Anonymity is definitely one of the most important aspects of the internet. It is what allows anyone to share their ideas without fear of being silenced by the majority or worry of harassment for their opinions. It allows people to be who they want to be on the internet, rather than the person society tells them to be. For young people who are questioning their religious beliefs, their sexuality, or anything else, it allows then to reach out to others in similar situations for support and guidance without the fear of anyone finding out. Some of the most engaging and intuitive dialogue comes from people who under the protection of anonymity are no longer afraid to voice their ideas. This has allowed people all over the world to connect and exchange ideas in ways people even twenty years ago could never have imagined.
At the same time, you discussed the problems that come with anonymity and there are definitely many. Many communities on the internet have become cesspools of bigotry, discrimination, and even sometimes violent or dangerous speech. Just because someone has access to a world of information and differing opinions doesn't mean they have to seek them out. Most people would rather have their own ideas enforced by like minded individuals, then seek out people of differing opinions who might make them question their beliefs and opinions. As a result, people tend to clump together on the internet, and when people agree with racist or derogatory statements, people are more willing to suggest even more repulsive speech. As we read in the case of autoadmit, when people started to post nasty rumors about Brittan Heller and Heide Iravani, hundreds of people jumped on the bandwagon. People didn't just stop at agreeing with other posters, they made up nastier and more disturbing lies to fuel the fire. Why? Because they thought it was funny and their was no one to hold them accountable.
All over the internet people have suffered at the hands of mobs. People who they've never met, never done anything to, choose to defame and discredit them simply because others are doing it too. People are now willing to flame and spew filth at random people in ways they would never do in person. because along with anonymity, the internet removes any sense of personal connection to the victim. This XKCD comic illustrates the issue of the internet quite nicely. When people on the internet forget that there are people at the other end of “the series of tubes” they lose all social boundaries, which is what I believe is one of the fundamental problems with the internet.
None the less, whether you view anonymity there are definitely obvious benefits to anonymity, but how anonymous can we really be? The idea of absolute anonymity you discussed is an interesting one, but is it even possible online? A graduate student in computer science, Latanya Sweeney, showed you can uniquely identify people with only three pieces of information: ZIP code, birth date, and sex. When people sign up for forums they almost always provide significantly more information than that. Even if the fabricate their application, their usually include a working email address and you can follow that back to find just about anyone you want.
Even people who try to hide from the world have great difficulty doing so if people are looking for them. A journalist at wired tried to hide from a legion of online searches for just a month, yet he failed. What chance does an average person have of absolute anonymity if even those trying for it can't achieve it.
One of the things you said was that you, “believe that the proper authorities should always, without fail, have the ability to trace Internet activity to a person, or at least to a small group of people.” The problem with that is one of the best properties of the internet is that we are building a global community online. The person you talk to online could be down the street or halfway across the world. How do you grant a country jurisdiction over something that doesn't belong to any one country. If people from all over the world participate in a forum where even criminal activity occurs, whose job is it to prosecute. Although we in the US often like to think we police the world, that is really neither our right nor our job, so how should one go about dealing with the Internet?
You mentioned the “recently popularized distrust of any kind of government,” but really the people we should be more worried about are bored people with too much time and a decent knowledge of the Internet. Society seems to have decided that people's privacy no longer matters. Anyone who chooses to participate in any online forum, and even many who don't, give up all rights to protection from harassment and defamation, and right now, people don't seem to care.
People have always felt that they had a right to privacy in their own homes and in fact this is one of the principles the United States was founded on. With the explosion of the internet, this privacy may soon be, and perhaps already is, a thing of the past. I wouldn't worry too much about perfect anonymity because I doubt it is going to be achievable in the near or even distant future. The world is getting smaller and there are less places to hide. On the other hand, people's basic privacy seems to be at stake. Should we be doing more to protect people's private lives? Is it the job of the government or should we establish a different code of conduct on the internet like Viktor Mayer-Schönberger suggests in Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age?
No comments:
Post a Comment