Naming Names on the Internet | Hacker News Reader

Naming Names on the Internet

nytimes.com

14 pointsbootload8 comments

It's only passingly relevant to the story but I hate when people bring up Choi Jin-Sil in this context (that's the name of the South Korean actress mentioned in the article). A few facts about that case...

1. She had a history of battling Depression and at the time was depressed over the suicide of her close friend.

2. She didn't leave a suicide note or give any reason for her suicide.

3. Her brother, who also had a history of depression, also killed himself a couple years later

4. Far from being bullied by the Internet trolls she had fought back and pressed charges. The police had made an arrest at the time of her death (libel is obviously a much bigger thing in South Korea)

5. Less than 6 days passed between when she reported the issue to the police and when they made an arrest. So anonymity didn't pose that big an obstacle

The South Korean policies were really just politicians jumping on the tragic death of a popular star and trying to make it look like they fixed a problem.

“The Internet would be better if we had an accurate notion that you were a real person as opposed to a dog, or a fake person, or a spammer.” - Eric Schmidt

There are no dogs posting on the internet and there's no such thing as a "fake person". That leaves real people and spammers. There are lots of tools to filter out spam and you mostly see spam on websites that are just not using any of them.

So, if that's really the argument Google's chairman has for abandoning anonymity and pseudonymity on the internet, can't we all just move on now and not pretend that "real names" policies are anything other than sheer demonstrations of dominance by these services and politicians?

Not to mention I'm seeing spam on Google+, while my pseudonymous friends are very difficult to find and/or recognize. In fact, because they're not allowed to use their names by which I know them, for each and every spam I am forced to wonder whether this might not be somebody I actually already know - clearly the reverse of a sane antispam strategy.

So all in all, this Google policy is wrongheaded and basically we all know it. I'm with you. It's yet another power grab.

Also, people should only publish pamphlets under their real names. If you want to opine on American politics, you should have the guts to put your name on the front of the pamphlet, like our Founding Fathers did, not hide behind a cowardly videogame pseudonym like "Publius" or something.

I'll repost something I commented a few months ago about the comparison of anonymous and real-name or 'transparent' systems:

Ultimately the question is one of freedom vs enforced rules.

If you have a system of anonymity or pseudonymity, it's always possible to identify yourself by a real identity if you want to. Whether this takes the form of 4chan's "photo with a shoe on your head" or Reddit's "Post about this to your twitter account", reliably associating a pseudonym to a meatspace person is easy. So you can get the advantages of the 'transparent' system in a pseudonymous system if you want them, but you're never forced to.

The only way to properly run a transparent system is to force everyone to identify themselves. Then you can't get any of the benefits of anonymity.

The only people pushing for 'transparent systems' are people who have some material gain from them - advertisers, information miners, law enforcement etc. I think they have enough power as it is.

So I'm in favour of anonymity by default, keeping the choice to be transparent in the hands of the individual.

Not the only ones. I have no power to leverage or gain via a transparent society and yet I advocate it. Or, at least, no personal gain that everyone else would not also share.

To me it merely seems inevitable and if we acknowledge that we can make sure it's actually a transparent society, instead of just a glass-walled prison.

> we can make sure it's actually a transparent society, instead of just a glass-walled prison.

I'm not being flippant, but what do you see as the difference?

Transparency up versus down. London now has only the wrong sort, for instance. They can watch you on almost any street but if you tried to record a police officer they'd arrest or add you to a watch list or something.

Whereas if encryption and hidden cameras go far enough we'll be able to spy on the authorities as well as them spying on us, thus keeping things in check.

These guys call call it sousveillance http://wearcam.org/sousveillance.htm but I think they overthink the idea a little. Simply put, who watches the watchers? Unless it's me at some level I'm not funding/legitimizing the system.

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