, at least, diverse and interesting and yeah, not exactly something where all that diversity seems forced, from what I remember.

I have honestly been trying to learn, but I must admit I've used my privilege card of "I don't have to think about this all the time" more than once during the intermediate portion of the debates. I just don't understand why it's so hard to respect someone's separation of meatspace and virtualspace, especially when there are dozens of good reasons for that separation for a lot of people.

[ultranos-fic.livejournal.com]

Oh, don't get me wrong, there are A LOT of problems with Snow Crash. It's part of the reason that I simply could NOT get through it the first time. I just sort of struck by how differently I'm reading it now, after all this talk, and maybe this time I'll actually get through it.

It's kind of "hey guys, if Snow Crash is doing better than you, You're Doing It Wrong". :)

And word on the separation of meatspace and virtualspace. I just Do Not Get how this is a hard concept for people.

[cshiley.livejournal.com]

Notes: I haven't read all that stuff. I have approximately the same approach as you to privacy/anonymity except I don't hesitate to use an identifiable handle.

A lot of people place a completely different value on anonymity. From their perspective, being anonymous means not taking responsibility for your words. When someone goes around spreading rumors that get you in trouble, when someone sends a grumpy letter and doesn't sign it, when someone keys your car instead of talking to you about it - these behaviors are what they think of as anonymity. It's cowardly, skulky, possibly criminal.

A part of being a Good Person (Good Man?) is being willing to stand up and defend what you say and what you think. It's part of being an Upstanding Citizen. Standing behind your words is a virtue, a value.

Is there something to this? Yeah. A lot of people take advantage of anonymity to be raving douchebags; you can't hold people accountable for the effects of their words or their behaviors. Where there's no community, no reputation, there's no social pressure to behave well and honorably even if you secretly are a douchebag.

There really is a lot to this, and a lot of websites are implementing things like this to reduce douchebaggery. You log in and your handle, at least, has a persistent identity. Some sites go to a lot of effort to reduce sockpuppeting, and everyone pretty much seems to agree that sockpuppeting is a questionable activity (even if sometimes it's worth it). Reputation also helps people sort out the useful voices from the useless ones when they don't have enough information to weigh the actual content of the words. Can this backfire? Yep. But it seems to be a necessary approach to wankers on the internets. It does privilege sourced speech over anonymous speech; there's disadvantages to it, but people are human and sometimes you just can't go with an "everyone behave now" model.

One can take these ideas too far, like the people who believe that privacy laws are only for people who have something to hide. You can require revelation of opinions or actions to have value on words (if you don't vote, you don't get to complain! Who did you vote for?) You can attach too much information to a persistent identity (salon puts all the posts you've ever made in all the different conversations together in a single place; if you post a lot, you will leak details, and a Bad Person can trivially reconstruct way too much information.) There's a lot more; you know all about this. These are things that people who are concerned with privacy and anonymity think about, and they're important.

But at heart, the anti-anonymity people mostly have a problem with implementation, not necessarily a problem with principle.

[cshiley.livejournal.com]

You should be responsible for your behavior and your words in both meatspace and virtualspace. What you say online is as real as what you say offline; we are all people, with feelings, and hiding behind a pseudonym is just like passing mean little notes in class. How is this a hard concept?

<--- devil's advocate. This stuff really is not cut and dried.

[ultranos-fic.livejournal.com]

*nods* I use this handle because I've had it for so damn long, mainly. I mean, I started using it when I was of an age when, honestly, using an identifiable handle was more dangerous than not. (about age 14. Did I really want to be a 14 year old on the internet who's name could be traced to her house? No.)

The thing is, about anonymity, there are historical examples of people standing behind their pseudonyms, as virtuous people. People like Mark Twain and even the American Founding Fathers. To say that pseudonyms are inheriently criminal is a gross violation of historical evidence.

And yeah, I know that it's pretty much a fact of life that there are raging douchebags on the internet, just like how there are in real life. And that exercising in being a fuckwit is a bit easier for a relatively normal person to do online because of that ability to easily make sockpuppets.

But John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory (http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/) does not hold true in all cases. And I'm not sure that everyone understands that.

[ultranos-fic.livejournal.com]

You should absolutely be responsible for your behavior and words in meatspace and virtualspace. Because there IS a human being behind the screen, with feelings and emotions and hopes and dreams.

But! This is all part of Being a Decent Human Being. And because there are people who are NOT Decent Human Beings out there, who will take glee in harming someone else who as done nothing wrong or who has stated an opinion they disagree with, that pseudonyms exist. That the right to remain anonymous in dissent and disagreements IS a right.

From the EFF on Anonymity (http://www.eff.org/issues/anonymity):

Anonymous communications have an important place in our political and social discourse. The Supreme Court has ruled repeatedly that the right to anonymous free speech is protected by the First Amendment. A much-cited 1995 Supreme Court ruling in McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission reads:

Protections for anonymous speech are vital to democratic discourse. Allowing dissenters to shield their identities frees them to express critical, minority views . . . Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority. . . . It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights, and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation . . . at the hand of an intolerant society.

The tradition of anonymous speech is older than the United States. Founders Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay wrote the Federalist Papers under the pseudonym "Publius," and "the Federal Farmer" spoke up in rebuttal. The US Supreme Court has repeatedly recognized rights to speak anonymously derived from the First Amendment.

(Also, thanks for playing devil's advocate.)

[cshiley.livejournal.com]

I'm not saying that pseudonyms are always bad. I am saying that anonymity is not always good, and the people who Just Don't Get Anonymity and Privacy on the Internets are not all retarded mouthbreathers.

And also trying to explain their perspective, since you said you didn't understand their perspective. Some of them would be all Well Mark Twain Was A Douchebag Too but most of them are quite reasonable, and quite reasonably do not understand how a person can say valuable things anonymously, because in their world, anonymous speech pretty much always goes with badness. They'd probably make exceptions for authors and for founding fathers because they figure those are exceptional circumstances, and point out that you are not an author and you are not a founding father. Although depending on how you describe the behavior of the founding fathers (they were terrorists who fomented rebellion against the legitimate authorities) they'd think that it was pretty immoral what they were doing.

Of course not everyone understands it, because everyone's got a different perspective. :)

(again, this is not reflective of my actual opinions on the matter)

[ultranos-fic.livejournal.com]

Okay, point, they're not all retarded mouthbreathers. (God, I haven't done debate like this since high school. I'm really trying not to be the self-righteous idiot I was at age 17. :) )

But I think what's bothering me about that perspective is that there IS that double-standard. That authors like Mark Twain and Publius get a free pass because...historical evidence that the Did Something Good? Because we have the luxury of hindsight in those cases?

Maybe it's the "guilty until proven innocent" mentality. Which is probably unfair to assign to their perspective, given the connotations of that phrase, but I can't think of anything else to describe it. I mean, I know where my biases point in this case.

[cshiley.livejournal.com]

So what, then, is the difference between meatspace and virtualspace that is so obvious that people do not understand?

We have to be responsible for our behavior in both places. EFF (a pretty radical group) cherry-picks quotes from SCOTUS about how we have to protect anonymous speech in meatspace, too, but those protections are not absolute, no matter what EFF might say. It's dangerous for a kid to leave around a magazine with their name and address on the subscription sticker, and people steal your identity from your trash as easily or more easily than from the internets.

People want to run around and pretend that who they are online is not who they are in real life. But they're still people taking actions, and actions have effects and sometimes should have consequences. So what's the big obvious difference, other than I get RSI talking to people on the internets and a caffeine addiction talking to people in coffeehouses?

[cshiley.livejournal.com]

Heh. Yeah. I think actually that is the Big Exception, that if you are in genuinely Adverse Conditions, it's something you can do, but then you should take credit after.

Also, author pseudonyms is such a long tradition that nobody thinks about it very much, or if they do they figure it's just to protect themselves from rabid fans. Also, Author is a privileged class, traditionally speaking, and Authors, like Journalists, have some kind of Social Responsibility.

I do wish more people would think critically about this stuff. To answer my own argument above, the difference between online and offline is persistence and correlation of data, by people and machines. Most people haven't got the faintest clue about this stuff, and even people who work with the internets all the time are careless. Commercial interests dominate and nobody thinks about the repercussions, and the cat is pretty much out of the bag.

heck, it's only been a couple of years since anyone decided that a person's medical data is something that should be protected.

But, well, just like everyone else, I accept compromises on my own privacy and security in the name of convenience and awesomeness. For all the security-minded people I know, I know of exactly one person who is actually diligent about his data on the internets, and he still uses credit cards, posts work-related stuff under his own name, and trusts that the MIT servers will remain under the control of sympathetic and security-minded folks.

[cshiley.livejournal.com]

Oh, and you also run with "guilty until proven innocent" in choosing to obscure your identity. Although it's more like "someone's guilty near me". Not that I'm saying it's wrong, but it is basically the same assumption. They assume that anonymous people are nefarious for their own, not entirely stupid reasons; you assume that someone near you will be nefarious at you, for your own, not entirely stupid reasons.

...and I guess I can only keep it up for so long, because I get really annoyed with the people I'm defending here. :)

[ultranos-fic.livejournal.com]

I think the difference between meatspace and virtualspace, right now, is that the latter is too new still. People still have a hard time realizing the fact that there is a real, breathing person behind the 1s and 0s there when they interact online. It's obvious in meatspace.

And because of that newness, I think ethics might be behind technology in this case. In an ideal world, there would be no separation between meatspace and virtualspace. (Our consciousnesses can all be jacked in directly. Oookay, too much William Gibson lately.) But it's not an ideal world. And things that people might shrug off in meatspace somehow don't when they're tied to virtualspace, right now.

In a way, virtualspace, as it exists right now, has a lot to do with being a combination of the private life in an extremely public space, especially with Web 2.0 applications. And because of this view of privacy, this need for privacy that exists because the Internet is an imperfect medium, is the reason that people need to still be anonymous if they so choose. Does this mean they get a free pass on whatever they say? No. They should get called on their shit. But the choice to be anonymous or not should be their decision, no matter how pissed off someone else might be because of what they say.

Is it an obvious difference? To me, yes. But I think about stuff like this more, and I'll admit that I'm coming from a different perspective.

[ultranos-fic.livejournal.com]

*laughs* Yeah, paranoia is a tricky thing. And, yes, it's on both sides of the argument.

I have to salute you for playing devil's advocate as long as you did! :)

[holdouttrout.livejournal.com]

I think there's a difference between anonymity and pseudonymity. One implies that you're not responsible for your actions, and the other implies that you have a consistent alter-ego that is responsible for what it says/does while keeping your original identity protected (at least to a certain degree).

Also, one of the main benefits of living online, if you will, is that you *can* let go of your meatspace, public persona and tackle issues that you otherwise wouldn't feel comfortable with, interact with people you might not feel safe to interact with, etc.

One of the growing pains of the internet is between identity off and online, and we're probably not going to know exactly how that will turn out until the young people ten or so years behind me start looking for work, since they're the people who live online and without boundaries between the two.

[ultranos-fic.livejournal.com]

Gah, thank you for the "anonymity =/= pseudonymity". I think I was flailing around that for...paragraphs. *facepalm* (I need coffee)

[holdouttrout.livejournal.com]

Hee. I've been thinking about that a lot today, actually, in between WANTING TO KILL ALL PAPERWORK.

[ultranos-fic.livejournal.com]

PESKY PAPERWORK.

[jessiehl.livejournal.com]

I came very late to Internet culture - I wasn't really involved with it at all until college, and I didn't do anything like video gaming where pseudonyms would have been prominent - and it took some time for it to occur to me that people wouldn't want their various handles to be associated with their real identities. I get it now, but I didn't get it then. I just didn't have the background in mass internet culture to understand the issue.

On the other hand, I think that using revelation of someone's real identity as a weapon is reprehensible.

Personally, though, I tend to use handles that could fairly easily be traced back to me. I find that it keeps me in a more responsible mindset. I have used pseudonyms that weren't easily traceable to me before, and I did find that using them made me more likely to say stuff that I really shouldn't (being meaner, being more knee-jerk, revealing too much about myself to strangers). I didn't like the effect that the illusion of anonymity (because it is an illusion - there's always the chance that you will be traced) had on how responsible I was being, or not being, with my words. There are circumstances in which I would and do use real pseudonyms, but in general, I find that using something closely tied to my real name keeps me, well, grounded in reality. I see a lot of people on the Internet use anonymity/pseudonymity to act like complete jerks, and I don't want to constantly subject myself to that temptation, especially in fora where heated debate sometimes happens and I'm likely to be angry and want to be an asshole.

[ultranos-fic.livejournal.com]

*nods* I think, for me, it's definately a matter of how and when I came to Internet culture. And I'm not saying that not using a pseudonym is wrong. Really, one of the reasons I use this one is because, well, habit. I mean, a lot of you people on my flist know exactly who I am in meatspace. I'm not exactly hiding behind anything. *grin*

That, and, well, this handle is almost a decade old. At this point, there exists a weight behind this handle that using one more tied to my legal name wouldn't have. As in, some people might not call [redacted] on her shit, but they totally would "Ultranos". Which is kind of an interesting reversal.

But that took years of work, and being careful, and not being a moron to build up that rep. Because, with just the handle, to me, there's a greater incentive to be a decent person, because I don't want to have to be ashamed of something if it DID get traced back to me.

[azurelunatic]

Yes. This is where I live. I am careful to not shit there, to put it crudely. I have a wider audience under this name than I would under my legal name. My father knows where this journal is, and reads it from time to time. I have a very small handful of old friends who don't know where this is, not because I'm keeping it from them, but because we haven't talked in so long, or because they have genuinely no interest in LJ.

If a complaint reached the Abuse team about actions I took, this could potentially cause hell in my social life. If my actions cause LJ wank and I handle it poorly, I could lose professional references.

I would never want to abandon nearly a decade of social capital. This represents many instances of calming the fuck down before responding angrily, many well-thought-out comments, many good memories and great interactions -- sometimes the same sort of concerted public persona goodwill that someone who sells themselves on their legal name has to exert.

[ultranos-fic.livejournal.com]

*nods* Yes. I think more people know me under the pseudonym than under my real name. Or, at least, more people who's opinions I actually value.

The thing is, at this time, the words I say under this name are the ONLY indication people have as to what type of person I am. Because of the medium, all they have are words. They do not have tone or facial expressions or body language. They cannot see me wincing or beating myself up when I fuck up, as they possibly could if this were face-to-face.

To me, because I have chosen a pseudonym to go under, the onus is on me to not be a raging asshole and to stop and think and choose my words carefully because they are the only things that someone else can judge me by.

[azurelunatic]

The medium is making us build whole new social models. I think it's the speed and widespread nature of the medium that's leading to this; people have been able to correspond by writing pretty much forever. It's just that it took so long and literacy was not necessarily the norm, and the spare time to do it was rare. Now it's reached critical mass, and the mass doesn't always know what to do with it.

Somewhat triggered by this whole cascade of fail, I've outlined some of the stuff that we don't get, and our readers are not entitled to, on the internet: http://azurelunatic.livejournal.com/6259775.html

[vito-excalibur.livejournal.com]

Plus one thing:

Realspace isn't Googleable.

In realspace, I have some idea of the context of what I'm saying.

[ultranos-fic.livejournal.com]

A very, very excellent point.