Whenever a government wants to justify its latest intrusion into people’s electronic privacy, it usually does so by appeal to one of the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse. Membership of this prestigious group is a little ill-defined, but the usual formulation is that it is made up of terrorists, pedophiles, drug dealers and organized criminals. As no one could possibly be in favor of any of these groups - so the logic goes - the government is justified in proposing whatever measures it wants to deal with them.
In recent years, the four have been joined by a fifth, copyright pirates. This is a harder sell because while most people aren’t pedophiles or terrorists, you have to look quite hard before finding someone who has never downloaded music or movies. People who might not blink when you tell them that you need to read everyone’s email to protect us all against Osama bin Laden and the international pedophile conspiracy are not quite so ready to believe that extreme measures are needed to deal with everyone who downloaded an illegal copy of “Born this Way”.
Now the five have been joined by a sixth and it is … wait for it … Internet trolls.
Randi Zuckerberg, sister of Mark, has recently declared that online anonymity “has to go away”. The reason? Antisocial behavior on line. If everyone were forced to use their real name, there’d be no more cyber-bullying and no more trolls. Apparently, Internet trolling is now a threat of the same order of magnitude as terrorism and child molesting, which is either very bad or very good news, depending on how you interpret it.
Facebook isn’t alone in calling for anonymity to be stripped away. Eric Schmidt of Google has also proposed an end to anonymity as a cure for the ills of the Internet. Schmidt actually goes further than Zuckerberg, predicting that a ‘verified name service’ will eventually be required to protect against ‘asynchronous threats’ (the Horsemen, presumably) and calling for ‘true transparency and no anonymity’. And Google’s newly-launched Plus service has recently lost some of its shine after a ham-fisted attempt to enforce a ‘real names’ policy.
While I would be the last person to question the truth of John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, I have some doubts about these proposals. For one thing, as any child can tell you, lack of anonymity has never been an obstacle to real world bullies. For another, short of the Orwellian ‘verified name service’ proposed by Mr Schmidt, it will always be possible to circumvent attempts to force users to use their ‘real names’. For still another, it’s pretty much certain that all this transparency is only going to flow one way. It will be individuals who are required to live by Mr Schmidt’s rules of ‘true transparency and no anonymity’. Governments and corporations, as ever, will be exempt.
Defenders of privacy have pointed out that while trolls and bullies may shelter behind anonymity, so too do opponents of repressive governments, political activists, corporate whistleblowers and battered wives. And so do ‘ordinary’ users: in a world of ‘total transparency’ where every utterance can be tied to a name and a real-world identity, how many people would dare to post so much as a bad restaurant review or a dissenting opinion? There’s no shortage of people, on the Internet or off it, who are willing to lash out against anyone who disagrees with them or calls them out on their own bad behavior. Anonymity might indeed facilitate misbehavior online, but to a still greater extent it protects us against the thugs and the bullies. (A friend of mine recently told me that she wants to create a Facebook account for her young daughter, using a fake name and an untraceable email address. Why? Because she sees a fake identity as the only effective way to protect the girl from cyber-bullying).
So why do the Zuckerbergs and the Schmidts of this world want to strip it away? It’s not that they’re unaware of the value, even the necessity of anonymity online. It’s not that they really believe that ‘real names’ or ‘total transparency’ are useful or that they could be enforced without state control over the Internet so pervasive and intrusive that it would make the RFP for the Total Information Awareness project look like an EFF ‘best-practices’ document. They’re too smart to drink that particular Kool-Aid.
The various interested parties who have decided that online anonymity and privacy must die always claim that such measures are necessary to ‘protect’ us (as far as I can remember, none of them have ever taken the time to ask us if we want to be protected). But that isn’t really what’s at stake. For companies like Google and Facebook, your real identity is a salable commodity: clinching that would put the capstone on the vast information-gathering exercise that has been sold to us as ‘social networking’. Simply put, the end to anonymity serves their interests.
Not ours.
