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The paper on Dissent gives a pretty good use case - groups like Wikileaks, where "members may wish to send messages to each other, to the whole group, or to a n
by pplldd 11y ago
The paper on Dissent gives a pretty good use case - groups like Wikileaks, where "members may wish to send messages to each other, to the whole group, or to a non-member, such that the receiver knows that some member sent the message but no one knows which member...We also wish to hold members accountable, however, not by compromising their anonymity and allowing some authority or majority quorum to unmask a member whose messages prove unpopular, but rather by ensuring that no malicious member can abuse his (strong) anonymity to disrupt the group’s operation. For example, a malicious member should be unable to corrupt or block other members’ messages, overrun the group with spam, stuff ballots, or create unlimited anonymous Sybil identities [17] or sock puppets [36] with which to bias or subvert the group’s deliberations."
- lisper 11y agoIt's a wonderful theory, but here's an actual data point: when I was at JPL, in the very early days of the internet (mid-to-late 90's), they set up an internal usenet newsgroup, and they set it up so that by default all posts were anonymous. The group was only accessible by JPL employees. The express purpose was so that employees could state their views freely without fear of reprisals. It was an unmitigated disaster. It basically degenerated into the on-line equivalent of lord-of-the-flies, with some of the the most vicious flame-fests I have ever seen (and I've seen some real conflagrations). They eventually removed the anonymity-by-default and all the vitriol ended instantly. Two interesting facts: 1. The "anonymity" wasn't real anonymity. The server simply rewrote the "from" header in each message to be from anonymous (which, of course, made things very confusing) 2. After "anonymity" was turned off, it was still trivial to spoof a "from" header and achieve the same level of anonymity as before. But no one did. I do not deny that anonymity can be useful in some circumstances. But it's no panacea.