August 2012
12 posts
The Guardian is, like, totally against anonymous...
In a column reeking of them-darned-kids-and-their-darned-Internet antiquarianism, The Guardian’s Jonathan Myerson dubs anonymity a force of “debase[d] debate”:
The web has become a bizarre synthesis of toilet wall and Thomas Paine
Far from being a crucial brick in the wall of free speech, online anonymity debases debate and devalues the national dialogue
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Anonymity as a Market?
Jan Chip Chase’s thought-provoking quote below, CV Dazzle, and the German Pirate Party all prompt me to ask one question:
Should we pursue anonymity as a right, or anonymity as a market solution?
Surely there are people willing to pay for privacy, even total anonymity online. And maybe if companies see a valuable market in providing anonymity — we’ll keep you secret if you pay...
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“When everyone is known by name, the value of being known shifts to the...”
– Jan Chip Chase, “Let’s Agree That I Don’t Know You” (August 26, 2012)
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Orlando Figes and the anonymous poison pen
Although Professor Orlando Figes used anonymity to publish caustic reviews of his peers online, anonymity and the right to sue for libel must be protected, writes Katie Engelhart.
[Note: this post originally appeared on www.freespeechdebate.com, a project of Oxford University.]
The case
In April 2010, a mysterious commenter, writing under the nom de plume “Historian”, began publishing caustic...
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Embarrassing Searches & Dissociative Anonymity
This morning, I saw a tiny, reddish beetle on my windowsill, right next to my bed. My first groggy-eyed thought was: Oh hello, Nature. How are you? Thanks for bringing me a cute little friend!
And then I remembered that this is NEW YORK CITY, which means that any and all small reddish moving dots I see must be under immediate suspicion of being BEDBUGS. And bedbugs – bedbugs!!! – mean that I will...
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Is it still heroic if it's anonymous?
Anonymity = cowardice? = half-way to heroism?
Former Israeli soldiers disclose routine mistreatment of Palestinian children. (via The Guardian). “Most of the soldiers have given testimonies anonymously.”
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“Dr. Arul Chinnaiyan stared at a printout of gene sequences from a man with...”
– Anonymous Medicine. From today’s New York Times.
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FromThe New York Times:
South Korean Court Rejects Online Name Verification Law
“SEOUL, South Korea — In a major victory for free speech activists in South Korea, a top court on Thursday ruled unconstitutional a law that required Internet users to verify their identity before posting comments on major local Web sites. […]
The regulation was adopted amid widespread concern that...
“Now that big data is becoming the norm, we need to build anonymity into our...”
– Swedish Pirate Party MEP Amelia Andersdotter, to Reuters.
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Anonymity: a human right?
If Germany’s especially-litigious Pirate Party has its way, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) will soon be forced to rule on whether anonymity is a human right - or, more specifically, part of the right to private life enshrined under the European Convention on Human Rights.
Reuters reports:
“This latest suit follows a February ruling by Germany’s Federal...
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There once was a word
I’m no linguist. Yet it occurs to me that our discussion of anonymity might benefit from a little phonological injection. The noun “anonymous” comes from the Greek anonymos, or “without name.” But—as the literary scholar Anne Ferry recounts far more thoroughly than I—the English adjective itself was only born in the late 16th century. Then, and for centuries, the word was used sparingly. And its...
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July 2012
7 posts
4 tags
“Whether you want to share sensitive protest footage without exposing the faces...”
– YouTube Announcement, “Face Blurring: When Footage Requires Anonymity,” (July 18, 2012).
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This Is What The Future Looks Like (?!)
Terrified of facial recognition technology? CV Dazzle will help you avoid it. :
CV Dazzle is camouflage from computer vision (CV). It is a form of expressive interference that combines makeup and hair styling (or other modifications) with face-detection thwarting designs.
The name is derived from a type of camouflage used during WWI, called Dazzle, which was used to break apart the...
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Late-night musings: Facial Recognition Technology
A vapid thought:
Could Facebook’s “Tag Suggestions” feature finally catalog of all of my photo-bombs? Because I’m not sure I want to know.
A serious thought:
What I do want to know is to what extent and with what frequency Facebook allows law enforcement to use or to access its data repository, particularly given this:
The scope of government-driven biometrics data...
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Senator Al Franken does not like facial... →
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Traceability and Purpose
ἀνωνυμία, anonymia, meaning “without a name” or “namelessness”.
I rarely think of anonymity as a state of being without a name. As The Historian knows, I immediately conceive of anonymity as a state in which one’s name is obscured — that is, a conscious decision not to use one’s name. Part of that is because I meandered into the Wide World of Anonymity...
“Literature tries to be unsigned.”
– E.M. Forster
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Onward: "The Age of Personality"
In 1930, The Nation magazine ran an article entitled “The Cult of Anonymity.” The piece followed a small group of Parisian writers who had pledged to publish their work without names: “to curb the exploitation of personalities” and to establish “the art as an ideal, not the ego.” A few years earlier, the British novelist E.M Forster’s pamphlet “Anonymity: An Enquiry” had lashed out a professional...
June 2012
3 posts
3 tags
Quote
“Today authorship and authority have become inextricably linked, and literature without a responsible agent identified is like an artifact that turns up in the saleroom lacking a decent provenance. Both anonymity and pseudonymity have become suspect behavior.” - Pat Rogers, New Literary History 33.2 (2002)
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“anonymous: not identified by name; of unknown name. (Oxford English Dictionary)”
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Anonymity is...
In 1995, The U.S. Supreme Court issued a benchmark ruling on anonymous publishing. McIntrye v. Ohio Elections Commission held that an Ohio ban on anonymous campaign literature was unconstitutional. Justice Scalia and Justice Rehnquist dissented. Writing on the case, Scalia argued that anonymity and accountability are antithetical: that anonymity “facilitates wrong by eliminating accountability.”...
May 2012
1 post
2 tags
Welcome!
Two experts: a historian and a lawyer. A single concept: the past and present, the ebbs and flows of “Anonymity.” From the 16th-century rise of pseudonymity, to the 18th century “age of personality,” to the 1930s “cult of anonymity.” From the printing press to Google goggles… One historian and one lawyer weigh in on all things anonymous. Here are our Anonymusings.
