Anonymity And Privacy: Two Endangered Species

"The mission of the company [Facebook] is to make the world more open"
- Mark Zuckerberg (CEO of Facebook)

As social networks grow in popularity and take deeper root into the social fabric, many people have embraced Mark Zuckerberg's message of sharing. Some knowingly, while others begrudgingly to stay connected within newly emerging social media. Whichever camp you belong to, one thing is clear. There are much less anonymity and privacy on the internet today than 10 years ago.


Are We Sharing Too Much?

Thankfully There Are Many Jae Kim's Around
But What Social Network Knows About Me Is Frightening

If you are unsure how much information you are sharing, one way to find out is Google yourself. But as we talked about, Google is still struggling to fully integrate social into its search engine, and unless you are a public figure, Google will bury your information in its mountain of search results. Better way to search is Spokeo. Spokeo pieces together all public social network information and create demographic report of who you are.

Another is using youropenbook.org as I covered earlier. It searches publicly shared status updates and displays them in chronological order using nothing but Facebook API. Remember that it's not your privacy setting that matters, but privacy settings of the page where you write to. For example, if you are writing to your friend's wall, and he has default share-with-everyone privacy setting, your status update is open to everyone.


If You Don't Feel Like Sharing, Government Will Help

Just 5 days ago, it was uncovered that FBI is seeking to expand Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) so as to mandate all US telecommunication carriers to provide a way to wiretap all communication including encrypted traffic. With US government leading the pack, United Arab Emirates (UAE), India, and Indonesia have already threatened to ban Blackberry use. Blackberry is targeted because of its end-to-end secure encryption where Blackberry Enterprise Server encrypts messages to Blackberry device. For the time being, UAE and India have extended the deadline for Blackberry ban to take effect to next Jan, but don't expect US government to lead by example in advocating for "secure" flow of information.

Barry Schnitt, Director of Policy Communication at Facebook
Commenting on Eric Schmidt Impersonation Incident

Facebook Doesn't Want Anonymous Users

If you've been following this blog, you'll know there have been many fake and anonymously created Facebook accounts just until a couple of weeks ago. But thanks to Michael Arrington impersonating Eric Schmidt on Facebook, Facebook is now visibly stepping up their combat against fake accounts. All of the fake accounts that were reported earlier in my blog seem to have been taken offline.

Barry Schnitt, Policy Communication Director at Facebook, made it clear on TechCrunch site that Facebook intends to move to real identity based social network.


"Who Watches The Watchmen?"

All these points to one thing: Anonymity and privacy are becoming two endangered species. But should we care? After all using real identity and sharing more will be good for society as a whole? Wouldn't real identity lead to lesser internet trolls, lesser downmodding, and lesser bullying because people are now taking responsibility of their deeds on the net?

True. I agree with all these points. I do see clear benefits of introducing real identity into social network and the internet in general. But who watches the watchmen?

If we have learned any lesson from early 20's century experiment with Totalitarianism, it would be that absolute power corrupts absolutely. Making all information public and leaving no room for us to be anonymous and private will be a very dangerous proposition because there will be no balance of checks and balances against entities that watches over us. We all know everyone is capable of making mistakes; governments and authorities are no exception. If we allow every information to be known about us, we'll be enslaved by the information not be enriched by them.

We'll have to strike the balance between private life (anonymity and privacy) and public life (identity, openness, and social responsibility). That applies to social networks and the internet as well.

So who's going to counter balance Facebook? Well, so far we have 4chan defending anonymity. Any one care to join?