anonymusings

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 for it — then there might be more initiatives dedicated to doing so.

This makes me exceedingly uncomfortable. I don’t want anonymity to be a luxury for the rich or the technologically savvy.

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 have to make embarrassing phone calls to prospective weekend houseguests, suffer nightmares about teeming infestations, and rack up massive drycleaning bills. In between bouts of hyperventilation, I captured the beetle in a Ziplock bag, snapped a dozen photos of it, and started up Google Image Search to see if in fact this intruder was the harbinger of gross news. (It wasn’t.)

 As with many of my Googlings, I fell down the rabbit hole of tangential but compelling side searches. Could bedbugs lay eggs in your eyeballs or ears? (Unclear.) Can other insects do so? (Yes.) What does one do if one suspects an earwig or a cockroach has invaded one’s ear? (STOP ASKING QUESTIONS ONLINE AND GO TO THE DOCTOR.) That latter line of questioning fascinated me: folks online were incredibly candid about asking questions that one might not otherwise ask a neighbor, friend, or casual passerby. Nor would one share with polite company the various implements used in coaxing a cockroach or other insect out of one’s orifices (Castor oil, in case you’re wondering). Even I had turned to Google with my entomological crisis before I called my friends — – even those that I knew had faced off with these skin-munching critters before. I was so afraid of confronting any latent stigma associated with bedbugs that an online search seemed preferable.

 John Suler calls this phenomenon dissociative anonymity: the idea that you can operate in a space without any affiliation with your real name. Not only does this allow you a sense of safety – that is, the ability to ask questions freely without any fear of stigma from others – but it also allows you to convince yourself that the phenomena you discuss or search online does not really relate to you. Dissociative anonymity cuts two ways. The first is what Suler calls benign disinhibition. Benign disinhibition explains why you feel okay workshopping your Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan fiction ideas on a message board, or sharing your deepest wishes and fears in a comment thread. Benign disinhibition explains why many loosen up online much more than they do in face-to-face interactions. Suler explains that this type of disinhibition “indicates an attempt to understand and explore oneself, to work through problems and find new ways of being.”

And then there’s toxic disinhibition, also known as The Reason That YouTube Comments Make Me Disappointed in Humanity. Toxic disinhibition, as Suler sums it up, explains why hateful, harsh, and grotesque commentary so frequently emerges in anonymous or pseudonymous spaces.

De-linking one’s identity from one’s behavior certainly lets people experiment – but that experimentation isn’t always pretty. I’m honestly not sure if online anonymity encourages more benign or toxic disinhibition, though I do understand that many calls for banning anonymity online are premised on an understanding that the repercussions from toxic disinhibition ruin the sandbox for everyone. What I am sure of, however, is that removing the possibility of dissociative anonymity troubles me. For me, that is one beauty of the Internet: the ability to play and to experiment, to question and to ask, to learn without shame. Dissociative anonymity seems to be the engine behind at least some of that – and modes of linking fixed identity and behavior online would threaten that anonymity.

Of course, one could argue that the world was an exceptionally playful, experimental, question-friendly space well before there was cyberspace-enabled dissociative anonymity. That is true. But the online space is becoming eminently more trackable — that is, it’s easy for cookies or talented folks or even untalented folks to figure out exactly where you’ve been and what you’ve been up to online — and permanently traceable. The space in which you play, experiment, and ask questions can now be preserved indefinitely, and often out of your control.

To me, this strengthens the case for dissociative anonymity alive in the online space – and not just the perception of it, but actual anonymity – for that reason. But is there a way to keep toxic disinhibition — the type that goes beyond disappointing comments and into actual harrassment — from growing alongside?

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 gestalt-image of warships, making it hard to discern their directionality, size, and orientation. Likewise, the goal of CV Dazzle is to break apart the gestalt of a face, or object, and make it undetectable to computer vision algorithms, in particular face detection.

Sounds great! I’m just not sure that this look is office-appropriate just yet, though:

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 collection is well-matched by private-sector collection. Facebook, which uses face recognition by default to scan all photos uploaded to its site, states that its users uploaded more than 300 million photos every day in the three months ending on March 31, 2012. And Face.com, which developed Facebook’s face recognition tools and was recently acquired by the company, stated in March that it had indexed 31 billion face images…Private companies are using biometric identification for everything from prevening unauthorized access to computers and corporate facilities to preventing unauthorized access to the gym

Testimony of Jennifer Lynch to the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law (July 18, 2012).

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 via the defamation and cyberSLAPP legal universe, where chatter about anonymous speech revolves around whether we should be revealing the identities of commenters who would probably rather not be unmasked.

And so I tend to think of anonymity as deeply related to traceability — a desire to remain anonymous, in my mind, is often associated with willful choices to conceal tracks that circle back to the Named You. But this logic lends itself so easily to the public damnation of Anonymity = Bad. It tracks the anti-privacy logic: if you haven’t done anything wrong, you have nothing to hide. And that’s simply just not the case. As Terry Eagleton writes in the London Review of Books:

A work may come unsigned because who wrote it is not thought to be all that important. Some medieval art is a case in point. What does it matter who is praising God, as long as he gets praised? The oldest form of literary anonymity is divine inspiration. There is only one author, and which mundane mouthpiece he selects to reveal his glory is neither here nor there.

It’s so easy to infer purpose from anonymity. What’s terrifying is that our assumptions of why one would desire anonymity dictates so much of how we receive and frame policy choices around that form of speech. The truth is that there really are a thousand reasons not to sign your name on something you create — laziness, experimentation, privacy, safety concerns, reputation, forgetfulness, or even a desire to hide. Who knows?