Not long after 9/11/01, every company that had any claim on imaging technology was trying to jump into the biometric identification fray, hoping to make a killing on terror (terrible pun intended). Not that the technology was anywhere near the task of correctly picking a known terrorist out of a crowd; but it sounded like the answer to our hopes and dreams of feeling safe again. Yet already, the prospect of having our imaged body parts encoded on ID cards and distributed to vendors of everything from burritos to airline tickets, was causing anxiety among those who did not want to see the tragedy of 2001 turned into an excuse to create the society of 1984. What happens to the right to privacy when the proliferation of biometric imaging turns your fingerprint, your face, your hand geometry and your DNA into commodities that can be demanded for identification, not to mention exchanged like social security numbers for fun and profit?
Sun Microsystems was one such company that was quick to rush in with an airport identification scheme. Bill Joy, cofounder of Sun, and a culturally sophisticated individual who is always ready with a pithy philosophical comment, was quoted as saying that we need new mechanisms to "govern privacy while at the same time resetting expectations about civil liberties"; and that "I'm for the right to privacy but not necessarily the right to anonymity". Now, let's ignore the crack about "resetting expections about civil liberties" so that Sun can more effectively market its products. My interest is more in the distinction between "privacy" and "anonymity" that is being drawn here. What exactly do they mean, in this context?
Suppose I am presenting myself in person to other individuals, who represent commercial or governmental interests, and to get what I want from them (an airline ticket, access to my bank account, or a burrito, for instance) I have to present some image - in abstract mathematical form, of course, since biometric id's are not stored as images but as points in a mathematical landscape - but it represents something that is supposed to be uniquely me. Is the idea supposed to be that what I give up here is just my anonymity, and not my privacy?
I think it is quite the opposite. When I am required to let someone do a digital scan of my face in order to get through the security check, so far as I can tell, I have not yet given up my anonymity - the staff who determine whether I passed the test don't even have to have my name, at least in theory, or any other identifying information about me whatsoever - but I think my privacy has surely been compromised, as I have already given up for public use and consumption the very thing I thought was sacrosanct, control over my own body. No, I am not in chains nor have I been tortured or otherwise subjected to pain or serious discomfort. Nevertheless, the details of what makes me unique as a human being were not simply copied, in their superficial aspect, for art or amusement, but were demanded, scanned, anlayzed, encoded, and stored in a database. I used to think that it's my damn business, thanks very much, whether you should know anything more about my body than I care to make visible in public. So much for that idea. (If you think this is just idle fussing, wait until the day it is discovered that some biometric information can be used to detect some disease or deformity that you'd rather not disclose.)
Now, what about anonymity? Most likely, that's gone too. It's gone in more or less the same way that it would be if I were required to carry around an RFID chip with my name and SSN encoded on it. (No surprise that these are two competing ideas for the design of the driver's license of the future.) Once I offer my fingerprints to the burrito place to scan, they can connect them with my name and other personal info. Why? Well, maybe I just give it to them to enter into their database. But all I really have to do is allow them to associate the biometric image with a credit card number, from which Bob's Burrito can glean everything from my name to my home address for the last 12 years (at least if they're willing to pay enough for it). And of course with the EZPass-like airport card, the very point is to identify me. When the FBI or the Police Department sets up security cameras that can scan faces in a crowd and compare them with a database of known criminals or terrorists, the point, again, is to identify not merely the face but the name and background of the individual. So, really, anonymity is out the door too.
Now, all of this is just a bit of a preliminary to some recent discussions about anonymity and the Internet, for example, this piece by Andrew Kean. Kean is a fairly widely published technology writer, but his opinion piece here is not exactly a paradigm of subtlety or measured judgment. His subject is "The Curse of Internet Anonymity", and though he states that the issue " is actually a lot more complicated than it first appears" he does not really treat it as very complicated at all. Children, who he refers to as "Generation Facebook", are taught "to lie about who they are". Parents collaborate in this to protect kids from "the social scum –- the sexual predators, the financial scammers, the con artists, the bullies, and the gossips –- who are corrupting the Internet with their criminality, perversions, and incivility". Aside from lumping together sexual predators and "gossips" he manages to throw in a barb at people who use music-sharing sites for "killing the recorded music industry"! (If someone is in the midst of committing suicide as they are rapidly dying from a terminal disease, doesn't poisoning them count as euthanasia?) Kean does not fail to remind us that "real lives have been wrecked by the evil actions of anonymous Internet users" and that "vulgar and irresponsible anonymous Internet users are souring public discourse", etc. You get the general tenor of it.
There certainly has been a lot of bruhaha about anonymity lately, but IMHO it is almost all just as misplaced as Joy's comment. That is because, if there is a problem about anonymity, it is the lack of it that should trouble us, not it's alleged proliferation. People are not anonymous when they use a pseudonym; they are pseudonymous, which is hardly an offense. Until the Internet age, no one ever called anyone on the carpet for adopting a pseudonym or going by two different names. Cicero and Tully turn out to be the same guy, Mark Twain is exposed as really Samuel Clemens, Marian Evans turns out to have paraded as George Eliot - get out the torch let's burn their books, let's throw darts at their effigies; beter yet, let's delete their Wikipedia entries! Does it sound ludicrous? Okay. So that's what I think of this garbage about anonymity. There is nothing wrong with adopting a psuedonym, and never has been. I adopted one on my first blog; now I don't, but I respect anyone's right to do so.
People have all sorts of reasons for not wanting their written words to be associated with their live persona. Picture this: a guy writes a novel full of all sorts of passages that are loosely based on the intimate details of his relationship with his wife. But he has children, some of them still young, but old enough to read his book. Feeling that in spite of the fictionality of many of the passages his children would be shocked at the recognizable connection with their mother, he decides to publish under a different name, which he will protect carefully from being publicly associated with him. That's one example; let your imagination run wild and think of others.
People have the right to be pseudonymous. All other things being equal, people have the right not to be directly associated with what they write; what counts is the content of what is written, not the authorship relation itself. Someone who writes a book exposing certain people as mafia members or corrupt law enforcement personnel may go to great lengths to keep his identity secret. Not only Marian Evans in the 19th c. but Wendy Carlos in the 20th adopted false names and hid their identities because they feared not being taken seriously if they went public as women. Whether they were right or not, it is clear that the moral weight for their contemporaries lay in protecting their pseudonyms, not outing them.
Publishing under a false name is not too different from being anonymous. But it is a little different: for "Anonymous", the most popular author in history, can publish an endless number of pieces which can only be linked together forensically; whereas "Joachim Pumpernickel" can, at least in principle, become a unique authorial persona, just not one that is tied to a known individual. This is another way in which the current flap about "anonymity" is off the mark. Someone who writes a blog or publishes reviews on Amazon under the name "Plexiglas" (made it up - apologies if there is anyone who actually does) can have a style, personality, history - in effect, an identity - over time, such that if they forget to sign one of their posts someone might conceivably be able to say, "Oh, that sounds like something Plexiglas would have said". (There was - is? - a mathematical group that published under the name "Bourbaki", though there was no person by that name in the group. "Bourbaki" had an identifiable perspective on mathematics. The name was apparently that of a French army officer.)
Psudonymous bloggers and posters are not violating anyone's trust, nor are they necessarily exercising undue caution or obscurity. People have a right to privacy, and they have a right to participate in public forums at the same time. I should be able to walk into a crowd without having my face scanned and matched with a biometric database. I should be able to speak in public without telling everyone my real name. Not being a criminal, nor having malicious intent, I should be able to use any name I want, or none, when doing so does not in itself harm anyone. When I say "in itself", I am comparing it with, for instance, someone who signs someone else's name on a check, or falsely prefixes "Dr." to his name, or claims to be a different person so he can get a second (third, fourth...) marriage license or access to additional government benefits. This is spoofing, or just plain fraud, for here, deceiving someone about the name is to deceive them about your entitlement to certain social benefits that you are not, in fact, entitled to. This sort of person does not want anonymity either; they want a false name. Their real name only matters insofar as it can help prosecute them. But they can be prosecuted under any name.
In the cases that Mr. Kean mentions - the woman who caused a little girl to commit suicide after pretending to be her friend, people whose reputations or sexual orientation are made the object of assault or derision in popular electronic forums - anonymity has nothing to do with the issue. Suppose the writers were named Jane Smith, John Brown and Bill Jones, and they posted their names; how would this make a difference? They would not be anonymous, but the moral problem with their obscure poisoned pen letters would be the same. Or, suppose they had easily identifiable names - wouldn't this be worse? Because at least some people would have the sense to write off the accusations of an obviously pseudonymous writer, or to take them with a grain of salt, whereas if people see a name that looks easily identifiable they are likely to give more credence to the allegations.
Objection: "But at least if you can identify them you can hold them responsible for their actions." Depends who "them" is here, because you can hold "the author of that particular nasty post" responsible for their actions too (this is called a "definite description", in the language of philosophy), though you don't know who it is that wrote it. Anonymity is never enough; people can be easily tracked down, too easily, from a single comment on a message board to a live human being in the back room of a fourth floor walk-up in Baltimore. Our lack or anonymity is scary. What is scary about the nasty creatures in cyberspace is not their anonymity, but their irresponsibility. They think they are safe from suffering the consequences of their actions, or indeed they desire bad consequences for the victim, and think they will not endure anything similar themselves. But it is not the fact that they fail to announce their names that makes their actions wrong. What is wrong is equally so whether they state their names, regular pseudonyms, ephemeral screen names or just post Anonymously. The post was, after all, written by a person, the same person regardless of the name(s) they use. They may be difficult to physically track down whether they are anonymous or not. Once they have been tracked down, they can be held accountable.
The anonymity issue is a red herring. A jerk is a jerk (that's eponymous, I think) - let someone use their name, a different name, no name, or ten names, what counts in the problem cases is that they are venal and cowardly, not that they are anonymous. I would bet there are hundreds of people named George Bush around the world. Let them all sign their posts "George Bush" - someone is sure to scream "anonymous blogger!", "spoofer!" etc. maybe we should all change our names to George Bush (please, whatever you're about to do, don't do it on your computer...) - then the anonymity business will go away and we can turn our attention to the people behind the names.
Indeed, multipseudonymity can be far more devastating than anonymity; one malicious individual can present as a whole community, and mount an attack on someone who feels the burden of agreement among several apparent authors. The unethical nature of this is clearly not tied to mudslinging alone. Suppose the owner of a bed and breakfast periodically logs into a popular travel site from a different email address and posts glowing reviews of their shabby, mildewy, boarding house. No one was dissed. But everyone has potentially been deceived, misled. Suppose the owner used her real name in one of these reviews; would it make a difference? Would people do enough research to figure out that it was the owner herself writing? Again, names in cyberspace are generally pretty meaningless, except for widely known personalities (and even then there's the George Bush problem, but I'll let that rest).
Anonymity makes no difference. The real problems have been around forever: deception, cruelty, dishonesty, irresponsibility. The author of a plagiarized book or term paper is more dishonest in their use of a name, and their actions more reprehensible, than any "anonymous" instant message user who does not deceive but merely hides their identity. Deceiving the person(s) on the receiving end of a communication is unethical, not because you hide your name but because you deceive. Dragging people's names through the dirt is obnoxious behavior, and doing it "anonymously" is cowardly behavior; hurting people intentionally is immoral, and doing it through anonymous posts, like spraypainting "Jill is a lesbian" on the side of the school, is disgusting. Anonymity is not new, and is in fact a right that we must hold on to. The fact that it can assist one in doing harm should not blind us to the value of this right. When anonymity goes out the door, so does privacy, to an extent, and the ability to exercise free speech and speak unpleasant truths without suffering evil consequences. Let's identify the problem correctly and stop moaning about anonymity, before the loss of it turns around and bites us in our virtual behinds.
