I truly share your concerns, especially as someone belonging to a minority.
At the same time, we have to be real: Online anonymity has significant, real-world drawbacks. I don't think it's reasonable to keep dreaming of the 90s or 00s when the internet was a comparatively innocent place. As society is more and more digitized, the stakes become much, much higher. An information leak 30 years ago was bad, but it had a fairly limited impact radius. Today it can lose you your house, your savings, your relationships, and even your life ("swatting" comes to mind).
This extremely ill-advised legislation across various jurisdictions cannot just be brushed off as a global turn towards fascism. It is that, but there are also real, legitimate concerns that need to be addressed, and the tech world has not leveraged its expertise to come up with any solutions so far. Sticking our head in the sand crying "git gud" while millions get scammed out of their life savings... It's not great.
(Children getting into trouble is honestly the least of my concerns here. Don't let your child go online unsupervised. The internet is not for them. You wouldn't let them roam free in a red light district or an underground illegal weapon's market either, even though they are unlikely to come to any harm.)
I feel like I see these comments basically verbatim and it's freaking me out. The whole "I share your concerns, but hear me out: anonymity is bad." It's basically identical wording every single time.
I think people who say this should back it up by posting their full name, date of birth, SSN or other ID number, and address. A phone number would also be helpful so we can call and verify that they made the post. Otherwise they're not being honest.
> I think people who say this should back it up by posting their full name, date of birth, SSN or other ID number, and address. A phone number would also be helpful so we can call and verify that they made the post. Otherwise they're not being honest
But this isn't (intellectually) honest, either?
Maybe you can justify asking that they post under their real name, but asking for the kind of information that's required to steal their identity isn't the same as asking them who they are.
Never once did I say that "anonymity is bad", but people in this thread and piling on as if that's what I said. I said there are drawbacks, and that those drawbacks are real.
> Online anonymity has significant, real-world drawbacks.
Do please be specific about those. Provide concrete examples and justify for the class why those involved couldn't have voluntarily done away with anonymity for that particular interaction.
Hypothetically someone can browse a tor site in one tab, post on 4chan in a second one, all while accessing online banking in a third. The bank can use hardware backed 2FA to verify you. Where's the issue here?
Here is one example: It's likely that we will never know who was behind the attempted backdoor in the xz library, which was almost successful in making a huge number of Linux installations worldwide vulnerable to remote exploitation. [1]
That malicious contributor is protected by online anonymity. Now, I know that it's probable that a state actor was behind "Jia Tan", meaning they could have been supplied with a fake ID as well, but that's still a higher barrier.
I don't think (and have not stated) that anonymity is worthless - it definitely is, especially if you're persecuted minority or under other kinds of threat. I just don't think it's helpful to pretend that it is completely unproblematic.
> The project in question could have chosen to verify identities if they deemed it worthwhile to do so.
But isn't this exactly what various social media companies are doing now? Choosing "to verify identities" because they have "deemed it worthwhile to do so?"
And don't tell me "the difference is scale", unless you're prepared to explain exactly what difference that makes.
When financial institutions in the USA are not even adding basic things like... approve transaction on phone, keeping most things pull based based on knowing a few magic numbers vs. push based and other really basic things, this really doesn't hold water. Things being anon doesn't even register in the day to day of what is bad with the internet, vast majority of it is from very non-anonymous sources, influencers, apps or institutions.
> An information leak 30 years ago was bad, but it had a fairly limited impact radius. Today it can lose you your house, your savings, your relationships, and even your life ("swatting" comes to mind).
So you are afraid of minor information leaks getting you killed, but you’re also trying to tell us that online anonymity is a bad thing?
Come on. This argument isn’t even coherent from paragraph to paragraph.
> I don't think it's reasonable to keep dreaming of the 90s or 00s when the internet was a comparatively innocent place
This is such a strange argument as the internet was most definitely NOT an innocent place, even relatively speaking, in that period.
I think there is a lot of nostalgic history rewriting in these claims. Much like political movements that claim that the past was a better time, it’s easy to only remember the good parts of how things were in the past.
> I neither believe nor did express any of the opinions you accuse me of.
I directly quoted your beliefs that minor information leaks on the internet can lose your house and get you killed, as well as your claim that the internet was significantly more innocent in the past.
These were the points you were putting forward along with your insistence that we have to “be real” about the problems of anonymity on the internet.
Its hard for me to believe that you don’t recognize the dissonance between the two points you were putting forward.
Your silly “Are you an American” attempt at an insult or rebuttal reveals the level of conversation you’re having, though.
> So you are afraid of minor information leaks getting you killed, but you’re also trying to tell us that online anonymity is a bad thing?
Which is a really severe misrepresentation of my argument.
My argument is that anonymity has drawbacks, and that it's bad to just ignore those drawbacks.
> Its hard for me to believe that you don’t recognize the dissonance between the two points you were putting forward.
But there absolutely is a dissonance? This is what's called a dilemma: Online anonymity protects some people, and puts other people at risk. If competent people ignore the latter, incompetent people will be trying to solve it instead, so we get these laws.
> Your silly “Are you an American” attempt at an insult or rebuttal reveals the level of conversation you’re having, though.
Sorry about the accusation, it was somewhat flippant. It just seems you and others read an opinion that goes slightly against your own, and immediately you assume that I actually hold the polar opposite opinion, which I don't.
How about this is actually the real problem? Online banking is not worth an omniscient global surveillance state, let alone the immense amount of leverage gained by this digitization.
> Sticking our head in the sand crying "git gud" while millions get scammed out of their life savings...
The solution is called a durable power of attorney and then moving significant assets to different financial institutions with e-statements. Or the heavyweight option is a living trust.
Mandatory identity verification or locking down software really have no bearing on this problem. Scammers leverage generic apps in the app stores just fine.
This problem most certainly is a part of the global turn towards fascism, which is ultimately based on frustrated people demanding easy answers and then empowering those who are able to give them easy answers by lying to them.
I've definitely listened to the frustrated people, as well as even sharing many of their frustrations. And their (our) problems are definitely real. I still stand by what I said.
To show you that I'm maybe not just blowing smoke out of my ass on this topic, here is me personally dealing with a scammer-adjacent problem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47125550
At the same time, we have to be real: Online anonymity has significant, real-world drawbacks. I don't think it's reasonable to keep dreaming of the 90s or 00s when the internet was a comparatively innocent place. As society is more and more digitized, the stakes become much, much higher. An information leak 30 years ago was bad, but it had a fairly limited impact radius. Today it can lose you your house, your savings, your relationships, and even your life ("swatting" comes to mind).
This extremely ill-advised legislation across various jurisdictions cannot just be brushed off as a global turn towards fascism. It is that, but there are also real, legitimate concerns that need to be addressed, and the tech world has not leveraged its expertise to come up with any solutions so far. Sticking our head in the sand crying "git gud" while millions get scammed out of their life savings... It's not great.
(Children getting into trouble is honestly the least of my concerns here. Don't let your child go online unsupervised. The internet is not for them. You wouldn't let them roam free in a red light district or an underground illegal weapon's market either, even though they are unlikely to come to any harm.)