An unpopular opinion on anonymity and pseudonymity

This topic keeps on giving and, even though I’m a big proponent of anonymity and pseudonymity online, there are things I need to tell all of you. Be aware that you might find my tone aggressive and take it personally. If you do take it personally, I’ll have to say to you what someone else told me: “I’m sorry you feel this way”.

First of all, most of you don’t give a damn about anonymity and pseudonymity online, and you don’t really care about freedom of expression. What matters to you is the “impressive” pseudonymity of your own online persona (in other words, your online trademark or brandname), which you can’t do without; without it, not even you would bother to read your own writings. Now, let’s suppose for a moment that a social network that really allowed freedom of expression and pseudonymity actually existed. You wouldn’t use it. What most of you people want is a medium in which you, and only you, are pseudonymous, while everyone else is transparent, especially to you. How narcissistic is that?

As for the NSA, the GCHQ, the Mossad and whatever other secret services crop up in the discourse on privacy, let me tell you one thing: They don’t give a flying fuck about you. You can bet your bottom dollar that not a single millisecond of your online or offline existence occupies any space in their permanent storage. To them, you are useful only as some sort of statistic reference.

The same goes for your “sensitive private data”; they don’t give a flying fuck about them either. Unless you think you’re the only brony with a massive whale-like penis equipped with Prince Albert piercings chained to your pierced nipples. Or unless you think you’re the only Mormon who faps to photos of iguanas mating. Or unless you think you’re the only SL-famous fashionista, blogger, or what have you.

Facebook doesn’t care much about your name, either. What Facebook doesn’t want is to become a medium that allows freedom of expression and pseudonymity. In which case, should anyone of you get in their radar, their “delete” button is only half an inch away from their finger, so you can be an example to others. And you can be sure this approach works astonishingly well for Facebook.

If, however, any of these “fine people” decide, for whatever reason, to actually give a fuck about you, you can rest assured they’ll nab you, no matter what pseudonym you choose to post your stuff on social media. Even if you’re using your real name. Let’s say you live in a country whose voters were so criminally irresponsible that they elected an alt-right government. Such a government will do everything to suppress democratic voices. But they won’t need to send a black Volga to your home to kidnap you and have you tortured in a Police Department – not that they’re above it. They have “softer” ways of dealing with “annoying” people.

Usually, in collaboration with Facebook’s local content moderation contractors, they’ll harass you if they decide to target you (informed, of course, by a well-trained troll army); the content moderation contractors will start by twisting the ToS and Community Standards to make your experience on the platform as miserable as possible, with one disciplinary action against you after the other. And don’t bother appealing, it won’t matter. That’s state-sponsored targeted abusive social media content moderation. And you have enabled it, by enabling Facebook’s stranglehold on your online social interactions. And don’t think for a single moment Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg give a shit about how their ToS and CS are misinterpreted locally, since they don’t stand to lose any money.

But really, the only ones who really give a fuck about you all the time are the behavioural marketing analytics guys. But their models are so fucked up that, even if they didn’t give a fuck about you, it’d be exactly the same. See the suggested ads that pop up on your Facebook timeline all the time.

No, you are not necessarily spied or snitched upon because you have a nickname. Your nickname is so crappy that it triggers a few hundred thousand algorithms, all over the planet. If your nickname was something like “Jennifer Smith”, you’d have been most likely under the radar. Of if you were a fucking nazi – Facebook always gives them a free pass. Your nickname will only matter to Facebook if someone tells your “friendly”, unaccountable, untransparent local content moderation contractor to blacklist you. But let’s face it, you don’t care that much about using a nickname to express yourself more freely. What you want is a brandname, what you want is a pseudonym, a nom de plume that will differentiate you from the others and bring you more views to boost your ego.

Every language has a finite variety of first and last name combinations. If your chosen pseudonym is significantly different from the norm, you’ll become fodder for the most basic data mining on this planet.

Finally, people have been telling you about the risks from the use of proprietary, non-distributed, unaccountable, untransparent social media providers. So far, you (and even yours truly) have consistently showed you don’t care what they say. And even if you do care, the person next to you doesn’t. And you can’t have a social medium without the “person next to you”.

Shortlink: http://wp.me/p2pUmX-LH

The Master Account proposal revisited

Back in 2009, 18 January to be more exact, Argent Stonecutter filed issue SVC-6212 in Linden Lab’s JIRA for Second Life, proposing a change in the way SL’s user accounts are handled. Right now, account name and user name are effectively the same – even after the discontinuation of last names and the introduction of the kludgy “Resident” last name in their place. Argent suggested (rightly) that username and account name be separated:

SL security would be better, also, if you separated the account and avatar names… so for example instead of logging in as “Argent Stonecutter”, I’d log in as “Argent007” or something that isn’t actually published… and then picked my “Argent Stonecutter” alt from a pulldown.

• Something else for attackers to have to guess.
• Better account management.
• Fewer name-password combinations for users to remember.

Argent’s point was to make log-ins more secure and account management easier. The discussion in the comments is quite interesting, too. Before I came to sit down and blog about this proposal, Ciaran Laval and Inara Pey blogged about it. So, what is that makes this proposal so special that I’m bothering to revisit it and attempt to draw new attention to it?

A scrutiny of Rod Humble’s talk with Draxtor Despres – Part 1

As this month began, renowned machinimist Draxtor Despres aired the seventh instalment of his widely acclaimed series titled “The Drax Files”. In this episode, which was much discussed by many, Draxtor had a talk with Linden Lab CEO Rod Humble. The video, which was 5 minutes long, did not feature the entire discussion – the full transcript was published by Jo Yardley. As I wrote in my own coverage of that episode of “The Drax Files”, it was most interesting to see LL’s CEO to come forward and speak about Second Life, his vision for the virtual world’s future and its place in the IT universe.

Please note that I refer to what was featured in that episode of “The Drax Files” as a “talk” and a “discussion”, deviating even from how I described it in my related post, because, frankly, it’s not a piece of journalism or investigation. It wasn’t designed to be a reportage, it wasn’t conceived as such. Instead, it was more like a presentation – and it’s not like Draxtor himself (who is actually perfectly candid and honest about his work) asked the number or type of questions you’d expect from a journalist. So, for clarity’s sake, I opt now for the terms “conversation”, “discussion” and “talk”.

This means, of course, that several questions that a user of Second Life may have simply were not addressed at all. And some of the claims and figures that Mr. Humble presents us with only serve to raise more questions, even though I readily admit that, on many levels, he seems to have a far better grasp of what Second Life is all about than all previous LL CEOs combined. So, this time, I’m going to base my work on Jo Yardley’s transcript of the full discussion and I’m going to provide some of my own questions – not that I really expect answers, as Linden Lab has a rather peculiar perception of what an interview should be like (i.e. all questions are submitted for prior censorshipvetting and approval and the interviewer is not allowed to sneak a censoredrejected question back into the interview; perhaps LL should look to this particular policy for some of the reasons that the media treat it with such contempt). Like I said, I don’t expect Mr. Humble to answer my questions – but they’re worth asking in public anyway, if only for posterity’s sake.

SL Intellectual Property – Next stop: Paranoia Central

Last time, in an anger-fueled post I decided to touch on a very sensitive and drama-inducing subject: the paranoia that is eating through the minds of many content creators in Second Life. It was quite a few RL years ago (late 2006, in fact; this sort of time interval in Second Life terms amounts to about a century) that the drama around Copybot started to unfold. For a quick and dirty summary, I will point you all to the coverage from CNET, because it is a serious resource, far more serious than the rants of many people on the forums, blogs and discussion boards. According to the content creators protesting against Copybot, it harmed them no end and put their livelihoods at risk, because it would allow everyone to copy their work and resell it.

In my previous post, I mentioned how the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the (conservative) Cato Institute and journalist institutions like Ars Technica and TechDirt  pointed out how the RL content industry presents bogus data to the authorities and the governments in its lobbying attempts (which are more often than not accompanied by melodramatic TV adverts about struggling artists who will become destitute by piracy) to pass pro-censorship “anti-piracy” laws (see HADOPI, SOPA, PIPA, ACTA and CETA). Yes, bogus data. And the U.S. GAO even protested about the content industry not giving them all the data and the methodology they used to come up with these make-believe results and conclusions. Once again, you can have a look at Cato Institute’s article “How Copyright Industries Con Congress” and, of course, the other sources I mentioned in my previous post on this matter.