Hacker News Reader

Comment by wedn3sday | Hacker News Reader

I find the sentence, "right to remain anonymous online," intriguing. Since when do we have this right? Where is this right written, and who decided we had it? I wouldnt be at all surprised if a poll of the HN community found that we all thought that we had (or should have) this right, but when did we all collectively make that decision? Since some time around 2014 I've been advocating in private around the issue of automated inanity engines and their rise to prominence. IMO online anonymity does more harm then good right now, and we still havent seen the full power of things like GPT-3 in the hands of nation state actors (or maybe we have and just dont know it).

View on HN

> IMO online anonymity does more harm then good right now

Okay, "wedn3sday", take your own advice and we'll talk.

Totally agree with your sarcastic comment, but you shouldn't fall into the fallacy of condemning his ideas just because he doesn't follow through with them. let's answer critically.

Do we a have such a right? Some comments in this thread answered it already.

Does anonymity do more harm? How did they measure that? What are the metrics and the data. Or what is the hunch leading them to this conclusion?

>Does anonymity do more harm? How did they measure that? What are the metrics and the data

Not everything has to be a metrics based, data collected thing, but if you insist. Lets do a thought experiment.

I'm an individual with a radical hot take on something I want to exercise it in the market place of ideas... But then you've got that thing that led to Larry getting his face pulped by those guys last week...

Lets do a count.

Larry had a hot take last week: Larry exercised it. +1 Beaten to a pulp. -1 It got out there, the the marketplace was enriched, Larry's face wasn't. As a person with a brain, and knowing I have my name attached to my hot take, I am not at all incentivized to contribute to the marketplace of ideas. -1

If it was a really disgusting hot take, then I just go on with that hidden and never have it challenged or the edges filed off. Incalculable loss +1-1-1=-1 in the short term. Long term losses are incalculable.

Throw anonymity into the mix. Anon X has this hot take.+1 Nother Anon responds: That's daft and here's why... +1 Nother Anon pulls an ad hominem adding nothing to the conversation +0 Another Anon goes "Hey, I see your hot take, but what if..." +1

Up to +3 already.

Now you have a plurality of viewpoints coming together in a mixing pot, some good, some bad, lots of garbage, but dome diamonds in the rough as well. And no one gets their face pulped!

And even in the case of garbage getting challenged, you can't fight disinfo, or horrid viewpoints without challenging them. They'll never get challenged if no one is willing to air that crap. Every now and again, someone comes around from an absolutely terrible way of looking at things. All it takes is time.

All things being equal, take the route of least perverse incentive. Anonymity wins just about everytime.

People underestimate the value of knowing the level of horrible people one is surrounded by. Seriously.

> Not everything has to be a metrics based, data collected thing

Very true, that's why my very next sentence prompted for a hunch, or some sort of reasoning.

Nevertheless, when data are absent, you need theories, and then you try to apply those theories to reallity, see if they actually apply, fix wrong aspects of the theory and reitterate.

Here is my theory:

Anonymity is vital in a society where different classes of people have conflicting vital interests, such as our society. It is a tool to allow you to criticise without being beaten for it.

Backing this up with a thought: Would you beat up a guy who went out publicly and said "We should all plant red roses, red roses are the best!" when you fancy yellow roses? No, noone gives an F for that. People care when these opinions affect their lives and well being, and crucially, they care when they have something to lose from what the other person proposes. That is the true incentive to retaliate. That's where the "conflicting interests" condition is coming from in the theory I proposed.

Now, did we not have conflicting interests, anonymity should still be nice to have, but not as important, because you wouldn't have people hunting your head for lack of it.

if things are unregulated then online anonymity comes naturally. on the other hand, it is anti-anonymity that is unnatural because it needs to be enforced. so no one needed to decide we have the right to anonymity, but "someone" is trying to decide that we don't have that right

> if things are unregulated then online anonymity comes naturally.

I think that, unfortunately, this statement is a bit too strong. An unregulated world doesn't stop private actors from pseudonymously using resources and lying about themselves, of course, but it also doesn't stop owners of network fabric or service providers comparing log data to de-pseudonymize a user.

In the absence of regulation, the predominant factor is just what people want to do.

my point is that option of anonymity comes naturally, as opposed to someone needing to grant you that right. privacy is also a natural right, yet nothing stops anyone from putting an eat to your bedroom door, so to speak

My guess is that the "right to remain anonymous online" is probably an overstatement of what most people believe, and the author was using a convenient, poorly-chosen phrase. I don't think he'd expect that you have the right to (for example) purchase goods online without providing personal information, or file your taxes online without giving your name, or register to vote in elections without verifying your identity: those are unlikely, if not absurd expectations. What most people mean when they say "remain anonymous" is something more like: if your identity is not strictly needed to provide some service, you should have the choice of whether to voluntarily provide it or not.

By this definition, "online anonymity" is something more like privacy: the right to act without unsanctioned intrusion. I know that anonymity and privacy are two different things, but I think they're often used to mean the same thing, and are in this example.

Anyway, to answer your explicit question, article 12 of the United Nations' list of basic human rights[1] lists privacy as a right, and they say that protecting people against unlawful and unnecessary surveillance is part of providing those human rights on the internet[2].

It is a fundamentally difficult question to answer, because who "we" are is hard to define on the internet. We are all part of different jurisdictions, with different laws. The U.N. is the best authority I can think of, though it's not got a lot of teeth.

[1]https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...

[2]https://www.un.org/techenvoy/sites/www.un.org.techenvoy/file...

A letter is anonymous. A phone call is anonymous. A quiet conversation can be anonymous. These are all established accepted means of communication. If we had the economic means to read every physical letter and overhear everyone all the time to prevent criminal activity, should we?

It's a right insofar that comprehensive identity data is additional meta that is attached to the message. But all that is truly needed is the message itself; we don't even need a single field for username. The internet is anonymous by nature, it is only through our artifice that not-anonymous messages are even possible. This is what the incumbents experienced long before the normies took over and IMO how it should remain

I guess the same question could be asked in the opposite direction, so to speak - isn't a belief that such a right exists enough for it to exist, even if it's unwritten?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com