It’s not okay to be tracked so thoroughly that people stop feeling they can explore controversy online
Anonymity is certainly a tool that can be used in dire situations when there are real credible threats and the stakes are high. However it takes a certain type of courage to express oneself freely which would be really nice to see in the majority of all other situations. Instead of exploring controversy anonymously, we should aim as a society to explore it normally and simply build up the intellectual maturity and capacity to tolerate controversy like adults and not children…
You wear a name tag to the pub, or supermarket?
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/14/opinion/bluet...
Being gratuitously anti-social online might also have consequences (your account gets banned), but if creating another anonymous account is free and easy, then the consequences are trivially ignored.
You could make a distinction between anonymity and ease-of-creating-new-accounts, but usually the two are tied together.
In meatspace, people use different modes of identification than just a name, so names aren't as important to figuring out who's who.
Yes, but I don't realize it.
I won't participate in them using my real name, because I once witnessed the mayor of the town doxx and lead a campaign to harass a single mother because she disagreed with the majority party that's run the town for the last 40 years. She got dogpiled on by hundreds of residents for participating in a discussion on Facebook.
It wasn't an isolated incident either, other people have had the same experience and even felt the need to move after it happened because some people took it to an extreme and felt the need to harass them for months afterwards.
Part of the chilling effect is the incentive against pursuing justice in cases like this. The single mother was already publicly targeted and made unsafe, chances are that the public targeting will get even worse if she pursued justice against her harassers.
These same people in power who led this campaign against her have sycophants in the local media who have no problem using their wide reach to smear dissenters like they do every election season, even for minor Board of Ed elections.
I'm glad that you feel secure enough in your position in life that you think you can weather such an attack, but not everyone is so lucky. Implying anyone who needs anonymity is simply holding an unreasonable position is simply not fair.
Neither of us did.
> If you can't stand by a position, maybe you shouldn't air it.
The implication of this is pretty clear.
E.g., this is why true democracy needs secret ballots. Perhaps you and I aren't afraid to vote in public. But a democracy needs everyone to give their honest vote, not only those who have nothing to fear.
Definitely agree. I have my approach to life, the universe, and everything, and it is unreasonable to project my values and whatnot onto others.
Many times, the favor is not returned, though.
Yup :) (1)
Also an online privacy fan with (what probably amounts to) strict views. Eg.: privacy is a bit of a misnomer. It puts the focus on the person who can be wronged. In other crimes, we don't do that. A burglar is not the one whose house was burgled; a robber is not the one who was robbed.
Privacy isn't about me or my rights; it is about other people and limits on theirs. You're not allowed to take other people's money, why should you be allowed to take other people's data?
(1) Aside: I keep rereading the books. I found others that move me more, but I tend to move beyond them. Eddings writings manage to keep entertaining me. Not necessarily high-brow, but definitely entertaining and the entertainment doesn't peter out after the 3rd or so book (all too common in fantasy in my experience).
Last time I played a Rogue in an AD&D game I used Silk as an archetype, and it worked out very nicely.
I tried the Elder Gods series, and it was ... awful. The Redemption of Althalus was readable, but couldn't hold a candle to the other books.
But context is king. The context of that particular quote, is that it came immediately after this:
> I stand by what I say, though my views now may be different to those of previous me and I'm happy to debate that too.
They were clearly talking about themselves, and a rule they apply to themselves.
That said, one of my "cleanup routines" for writing and posting, is I look for instances of "you," and often change it to "I" or "me."
I would have probably written it like so:
> If I can't stand by a position, maybe I shouldn't air it.
BTW: I apply the same philosophy to my own posting.
There's a very valid argument for online (and offline) anonymity, and I don't like the specious "If you aren't doing anything wrong, then you shouldn't have anything to hide." argument.
I just find using that as a fig leaf for trolling and stalking people is rather annoying, as that behavior actually puts the people that really need it, at risk.
Standing up for my Principles can sometimes be quite scary. I've risked losing jobs, for refusing to carry out orders that were unethical, and I am routinely attacked, here (but politely -this is HN, after all), for holding some of the views I hold.
Yes, the context was a switch from first person to second person. The most reasonable and likely interpretation is not that it was an accident, but that the second person was intended to convey a statement about what people in general should do. E.I: "If one can't stand by a position maybe one shouldn't air it."
It is true that there is a trade off between anonymity and culpability, but that doesn't mean we don't need both. To my mind, we need anonymity to protect smaller scale participants and accountability for larger scale participants to limit abuse of power. I don't know how you achieve that in practice.
Its not standing by a decision, its the unknown risk of an adversary using information you thought private against you. Whether its abortion clinics, or prospective employers vetting your background. You won't know which opportunities were missed as a result of something in your record that may have happened 20 years ago. You'll probably think it isn't happening, until it impacts you personally, and then its too late. That's exactly how it happened in East Germany with the wall.
In other words, stand by your position, but also learn when to admit you were wrong.
It's a fundamental tenet of my way of life. I promptly admit when I'm wrong.
I've found the best way to avoid having to make amends, is to not cause the offense, in the first place. I tend to be fairly careful about keeping it in the "I," all the time (but no good deed goes unpunished -I am often told that "I'm making it all about me").
I do find that I get attacked, sometimes, right out of the blue, for stating personal philosophies and/or experiences. My fave is when I am told that something that happened to me "didn't actually happen." I assume that is because it is an inconvenient truth, for others. My experience, dealing with tech industry ageism, is a common fulcrum for that kind of response.
Sometimes, though, I absolutely -do- intend to offend somebody, and in that case I own it.
That's the thing, there are a lot more positions these days that people seem to be unwilling to change.
To bypass the sources of those chilling effects by remaining anonymous may in fact only allow them to grow stronger.
That's okay, as long as you aren't a member of any persecuted minority, and as long as you don't have any interesting political views to share.
It’s fine, for me. I actually know folks that it would not be OK.
I am not giving advice; merely recounting what I have experienced, and the personal choices I have made, based on those experiences.
A small use of privilege but I hope a useful one overall.
Also, what impressed me about the Disqus incident, was how fast it came back with that list.
In the US, at least, true anonymity takes a lot of work. For example, if you own a house, people can use tax records to find out who you are, unless you do what rich people do, and use shell companies. I also own a couple of [small] companies. I maintain a UPS box, because they get a lot of junk mail (and some business junk mail comes to my home address, anyway).
That's just one of hundreds of ways we can be found. Many predate teh Internets Tubes. My mailbox gets stuffed with junk mail. Some of it is quite specific. They use these mechanisms, and have been, for decades. I have known folks in the collections industry. They can find people surprisingly easily. There was one guy who used to be a skip tracer, and he wrote a book called How to Disappear[0]. It's a fairly sobering read (and probably quaintly anachronistic, these days).
The Unabomber actually did it correctly. He only got nailed, once he posted something publicly.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/How-Disappear-Digital-Footprint-Witho...
https://old.reddit.com/r/fatFIRE/comments/l0wd5i/update_to_p...
(This is different than there being a law codified and not being enforced)
But I’m fine with one agency of the federal government having a private database, shareable for some investigations, which is the direction its going
I hope it gets handicapped or repealed
Once, my housemate got junk mail addressed to 'Mr. <firstname> Trout' as a result. He was a trifle annoyed by this but his partner found it hilarious.
If I'd need full privacy, I'd have to add many more levels of security in my daily life that I don't find necessary. I just don't want people (or a SWAT team) to show up at my door because I triggered someone on the internet. That's why I post from multiple different accounts on different platforms. Though, I'm sure, in the future some form of AI will be able to link them all based on writing style and similarity of content of my posts. Guess I'll have to find another way to remain somewhat anonymous then.
> some, very old
> I had sworn were done anonymously
Then if another user registers with the same fingerprint we link the accounts together.
In our case the whole thing is also requiring human moderator input to actually keep the whole thing going though.
(apologies for the level of vague here but I don't believe it's fair to anybody else involved to be less vague - including the user in question, who seemed relatively young and I hope has grown up since)
There is also a premium verson: https://fingerprint.com/
So it might be something else, given the implied age of the comments.
- cookies are temporary. Even 'ever-cookies' wouldn't have survived brower upgrades.
- email, tel : the parent insists having had privacy opsec so reusing those over time would not fit in this view
He worked for Kodak, at that time. I used to have his card, with his smiling mug on it (Kodak used to have picture business cards).
One advantage of having a fairly old and robust online (and offline) ID, is that it actually makes it harder for people to assume your ID, as there is so much "prior art," pointing to your real persona. It makes it fairly easy to short-circuit hijacks.
Of course, it all becomes problematic, if I decide to go around pissing everyone off, or poking bears.
But, if I piss off people that have the willingness and ability to do me harm, they'll find me, anyway.
I don't choose to live a life in a shack in the woods, typing manifestos. I want to be a part of Society, and reap the benefits of participation.
It also helps me to help others. A lot of my life, these days, is around helping others. Hard to do, if I'm hiding in a dumpster.
Happily for me everybody I've seen comment on it laughed it off as "I wonder what happened to make them that angry but I'm sure they deserved it" - with a few exceptions of people I've previously pissed off who basically said "nah, he's an asshole moderator but there's no way he's a paedo".
And, well, sometimes I -am- an asshole, and some of those times I deeply regret. But reputation can be useful in general.
It’s a YC company. My only affiliation is that I’m a customer.
I have a discount code if anyone is interested. I wasn’t sure if I could just paste it in the comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=beyondd
I’m assuming that YC frowns on their funded companies doing unsavory things?
There's a kind of YC culture where they believe nice guys do well [1]. And they're likely biased towards funding nice people. But after they're funded, they don't really have any control over the company.
Only if it leads to unsavory revenue reports.
Maybe ping them?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30605010
Are you sure it’s not an issue on your end Cole?
I don’t foresee changing my stance, for myself. However, I’ve been around long enough to know that the way I see (and do) things does not apply to others.
I would not prescribe my way to others. I’m merely recounting my lived experience, and the personal decisions that I made, based on them.
I learned this, by setting up a Disqus ID. I wanted to comment on a blog post, and started to set up an account.
After I started the process, it came back, with a list of random posts, from around the Internet (and some, very old), and said "Are these yours? If so, would you like to associate them with your account?"
I freaked. Many of them were outright troll comments (I was not always the haloed saint that you see before you) that I had sworn were done anonymously. They came from many different places (including DejaNews). I have no idea how Disqus found them.
Every single one of them was mine. Many, were ones that I had sworn were dead and buried in a deep grave in the mountains.
Needless to say, I do not have a Disqus ID.
Being non-anonymous means that I need to behave myself, online. I come across as a bit of a stuffy bore, but I suspect my IRL persona is that way, as well.
That's OK.