TechStuff Classic: Anonymity

we talk about the concept of anonymity. Anonymity is one of those things that the Internet was kind of built off of, and there's been sort of a love hate relationship between anonymity and the need to have some form of accountability on the Internet. This episode originally published on August two thousand eleven. It's one of the true classics of tech Stuff. Chris Palette and I have this conversation.

I hope you enjoy this discussion about anonymity. So we're gonna talk today about anonymity and the web and its relationship with one another and how things have been changing over time. And this also ties a lot into a privacy in the web. In fact, the two are these topics are all very closely related. But um it's it's been in the news a lot recently, and by recently I mean the summer of of two thousand eleven because

of a couple of different things. First of all, a couple of years ago you had um or it was only a year ago, but you had Mark Zuckerberg say that the the whole notion of privacy was falling out of social norms, meaning that people today don't value privacy or don't think of privacy is something that's important the way that generations earlier had, uh you know, thought of

the subject. So uh, that was that actually kind of explains a lot about certain things that Facebook has done over the past, where you know, it's all about sharing information, particularly information about yourself and the things you like to do in the places you like to go. And then you know, the the argument I think someone at Facebook would make is that the more you share, the more

you're going to get out of that service. So if you do not share a lot, you won't really benefit from the service the way you do if you are someone who shares lots of stuff. Although even that, you know, we could anyone could tell you if they have a friend who shares absolutely everything that that can get old too. Yes. Sorry, Look, I thought it was a particularly interesting bowl of oatmeal, so I shared it. Well, it's always nice to share otmeal.

I don't know, but all right, anyway, we're getting off track because I mean I just go back to the Oatmeal party where Josh Clark did that well anyway, So so Facebook's approach is saying that anonymity and privacy are really kind of those are old ideas that we're slowly seeing phase out. And then the other thing that kind of brought this into attention was a Google launching Google Plus, and we did that episode on Google Plus, that epic Google Plus episode. One thing we didn't really talk about

that much was that Google Plus. You know, in order to have a Google Plus profile, you have to have a Google profile. In order to have a Google profile, it has to be a Google profile that's public because they eliminated all private Google profiles, And you had to have a name associated with that profile. And it didn't have to necessarily be your legal name, but it did have to be the name that you go by the

most frequently. And so you would, you know, I have to put a first name in a last name and make it make it a legitimate name if it were something that was clearly a handle or a nickname or just unusual had some odd characters in it, like not like you know, Alex from Clockwork Orange odd characters, but like symbols like at symbols or hashtags or things like that. Um that Google would flag it and then Google would suspend your Google Plus account. It is a darn good

thing that Prince decided to go back to being prince. Yeah, well he the web's over compared if yes, Prince, So it's immaterial for this discussion. Point yea irregardless um supposedly supposedly, Uh yeah, anyway, if you if you put these these symbols into your name, or you had some other weird name going in there, Google might flag your account and

suspend it. Uh. They then later on kind of adjusted that a little bit where they would give you a warning saying you need to go into your Google profile and put in your actual name, and you could add in nicknames and stuff and another field called other names, but that the name associated with your profile would be your real name. Now, that brought up some some questions among a lot of users, and it ranges through the

whole spectrum. You've got the spectrum that includes people who are know that their argument is that hey, I have made a a name for myself under this persona. It's like a brand. Yeah, a brand exactly. It's like a brand. So um The example I used in my blog post was Dr Kiki of Dr Kki Science. Yeah, she's she's a scientist, um uh. And she is known as Dr Keiki. Her first name is I believe Kirsten. But but you know,

she that's not what everyone knows her as. So she created a Google profile using Dr Kiki and um uh, yes, Kirsten Sandford. That's her name, Dr Kirsten Sandford. So she went she goes as everyone knows her is Dr Kiki, So that's what she created a Google profile as. But she her Google Plus profile was suspended because it did

it violated the rules that Google had set up. And Google's argument was that he wanted to create a social network that would let people connect with folks they know and folks they know of easily, and that that if you start putting in handles and things and you're cloaking your identity, that's kind of antithetical to what Google meant Google Plus two be. The problem is that's not the way people use the web. You know, people use the web in all sorts of different ways. There are people

who will use their own names as their handles. For example, I'm one of those people. I use my own name as my handle pretty much everywhere, and uh, the reason for that is so that I keep myself accountable for the things I say. It's a personal choice. I don't judge anyone else who goes by a handle. I totally understand that, and I think anonymity is an interesting and important issue. I just, for myself choose to use my own name because one, uh, that's kind of my brand.

It's my name at this point. If I had gone by some other weird, wacky name, I'd probably be using that everywhere. But to you know, it's just again, it just keeps me responsible for the things I say. I'm less likely to say something really offensive or outrageous or just pigheaded because it's attached to my name, and I'm not gonna go onto some forum and and tell off the person who posted above me that they're a complete jerk and an idiot. And you know, I'm I'm less

likely to do that. I still do it, I just don't do it as frequently as I would if I had. You know, you know, hamster Man seventy three was my handle, and no one knew that that was me. But we all know now, well I don't post under that handle anymore. You won't find those YouTube comments coming from me anymore. Buster. Yeah, well it's funny. Um you need to it's weird to put this in perspective, so you know, to some degree, I think online Mark Zuckerberg has a point. We've gotten

to the point where we're interested in social networking. Um. We have business profiles on link den dot com. We've got uh, Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and all the others for our social fun you know, our our informal networking, in some case business networking too. Um and And it's hard.

It's when you've gotten used to the idea of the right to privacy, which, um, you know here in the United States we have a certain expectation of personal privacy, um and not that's not necessarily true everywhere else in the world. But when you've established all these accounts and you say, no, I just want to be online and have my uh my ten family members and sixty friends, and that's it. That's all I want on my account. I don't want everyone else to read my posts. Why

are you making them available? Um? The thing is, Mark has a point because if you, you do have that right to privacy. But when you join Facebook, the point is to be social, and I, you know, I don't want I'm one of those people that would prefer to socialize with people I know in real life and not you know, everybody online that I that I really don't

know that well. But at the same time, you know, if if I joined Facebook and I don't have, you know, I have to play the rules, by the rules of Facebook, and if Facebook says on Facebook, you don't have the right to privacy. And to the same extent, I mean, you're you're everyone can see you. Now. You don't have to publish your stuff so that the world can read every single post you write, but everybody's going to be able to see that you have a profile. And that's

just the way it is on Facebook. And um, you know, I I see the annoyance, but I don't see why people get so very angry simply because you've you're you're agreeing to the terms of service for joining those accounts. And that's one of the reasons I wasn't anxious to

uh join Google Plus right away. It was because I realized that I was gonna have to make my profile public and everybody was going to be able to see it was me, And um, you're not allowed to use your nickname because I mean, not only is that against the rules, but it also shows up against your account. So if I wanted to be Larry the Wonder Beagle, then all my email on Gmail comes from Larry the Wonder Beagle, and I don't want to do that because

I keep in touch with you. You would essentially have to create a second Gmail account just for your Google Plus profile in that case, which you could theoretically do, although you're again kind of skirting the rules there. Yeah. Yeah, so, I mean that's and it would be annoying because you always have to log out of one account and log into the other whenever you wanted to check your quote unquote real email. Yeah, exactly. It's a it's a pain in the neck. But the thing is, and again, this

has nothing to do with the actual law. This has to do with the terms of service of the website you're using, and it is it is frustrating. Hey guys, it's Jonathan back in two thousand and eighteen. I just wanted to interrupt here to say we need to have a quick break to thank our sponsor. I think there are some people who who agree, like, all right, I get it. If I want to be on blah blah blah,

I have to play by their roles. I think the fear is that the approach to eliminating anonymity entirely, they're they're worried about that being more of a broad approach to the web in general. Yeah, and I worry about that too. Yeah, that's something that I'm not interested because because that would be let's let's say that Twitter made that same same decision that your Twitter handle had to

be your first and last name. Now for me, it happens to be that, but the shortened version of my first name because Jonathan Strickland does not fit as a full Twitter handle. Um, so you know, Johnny cakes, that's me. No, it's not, It's not really me anyway, so the cake

cake I prefer pie anyway. If Twitter did that, then you know, you think about that there there, We've seen Twitter being used in things like a political revolutions, you know, political unrest, turmoil, riots, that kind of thing, protests, uh, situations where the people who are organizing it definitely would not want their their identity shared with the general public because it would put themselves in danger, literal physical danger, and it would it would help prevent them from doing

the the political activist work they were trying to do. Like if they were to post something and it was traced back to their identity, they could be you know, theoretically by by an oppressive government brought in and then not only do you have a person brought in by the same government they were trying to protest, but whatever activities they were trying to organize have been, um, you know, have been somewhat well sidetracked, have been have been sabotaged

exactly because you no longer have that anonymity. And so there is a definite place for anonymity on the web. So you here here, Like, let's talk about some of the different arguments that people make for and against anonymity. Okay, so we've already covered one of them, which is that, you know, if you want to be able to connect with people, you need to be able to know who to look for. And it's kind of hard to look for someone if everyone's using up fake names everywhere. So

that's one argument against anonymity. Um another is another argument against anonymity is that, uh, making someone use their own name kind of the way I was explained my own personal approach, uh, keep some somewhat accountable for their words and actions. So, in other words, the idea is that if you make sure that people cannot be anonymous, you really cut back on trolling. That's that's ultimately what we

get down to. So can you imagine what a place YouTube would be if everyone had to use their real names and like there was a way of really linking an account to an actual person as opposed to just a handle, because I mean, you look at some of the quotes on YouTube, and they are some of the meanest, nastiest, mean spirited stuff I've ever read anywhere, and just on the typical video even you know something that a video that has no objectionable material in it, it's just silly,

or it's or it's even you know, even if it's boring. Sometimes you kill the nastiest responses. And so the argument is that, well, if you made sure that people could not be anonymous, couldn't hide behind a pseudonym or a handle, that they would be nicer. And that's probably true for

most people, they would probably be nicer. I don't think that it would magically make the web a shiny, happy place and no one would ever disagree with anyone, and you would never have anyone call anyone else a hurtful name or anything that's naive. That would still happen, but I think it would cut down quite a bit on the trollish behavior. But I don't know that the trade off is worth that, you know, So anyway, those are

those are two arguments against anonymity. But one that we've mentioned already is what if you want to be able to protest something or to bring attention to an issue that could get yourself in trouble, um, just because of your circumstances. That's true, um. And then there's a difference to I mean, we could take, uh, we could take specifically the the example of Google itself. So on the one hand, you've got Google Plus, which is a social networking service that is optional for you to join you

if you if you want to join the service. Currently as of the time we're recording this, you have to use your real name and that's up to you. You do not have to join Google Plus. Then you have Google street View. On the other hand, and this again long term listeners will know that We've talked about this

before on the on previous podcasts. So Google street View the idea of being that Google is sending cars on driving around neighborhoods, driving on city streets, um, and basically they take pana ramic photos of the street so you can see I personally find it really helpful when I'm looking for a business that I've never seen before. I'm trying to get there and you can go look it

up online and see a picture of what it looks like. Oh, it's the green building, and you can pan around and see what the surrounding buildings are and you can you

get an idea for the landmarks. Yes, it's it's it's really a neat idea, a concept on the table right there is a neat idea, especially when you apply to things like I want to take a virtual tour of a city I've never been in, and you could literally do that if you have a fast enough connection to the Internet and a good processor, then yeah you can.

You can you know, navigate through street View and go down streets in cities just as if you were there, um without the like, you know, you can stroll down New York City at night without worrying about getting bugged. So I don't think it'd be at night. Well, no, but it would. It would be kind of hard to see. But um, and there are there are many funny stories about Google street View, the cameras getting knocked off by

low bridges and people doing crazy things. People hearing that street view was coming through, so they arrange for some sort of bizarre demonstration or or sword fire mooning, you know, all kinds of stuff. But the thing is to people complain that they're taking photos of their houses without any permission. It's an invasion of privacy, as the argument. Yes, um, and so there you go. You you you know, suddenly your house is there and you can't opt out of it. Yeah. Yeah,

so you know. Plus there are many many phone directories with with information in there. Uh they scrape phone books and you know their of course legitimate phone books as well phone directories online. So if you put two and two together, you can figure out where somebody lives and what their house looks like. Yeah. Now, if you've, if you've managed to stay unlisted and everything, then there may not be a connection between you the person and your

wherever you call home. So but for the majority of people. I think, yeah, you know, with a little snooping, you could easily figure out where someone lives, and then through street view you can see you can actually see their their house, which I mean, you know, you can argue, well that let's let's let's potential thieves case the joint

without ever leaving, um, leaving wherever they are. You know they can they can look it up and then get a real good view at least to the front of the house, maybe even the back of the house, depending on how your neighborhoods laid out. And you could use the satellite view in in one of the mapping services or in Google Earth to get an idea of the

lay of the lands. So it's you know, it's one of those arguments where you make well, this this can make us less safe and and there that is a good argument for anonymity, saying that, well, I understand that there are uses for this technology and that um that it can come in handy and it's a fun technology, but there are also some serious consequences or there can be serious consequences to enabling this technology and immediately opting everyone in. It's not like you had a choice as

far as street view is concerned. I mean, there are some very famous cases of towns that the essentially told Google to go uh google themselves and get the heck out of Dodge, although Dodge was not one of those towns. Well yeah, and some gated communities places like that. In course, in in Europe, there have been many cases, um, in different countries in Europe where uh, you know, they they've taken Google to court and said, you do not have the authority to do this, um, you know, because it

violates our country's privacy laws. So um, you know, it's it's it's difficult, you know, on on, but it's there is a definite difference in um, you know, things like being signing up to be unlisted from your phone company and deciding to opt out of social networking services versus um, you know, what other people post about you online. And that's another thing too. You you can't control what other people do, um not yet, but I'm working on it. That's why I brought a crown in today. Yeah he did,

sitting right on the table right between us right now. Um. But yeah, I mean, you know, I've had pictures tagged on Facebook, um, and you know, with my name on them, and I'm kind of the point where I try to avoid having that done, and I go and remove the tags simply because I'm less comfortable being public than other

people there. But I can that I think there's this, well, I'm pretty sure actually that Facebook has in its privacy settings a setting where you can go in and make sure that if someone wants to tag you in a photo that it has that requests your permission before the tag goes public. So you can actually tweak that setting, although like all Facebook privacy settings, it's not the easiest thing to find. You have to kind of do a

little digging. Um. Google Plus is is kind of the same way in a sense, it's a lot easier to control who sees your information when you use Google Plus because you can just at every stage you can determine which bits of information are visible to others and which ones aren't and uh, and you can specify you know, which users can see it, like a circle or just a specific user. But even so, it's it's still a lot of stuff to wade through. Hey, guys, Jonathan two

thousand eighteen, present day, looking back on the past. Before we conclude this discussion about anonymity, let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. Another thing about well, another argument you can make against anonymity. We we've already touched on this about the trolling, but if you really want to see and I don't recommend you do this, but if you if you want to see what the power of anonymity, you can go to a uh community like

community like four chan. Yes, now, four chan is we've talked about before. It's a it's a message board that allows you to post things anonymously. You don't have to create an account. You can create a handle and you can either use the same handle or you can use a different handle every time you log in if you want to. Um, Actually, that would probably make you less likely to be traced because you're using a different one. You're not creating an identity for yourself. Is there a

spout too, or just a handle? It's just a handle. It's actually two handles. I'm a sugar dish um. So the the idea here, but four chann is that you can share stuff without ever having to to link it back to yourself personally. And they actually have a couple of chann and not everything on four chan is is of objectionable material. Right. Uh, there's a lot of stuff on Fortune that's all about uh, you know, a lot of its Japanese pop culture stuff, especially um manga and anime.

But there are some channels in four chan, the random channel being the most famous channel where anything goes and people are using um anonymous handles in or or to post stuff, usually in order to get a reaction out of other people, um, either to make them laugh or to shock them, or to discuss them or whatever. But it's it's kind of about it's about as close to chaos as I can think of really. Um, not that it's not interesting or entertaining at times, but it's often

very uh disturbing to look at. So you look at that and you say, well, if if maintaining anonymity on the web means getting this kind of reaction where you get the sort of of people trying to do whatever they can to get a reaction of other folks, that's an easy thing to point out and say, well, this

is why we don't want anonymity, right. I think it's I think it's misleading because it's it's stating that just because you want to be anonymous, you want to cause trouble, and I think that's you know, I don't think you can draw that conclusion, but I think that that's something that a lot of people who argue against anonymity, um, they will they will point their finger at places like or or sites like four chan and say, well, that's why.

And I think that's shortsighted. I mean, I I just point to the political unrest in places like Egypt or uh Libya or Iran or Iraq, where you know, we've seen social networking come into play and help people, and say, well, this is where anonymity is really important. And without it, uh,

it's possible that these people would have suffered more. It's possible that the world would have remained ignorant of what was going on for the most part, because we would just get mainstream media coverage of whatever those events were. And either, you know, you can be cynical. You could say that mainstream media just doesn't do a good job of covering that kind of information, and you know, that's

that's an argument for a different podcast. Or you could say that mainstream media does an okay job, we just have become very good at ignoring it, cynical in a different away, or it could be a combination of the two. Um, I'm not arguing any of those things, of just saying that without that, you know, if we had had the social media, without the social media, we all we'd have

is the mainstream media approach. With the social media, it tends to put up even when it's anonymous, it puts a personal spin on these stories that tend to hook us as human beings into them. Yeah. And and I think it's also important for us to touch on enforcement. Yeah, because you know, although Facebook and Google Plus are are currently requiring people to use, you know, a real name or at least the name they go by. Um, no, nobody's requiring a birth certificate. And even then, you know,

a birth certificate could be faked. Um, let's not get into that. But I mean, yeah, I mean you could. You could doctor a document and send it into Facebook and say hey, so, nopsie, that's right, you real name. Um, so you know, there there nobody's actually doing that. And I know people who don't use their real names on Facebook.

And for a while there they were removing people. I assume they probably still are, but I remember it being a big thing a while back, a few months ago, maybe a year ago and I thought, oh, well, you know, my friend is going to have his profile removed. It never happened when it's clearly, you know, he goes by a band name, you know, the name of a character creative for the for a band that he's in, and it's like, uh, like the remote stage person it's a

stage persona and it's clearly not a name. Well, which you could clearly you could do that for a fan page without any issue at all, but for a personal page that does tend to get a little like if people notice, they get or if people if if the company that is providing the service notices, you might have some issues. But some people with particularly unusual names I've been reading about Google Plus have had their profiles removed

and actually it's their real name. Yea, let's happened. I mean there are some there's some fun names out there. I'm reminded of my my my sister's vet Dr Stacy Stacy. Seriously, yeah, Stacy Stacy. Interesting. Yeah, she says everything twice twice. Check the papers, check the papers. Um she's at any rate. Yeah, there there are issues where we see people who are legitimately following the rules, who being punished for not following

the rules just because they happen to have an unusual name. Um, you're gonna fall find that pretty much in any kind of environment where they are requiring people to use real names. Just because you know, we're human beings, we come up with some interesting combinations for names. Sometimes we marry into them. Sometimes we just luck out in our born into them. Sometimes our parents have a cruel since humor Moxi crime Fighter being a good one, Pen Gilette's daughter Moxi crime

Fighter Gilette. That's true. I'm not making that. I don't I don't have any doubts since I don't remember some of the countries around the web Moon Unit Moon Units that. But that's what I meant. Um, yeah, they Yeah, they were. I remember seeing legislation in several countries where people were

trying to name their kids things like Superman. Wow. Really um but but yeah, I mean, and it's very difficult to enforce that without requiring any kind of proof, and so they're sort of going through and going, well, I'm that doesn't seem like a real name, so you can go ahead a lot of guesswork. So yeah, yeah, I'm sure that Google plus I Google seems like one of those companies that's really eager to please, and I think

I think there are cases like this. Is This is also an issue Google Plus runs in too, when it opens up a private beta and the there's a disproportionate number of people in the private beta who are public personas, especially in the tech world, because you have people who are known by their brand. So Google Plus kind of brought it in on themselves in this case. But at least they're learning this lesson very early on before it

the recording of this podcast. They haven't gone open, they haven't opened up the social network yet, so hopefully this stuff will get ironed out so that UM, if you do want to use a nickname or a brand or something as your persona, you should be able to UM. There's been discussion at Google about finding ways of making

that happen, although it may not. It may mean that you have to create a sort of profile that's not the same as a personal profile, kind of like on Facebook, where you have fan pages or group pages, and then you have your personal pages. UM, I think picture pages. I think the concern really I have is not um whether or not you could be anonymous on Google Plus,

or on Facebook or whatever. My concern is that you start to see the generation of movers and shakers in the web space, like the Mark Zuckerberg's of the web, who say that they think that privacy is no longer a social norm. That concerns me. And the reason that concerns me is because that means that if that, if that attitude becomes prevalent throughout the web, then and then it will become a thing of the past in all

but the smallest niche communities. So that's really where I'm concerned, not so much in the specific cases of Google and Facebook, but in a more general web wide case. And will we see anonymity get stamped out? I don't. I don't think that will ever happen across the board, but I can certainly see privacy and anonymity taking kind of a uh diminished role in the future. Well I, um, you know,

I personally like to retain a great deal of my privacy. Um. But at the same time, I do think that anonymity can breed a sense of um recklessness when when people are willing to say whatever they feel like they can get away with well without any kinds of repercussion and

I don't I don't particularly approve of that. Um. But you know, at the same time too, I think, uh, you know, the idea that we have all given up our privacy and this is just the way things are going to be also encourages people to share too much information. You know, Hey, I'm going out of town for two weeks. Look at this. Here, here are pictures of my trip. And uh, you know, and then two posts later, Oh, the police just called. Someone broke into my house. Yeah,

you know. I mean if if if you go, well, you know, it's all public anyway, who cares? Then you know, you're I I think I don't think there's as much to discourage you from over sharing things that you shouldn't share. Well, yeah, And and the Internet has made it so easy to share things as soon as you think of them that uh, that's that's also an issue. Like the Google Plus setting for your phone that instantly uploads any photo you take. Yes, but you don't have to have those shared publicly. You

don't have to. But if you don't, yes, um yeah, the yes is getting easier and easier for you to to upload your thoughts immediately to the Internet without filtering them first, which is why whenever I make my social network, I'm gonna have a little window pup ups, do you really want to post that? And when you click yes, do you really really want to post that? And then when you click yes it it posts. And then at the very end it says if this is stupid, it's

not because I didn't tell him. So well, that's that's why I started my own anti social network and I am I am the only member, right uh, and that is unlikely to change, right, It's just it's just it's just me. It's just a black web page. You go to the web page, there's nothing on it. It's just it's just black. Well, it saves me a lot of time because they don't have to check it very often. Yeah,

I'm sorry. There is at the very bomb, if you scroll all the way down and it's long, there's an under construction boom shovel digging with the hard hat because we're gonna bring geo cities back one web page at a time. And that is the classic episode of tech Stuff about anonymity. I hope you guys enjoyed it big thanks to my original co host, Chris Poulette, who I always enjoyed having conversations with on or off the microphone. If you guys have any suggestions for future episodes of

tech Stuff, let me know send me an email. The address for the show is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter. The handle there is text stuff H s W. Don't forget. You can follow us on Instagram and I'll talk to you again really soon. For more on this and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff works dot com.