4 ms·

Anonymity vs. Transparency [Infographic]

wladimir 15y ago
My vote goes for pseudonymity. It has the advantages of transparency (such as reputation) but also the advantages of anonymity (such as to allow expression of less popular opinions without repercussions).
Silhouette 15y ago
I think this is a false dichotomy. In reality, your life is not either an open book or a closed one, and you can choose how much personal information of what type you share with whom. The problems usually start, IMHO, when others are allowed to make that choice for you. This can be direct, as with all the modern tracking technologies and personal information that businesses try to collect about you even if they don't really need it, but it can also be more subtle, for example where social networking sites can build up a profile on you based on information implied by your relationships, or where information from sources you might expect to be independent is aggregated and available for data mining by a single entity. It also cuts both ways, if you wanted to share certain things but for some reason were prevented from doing so, leaving others with incomplete or out-of-date information even though you were willing to share that kind of data with them. I think the more serious problem here is that this is a Pandora's box problem. Once your life is out in the open, there is no way to put it back, but the consequences are not always immediately obvious. Perhaps as a society we should grow up and learn not to evaluate people based on isolated data or out-of-context incidents that we find out about their past, but as any politician, insurance company or judge can tell you, that's not going to happen any time soon. It's probably a generational shift if it's even possible at all. In the meantime, an entire generation are growing up sharing their lives on Facebook and Twitter and being physically tracked via their mobile devices and travel smartcards and logging every purchase/refund they ever made with credit/debit/loyalty cards. It's only a matter of time before "bad candidates" don't even get their CVs read because the employer's automated background checks picked up a black flag, "bad customers" (who expect the product/service they paid for and complain if they don't get it) see their consumer rights eroded by the power of the database, "bad clients" can't get useful or even legally required insurance because their profile fits a high risk group, and so on. These trends are already well established, but as Pastor Niemöller explained, first they came for the communists and I was not a communist... An amusing anecdote to close with: just a few hours ago, I read a comment by someone who works at Facebook, observing that most people there also maintain a separate LinkedIn profile because they want to keep their personal and professional lives separate. Apparently Zuckerberg hires a lot of people who, in his judgement, have a "lack of integrity".
- TeMPOraL 15y ago
  "just a few hours ago, I read a comment by someone who works at Facebook, observing that most people there also maintain a separate LinkedIn profile because they want to keep their personal and professional lives separate." Given how easy is to track down someones' Facebook profile given his LinkedIn profile (and the other way around), I see no sense in this reasoning. Different "profiles", accounts, blogs, etc. form a kind of graph - they are usually connected one to another (often the connection is by google'ing up something) and it's really hard to keep them disjoint without special effort. It's easy to find someone's Facebook account from LinkedIn name, then google up his blog via e-mail address he shared on Facebook, then google up something else via the nick-name found on that blog, etc. The question always is, if someone cares to do that.
  - ghaff 15y ago
    There's often value to segregating different content/"lives"/etc. even if you aren't keeping one hidden or secret from the other. A lot of people with whom I have some sort of professional connection aren't necessarily very interested in my hobbies etc. I see it more about making at least a modest effort not to feed every one of my connections, who I know in a wide variety of different contexts, the same information stream.
    - TeMPOraL 15y ago
      Right, I see how it makes sense in terms of filtering relevant information. Thanks.
  - tincholio 15y ago
    I'm on both FB and LinkedIn, but my provacy settings in FB pretty much prevent anyone from seeing my FB profile without friending me. I have no interest in having any (or most, in any case) of my LinkedIn contacts see whatever BS I post on FB. The same applies in the other direction.
- david_a_r_kemp 15y ago
  Exactly - sometimes I'm happy for sites to know who am I, what toothpaste I like, etc, or for them to try to sell me stuff I might like. However, what I don't want is a tracking beacon, where one provider (Facebook spring to mind) track all my activity on the web, and provide slices of that to other sites.
TeMPOraL 15y ago
A really nice infographic. I like the design, especially the Facebook logo progressbar (near the bottom, "70% of Facebook users...").
robertskmiles 15y ago
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.
shii 15y ago
Original source without the blogspam from a new user: http://namesake.com/blog/2011/05/namesake/are-you-who-you-say-you-are/ http://namesake.com/blog/2011/05/namesake/are-you-who-you-sa...
zipdog 15y ago
We could turn this question from the individual as themselves to the individual within an institution: for example an executive at Sony or a government official. Given the harassment Anonymous has given to Sony execs, its not surprising that there's a certain invisible wall between the rest of the world and those in privileged positions. I guess anonymity of everyday activitists is a one way to redress that.
- nooneelse 15y ago
  From your first paragraph, I thought you were about to turn this question toward something a bit different about the issue of transparency into institutions. For instance, why, after say a time period t (set by reasoning about the particular context, allowing for the maintenance of competitive advantages, etc.), shouldn't people outside of an institution be able to see internal records of how decisions (and thus perhaps very important mistakes or triumphs) were made? Surely the information has utility to the public, if only for historical reasons. If an institution is unwilling to allow that, then hypocrisy threatens when they would deny individuals in other institutions (even if it is just a social discussion group) the same right to privacy about how internal affairs are conducted.
terio 15y ago
Of course both anonymity and transparency are needed. The need for transparency is obvious in many scenarios. Anonymity is more contentious. Some people would love to avoid it completely. For example, I just came back from Spain and I saw a debate, which was none after all, on TV about the need to identify everybody to prevent slander. I firmly believe that anonymity is in many cases the only tool to express oneself, like when power asymmetries or divergence from social conventions make such an expression extremely expensive. Anonymity is fundamental for democracy. If it was not, there would be no secret voting. Other examples in which anonymity is obviously required are when you need an honest opinion which could be affected by power asymmetry (rate your professor, give your employer some feedback, etc); when the subject matter requires privacy (sexual behavior poll); and so on. Dealing with anonymity in the internet is not easy. The usual problems are slander, low quality content, trolls, spam, etc. [Shameless plug ahead] That is part of our mission at spottiness.com. We allow anonymous users to send messages that remain posted in our web site. We guarantee the quality of the content of the messages, and although there is no way to fend off slander from the beginning, the site offers tools to fight back.
- Silhouette 15y ago
  I think several of your anti-anonymity examples are flawed. For example, if voting in elections were truly anonymous, anyone could vote many times over. In practice, they know very well who has voted, as they must to make sure the election is properly conducted. What they can't do is associate how someone voted with that person. (Except that actually they often can, because in many electoral systems the ballot papers are numbered and they can in theory figure out who got which paper. You are protected in this case only by the separation of the electoral register-ballot paper index from the ballot paper-vote cast connection, making it another excellent example of how sharing limited data with independent parties can be fine but combining that data in the hands of a single party can have unintended consequences.)
  - terio 15y ago
    If you are part of a big enough group, and your ballot is not traceable to you, your vote is essentially anonymous even when the authority can determine for sure that you voted. I agree that voting may be flawed in cases. Electronic voting is particularly vulnerable.
bugsy 15y ago
Infographic is pretty but misleading propaganda that promotes its left column. It does indicate "advertisers" win at the bottom, but fails to mention stalkers, totalitarian governments, corporate power in general, and Zuckerberg and his investors in particular benefit from the total internet surveillance tracking which Zuckerberg cynically calls "integrity". Having a corporation track all your visits, readings and posts on the internet such as Facebook is trying to establish, and to be able to accurately link it to your identity, is about power control and money, and not to your benefit. It is such an unpleasant possibility that expert PR firms plant absurd infographics and stories every day to promote this agenda and pay armies to downvote or otherwise disenfranchise all who question the plan. The propaganda is working as we see here in this discussion all the people now have bought in and are promoting corporate surveillance and control of lives as if it is a good thing in any way whatsoever.
cosgroveb 15y ago
"Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity" It's been said before I'm sure but I don't need Zuckerberg lecturing me on integrity.
AliAdams 15y ago
I remember hearing a talk by Philip Zimbardo, one of the main figures in the Stanford Prison Experiment. He concluded that 'evil' behavior is a product of a combination of: 1) Mindlessly taking the first small step (eg Milgrim Experiment - the first 45volts couldn't be felt) 2) Dehumanization of others (giving them numbers in a prison) 3) De-individualisation of self (anonymity) 4) Diffusion of personal responsibility (saying a higher authority takes responsibility) 5) Blind obedience to authority 6) Uncritical conformity to group norms ('Everyone else is doing it') 7) Passive tolerance of Evil through Inactions and/or Indifference 8) New or unfamiliar situations (default actions don't apply so morality can become disengaged) If you take this in the context of anonymity online, a substantial number of these factors are heavily involved(2,3,4 and potentially 1,7&8). Anonymity has its advantages, but the encouragement of it diffuses people's responsibility, potentially encourages 'evil' action, and has subsequently risk of escalation... I think my vote has to be transparency. TED talk link: http://www.ted.com/talks/philip_zimbardo_on_the_psychology_of_evil.html http://www.ted.com/talks/philip_zimbardo_on_the_psychology_o...
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- bugsy 15y ago
  False argument. De-individualisation of self is not anonymity. You are misrepresenting Zimbardo. Zimbardo would note that the tracking and surveillance we are talking about is the sort of thing that leads to atrocities.
  - AliAdams 15y ago
    Dehumanisation could be arguably not as applicable as some of the others but it isn't difficult to see parallels between a 'number in a prison' and an avatar; In a forum, the person can address the avatar without thought of the individual (human) behind it. I don't think my point was anything to do with surveillance. It is an interesting thought that Zimbardo would draw that conclusion though.

My vote goes for pseudonymity. It has the advantages of transparency (such as reputation) but also the advantages of anonymity (such as to allow expression of less popular opinions without repercussions).

Silhouette 15y ago

I think this is a false dichotomy. In reality, your life is not either an open book or a closed one, and you can choose how much personal information of what type you share with whom. The problems usually start, IMHO, when others are allowed to make that choice for you. This can be direct, as with all the modern tracking technologies and personal information that businesses try to collect about you even if they don't really need it, but it can also be more subtle, for example where social networking sites can build up a profile on you based on information implied by your relationships, or where information from sources you might expect to be independent is aggregated and available for data mining by a single entity. It also cuts both ways, if you wanted to share certain things but for some reason were prevented from doing so, leaving others with incomplete or out-of-date information even though you were willing to share that kind of data with them. I think the more serious problem here is that this is a Pandora's box problem. Once your life is out in the open, there is no way to put it back, but the consequences are not always immediately obvious. Perhaps as a society we should grow up and learn not to evaluate people based on isolated data or out-of-context incidents that we find out about their past, but as any politician, insurance company or judge can tell you, that's not going to happen any time soon. It's probably a generational shift if it's even possible at all. In the meantime, an entire generation are growing up sharing their lives on Facebook and Twitter and being physically tracked via their mobile devices and travel smartcards and logging every purchase/refund they ever made with credit/debit/loyalty cards. It's only a matter of time before "bad candidates" don't even get their CVs read because the employer's automated background checks picked up a black flag, "bad customers" (who expect the product/service they paid for and complain if they don't get it) see their consumer rights eroded by the power of the database, "bad clients" can't get useful or even legally required insurance because their profile fits a high risk group, and so on. These trends are already well established, but as Pastor Niemöller explained, first they came for the communists and I was not a communist... An amusing anecdote to close with: just a few hours ago, I read a comment by someone who works at Facebook, observing that most people there also maintain a separate LinkedIn profile because they want to keep their personal and professional lives separate. Apparently Zuckerberg hires a lot of people who, in his judgement, have a "lack of integrity".

TeMPOraL 15y ago
"just a few hours ago, I read a comment by someone who works at Facebook, observing that most people there also maintain a separate LinkedIn profile because they want to keep their personal and professional lives separate." Given how easy is to track down someones' Facebook profile given his LinkedIn profile (and the other way around), I see no sense in this reasoning. Different "profiles", accounts, blogs, etc. form a kind of graph - they are usually connected one to another (often the connection is by google'ing up something) and it's really hard to keep them disjoint without special effort. It's easy to find someone's Facebook account from LinkedIn name, then google up his blog via e-mail address he shared on Facebook, then google up something else via the nick-name found on that blog, etc. The question always is, if someone cares to do that.
- ghaff 15y ago
  There's often value to segregating different content/"lives"/etc. even if you aren't keeping one hidden or secret from the other. A lot of people with whom I have some sort of professional connection aren't necessarily very interested in my hobbies etc. I see it more about making at least a modest effort not to feed every one of my connections, who I know in a wide variety of different contexts, the same information stream.
  - TeMPOraL 15y ago
    Right, I see how it makes sense in terms of filtering relevant information. Thanks.
- tincholio 15y ago
  I'm on both FB and LinkedIn, but my provacy settings in FB pretty much prevent anyone from seeing my FB profile without friending me. I have no interest in having any (or most, in any case) of my LinkedIn contacts see whatever BS I post on FB. The same applies in the other direction.
david_a_r_kemp 15y ago
Exactly - sometimes I'm happy for sites to know who am I, what toothpaste I like, etc, or for them to try to sell me stuff I might like. However, what I don't want is a tracking beacon, where one provider (Facebook spring to mind) track all my activity on the web, and provide slices of that to other sites.

TeMPOraL 15y ago

A really nice infographic. I like the design, especially the Facebook logo progressbar (near the bottom, "70% of Facebook users...").

robertskmiles 15y ago

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.

shii 15y ago

Original source without the blogspam from a new user: http://namesake.com/blog/2011/05/namesake/are-you-who-you-say-you-are/ http://namesake.com/blog/2011/05/namesake/are-you-who-you-sa...

zipdog 15y ago

We could turn this question from the individual as themselves to the individual within an institution: for example an executive at Sony or a government official. Given the harassment Anonymous has given to Sony execs, its not surprising that there's a certain invisible wall between the rest of the world and those in privileged positions. I guess anonymity of everyday activitists is a one way to redress that.

nooneelse 15y ago
From your first paragraph, I thought you were about to turn this question toward something a bit different about the issue of transparency into institutions. For instance, why, after say a time period t (set by reasoning about the particular context, allowing for the maintenance of competitive advantages, etc.), shouldn't people outside of an institution be able to see internal records of how decisions (and thus perhaps very important mistakes or triumphs) were made? Surely the information has utility to the public, if only for historical reasons. If an institution is unwilling to allow that, then hypocrisy threatens when they would deny individuals in other institutions (even if it is just a social discussion group) the same right to privacy about how internal affairs are conducted.

terio 15y ago

Of course both anonymity and transparency are needed. The need for transparency is obvious in many scenarios. Anonymity is more contentious. Some people would love to avoid it completely. For example, I just came back from Spain and I saw a debate, which was none after all, on TV about the need to identify everybody to prevent slander. I firmly believe that anonymity is in many cases the only tool to express oneself, like when power asymmetries or divergence from social conventions make such an expression extremely expensive. Anonymity is fundamental for democracy. If it was not, there would be no secret voting. Other examples in which anonymity is obviously required are when you need an honest opinion which could be affected by power asymmetry (rate your professor, give your employer some feedback, etc); when the subject matter requires privacy (sexual behavior poll); and so on. Dealing with anonymity in the internet is not easy. The usual problems are slander, low quality content, trolls, spam, etc. [Shameless plug ahead] That is part of our mission at spottiness.com. We allow anonymous users to send messages that remain posted in our web site. We guarantee the quality of the content of the messages, and although there is no way to fend off slander from the beginning, the site offers tools to fight back.

Silhouette 15y ago
I think several of your anti-anonymity examples are flawed. For example, if voting in elections were truly anonymous, anyone could vote many times over. In practice, they know very well who has voted, as they must to make sure the election is properly conducted. What they can't do is associate how someone voted with that person. (Except that actually they often can, because in many electoral systems the ballot papers are numbered and they can in theory figure out who got which paper. You are protected in this case only by the separation of the electoral register-ballot paper index from the ballot paper-vote cast connection, making it another excellent example of how sharing limited data with independent parties can be fine but combining that data in the hands of a single party can have unintended consequences.)
- terio 15y ago
  If you are part of a big enough group, and your ballot is not traceable to you, your vote is essentially anonymous even when the authority can determine for sure that you voted. I agree that voting may be flawed in cases. Electronic voting is particularly vulnerable.

bugsy 15y ago

Infographic is pretty but misleading propaganda that promotes its left column. It does indicate "advertisers" win at the bottom, but fails to mention stalkers, totalitarian governments, corporate power in general, and Zuckerberg and his investors in particular benefit from the total internet surveillance tracking which Zuckerberg cynically calls "integrity". Having a corporation track all your visits, readings and posts on the internet such as Facebook is trying to establish, and to be able to accurately link it to your identity, is about power control and money, and not to your benefit. It is such an unpleasant possibility that expert PR firms plant absurd infographics and stories every day to promote this agenda and pay armies to downvote or otherwise disenfranchise all who question the plan. The propaganda is working as we see here in this discussion all the people now have bought in and are promoting corporate surveillance and control of lives as if it is a good thing in any way whatsoever.

cosgroveb 15y ago

"Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity" It's been said before I'm sure but I don't need Zuckerberg lecturing me on integrity.

AliAdams 15y ago

I remember hearing a talk by Philip Zimbardo, one of the main figures in the Stanford Prison Experiment. He concluded that 'evil' behavior is a product of a combination of: 1) Mindlessly taking the first small step (eg Milgrim Experiment - the first 45volts couldn't be felt) 2) Dehumanization of others (giving them numbers in a prison) 3) De-individualisation of self (anonymity) 4) Diffusion of personal responsibility (saying a higher authority takes responsibility) 5) Blind obedience to authority 6) Uncritical conformity to group norms ('Everyone else is doing it') 7) Passive tolerance of Evil through Inactions and/or Indifference 8) New or unfamiliar situations (default actions don't apply so morality can become disengaged) If you take this in the context of anonymity online, a substantial number of these factors are heavily involved(2,3,4 and potentially 1,7&8). Anonymity has its advantages, but the encouragement of it diffuses people's responsibility, potentially encourages 'evil' action, and has subsequently risk of escalation... I think my vote has to be transparency. TED talk link: http://www.ted.com/talks/philip_zimbardo_on_the_psychology_of_evil.html http://www.ted.com/talks/philip_zimbardo_on_the_psychology_o...

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
bugsy 15y ago
False argument. De-individualisation of self is not anonymity. You are misrepresenting Zimbardo. Zimbardo would note that the tracking and surveillance we are talking about is the sort of thing that leads to atrocities.
- AliAdams 15y ago
  Dehumanisation could be arguably not as applicable as some of the others but it isn't difficult to see parallels between a 'number in a prison' and an avatar; In a forum, the person can address the avatar without thought of the individual (human) behind it. I don't think my point was anything to do with surveillance. It is an interesting thought that Zimbardo would draw that conclusion though.