[PREV - ANON_SALVAGE] [TOP]
INFO_VERITAS
March 19, 2018
November 11, 2018
Think through what's meant by anonymity:
o what variations?
o what are the real problems I want to prevent?
One version of identity: you're a person who lives in public,
everything you say on-line is done under your legal name.
Another: you tell us who you are and we verify that--
but we promise not to tell anyone else.
The site then acts as a reputation server:
everyone knows the handle is associated And this person has
with a single, real person. agreed to a TOS with
firm provisions against
Note: the site could re-verify identities, undisclosed conflicts
say once a year, to minimize issues with of interest.
people giving them away (or stealing them
from the dead and/or inattentive). There's an issue with that,
though: would you trust such
a site to do a good job of
enforcing it's own rules?
If they won't reveal the
true ids, then you can't
check.
Independent auditing firms
with confidentiality rules
might salvage the idea.
One notion: what if you used snail-mail to make
sure you were talking to a person at a particular
physical address? That could make it more difficult
to establish sock-puppet accounts without relying
on credit-card companies..
It could also simplify restricting discussion
privs by geography-- maybe only someone from
District 13 gets to comment on the District
13 race.
Is there a need for additonal laws to protect user accounts?
E.g. what if Walmart pressured it's employees
for account access-- or what if cracker types found
a way to hi-jack people's accounts-- then you could
have IDs verified correctly, the virtual personages
look like they're doing good and useful things,
except for that one time...
Other potential problems: say you get a really good
system of virtual ids quietly tied to meatspace ids,
and it's handled by an agency that everyone trusts...
then someone gets the bright idea of conducting
elections online, one vote per handle.
The case against anonymity is strongest for
moderation privileges. For posting, you
may be able to allow it (ala slashdot),
provided it's regarded as a second-class You could make "anonymous"
citizen-- arguably it should be downplayed posts invisible, unless a
even further than slashdot does. moderator decides they
deserve it.
The for-profit subscription-model might be
salvageable... the trouble there is that
it might add too big a barrier to reaching
a critical mass of volunteers.
I think the Right Way is everyone should
be allowed to read anything that's been
published (no paywall), but you pay for
additional privs, not for "content". Paying to be able to post
comments is one thing I've
(There might be "extra content" seen in use.
of some sort, though... I've
seen some publications try that, Only allow subscribers to
a few freely available articles, moderate?
with most only for paid
subscribers.) Arguably, that feels
backwards though: if you
want to volunteer to do
additional work, you have
to pay us for the priv.
Note:
In many ways, the word "anonymous" has been completely
mangled by places like "slashdot", where *all* of the
accounts are effectively anonymous, but the things
that are called "anonymous" are posted without logging in.
There's some newer terminology-- I first saw it in
use at the New York Times- of "verified". Anyone
and open an account, but if they have some reason
to believe you're who you say you are-- say, you've
paid for a subscription-- they'll label your comments
as having a "verified identity".
Usually, this is what I mean by "non-anonymous":
a payment (possibly nominal) has changed hands
so that the credit card system can be used to
tie your handle to a meat-space ID.
The central purpose of this is to require
a disclosure of conflicts-of-interest,
and to try to make the Terms of Service
agreement enforceable.
This is supposed to guard against using
a dozen employees with hundreds of sock-
puppet accounts pretending to be an
upwelling of popular sentiment.
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