Do you need anonymity over the internet?
Posted on April 18, 2008 | Categorized under Internet
Life is full of coincidences! Just after having a personal experience with phishing attack, I happened to land up to a talk by Dr. David Cheriton (Professor, Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, Stanford). The talk was about concerns with the internet as a reliable platform; and as you might guess, it was mainly focused on security issues - with anonymity being a prominent one!
Except face-to-face, any other form of communication is vulnerable to anonymity and so is communication over the internet. Then shouldn’t we just live with it - like we live with anonymous letters or phone calls? Well, we won’t be able to say so innocently after looking at some numbers and facts - among the total of about 6.5 billion people over this planet, more than 1.3 billion are connected by the internet between them! And this number is growing faster; it’s already 2.5 times more than it was in year 2000! Perhaps, the more concerning fact is that, anyone can publish any kind of information (text/media) over it and everyone else of those 1.3 billion (minus 1) is possibly exposed to it — like an easily writable and globally readable, huge white board!
Now, it’s a fact that anonymity encourages freedom of expression, especially while expressing thoughts over controversial and not-so-freely-discussed (or may be embarrassing) topics. For example, to express opinions against a repressive authority - say a government - people would certainly seek anonymity. Free discussions related to some subjects - like sex problems - are not appreciated in many restrained communities and so people may desire anonymity to get over those social/cultural restrictions. People may seek anonymity when talking about non-controversial topics as well — usually to hide their ignorance about a subject or simply to seek unbiased input from others. And the internet, being an universal communication platform, is expected to encourage free sharing of thoughts and feelings.
Alright, so far so good. But there is a not-so-bright side to this equation too. Spamming - the most irritating side-effect of anonymity. About 96% of internet traffic is estimated as unsolicited today; and this percentage is growing at a high speed! The straight consequence is that people don’t trust the internet anymore. It also makes finding relevant and useful information hell lot of difficult. Well, although being a pain in neck, spamming could be ignored to certain extent but what about a completely dark side - which can have highly devastating consequences than mere irritation? Anonymity is equally exploitable by bad guys out there to perform illegal and antisocial activities — and that is without any fear of getting traced. Finding source is really hard over the internet due to anonymity and the evil has many doors to leave no evidences here. Fraud emails seeking your bank account credentials, publishing of hatred and inappropriate content (that can instigate social bursts in sensitive communities), and communications with the sole intent of seeking accomplices and further to commit crimes, can not be simply ignored, can we?
In fact, on comparison, dangers of anonymity clearly over-weigh benefits. Moreover, anonymity is not really required or helpful to address the issues those we mentioned in its favor before. For example, anonymity today allows an user to register for a web service (e.g. an email account) without any genuine identifying credentials. So nobody in the world can be sure about real owner of an email account. In case, any criminal activity is detected on that account, there is no way to trace back to the owner. Perhaps, a better alternative here is pseudo-anonymity. A web service provider (the one providing email service in this example) should be asked to make sure that it has all the genuine identification information before granting a service account to anyone. Now, they can, of course, allow the user to choose a fake-name for communication purpose only. This way, the web user can be traced in extreme circumstances, otherwise he is free to enjoy his anonymity.
Now pseudo-anonymity may not be useful when talking against an influential authority like a government, as they can force the web service provider to reveal identity of the pseudo-anonymous user. But the question is, how effective is a revolution when it’s backed up by anonymous revolutionaries? History confirms that people have to sacrifice their well-being in order to make a drastic social/political change; they are required to stand up and speak up loud to make that change. Who is (and how much) going to value an anonymous message in such circumstances, anyways?
With great capability comes great responsibility. The internet has become so powerful a medium of communication and perhaps, now it’s a time to think about it’s responsibilities.
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