“Anonymity should be the default” doesn’t say what I mean. Sorry to have put it badly. “Defaults” come to us from the software world where shipping software with the right options turned on can make or break a product. It may be that anonymity is the right default option for digital ID management software, but that’s not what I meant. And if it is the right default, it will be due to anonymity’s social, political and personal roles. Those roles are what interest me.
I probably should have said “norm” instead of “default.” In fact, it’s helpful (I think) to put this in moral terms. Philosophers have the useful concept of the prima facie. (If you disagree with how I describe the prima facie, then skip the phrase and go straight to the concept.) Something is prima facie good if you don’t need a special justification to do it, but you do need a justification to do its opposite. Telling the truth is prima facie good because you don’t need a special justification to do so, but you do to tell a lie. Likewise, anonymity is prima facie good in our culture: We don’t need a special reason not to ask you to identify yourself and we do need a special reason to ask you to whip out your drivers license. There are places and contexts where this doesn’t hold, e.g., entering a nuclear facility or the Nebraska State Twine Museum (on Homeland Security’s Vulnerable Sites list) these days. But still, in general, anonymity is prima facie good and is the norm.
I don’t want that to change on line. Here’s why.
While obviously what we do — and who we are — on the Net keeps surprising us, we would be fools not to learn from our experience as selves in the real world. So, here’s something I think the real world teaches us. The term “anonymity” has a bad connotation because it’s used primarily where there’s an expectation of identification. We don’t say that someone entered a movie theater anonymously unless we’re implying that the person had reason to hide her identity, even though, in truth, anyone who pays cash for a theater ticket is entering it anonymously. So, because we use the term “anonymous” mainly where identification is expected, this may lead us to think that being identified is the usual state — the default state — in the real world. In fact, the rarity with which we use the term actually indicates that the opposite is the case: Anonymity is the norm in the real world.
That of course doesn’t mean that we’re always anonymous. There are zones where being identified becomes the norm by law or policy. And, in a small-ish town or within a work community, we may expect to know who everyone is. But, even so, the people in the small town are not entitled (by law or custom) to demand to see a drivers license of a visiting aunt walking down the street. You need a special justification (in the real world) for demanding ID, but you don’t need special justification for not demanding ID.
Of course that doesn’t mean that anonymity should be the default online, just as e-commerce sites shouldn’t replicate the real world experience of waiting on check-out lines. But, it’s worth looking at the real world in this case because it can help undo anonymity’s bad reputation, so that we can make a better judgment about what we want online.
Anonymity (including pseudonymity) does much good online. It also allows bad things to happen, but so does free speech. Before we tinker with the defaults, we ought to at least recognize what we may be giving up in the realms of (1) the political, (2) the social, and (3) the personal.
1. Anonymity allows people to say and do things that those in power don’t like. It enables dissidents to speak and whistleblowers to blow their whistles.
2. Anonymity allows people to say and learn about things from which social conventions otherwise would bar them. It helps a confused teen explore gender issues.
3. Anonymity (and especially pseudonymity) enables a type of playing with our selves (yes, I know what I just said) that may turn out to be transformative of culture and society.
Anonymity also allows some awful things to happen more easily, but we can’t fairly decide what we want to do about it unless we also acknowledge its benefits. Just as with free speech.
Some of these issues have to do with privacy. Since I’m interested in norms, I don’t want to stipulate definitions of “privacy” and “anonymity,” which is probably the only way to make their relationship crisply clear. The fact is that the two terms, as we use them in the real world, are murky alone and in relation. Roughly, when we talk about anonymity, we generally mean not knowing who I am, whereas when we talk about privacy, we generally mean not knowing things about me. (Logically, privacy includes anonymity since who I am is something to know about me, but in practice we use the terms separately.) In many instances, a strong right to privacy confers the benefits of anonymity. But, the real not-knowing of anonymity may be required in some regimes for people to feel free to speak. And it may have a subtle, liberating effect on the selves we’re building in the new connected public.
Worse — at least if you insist on clarity — both terms are complex and gradated. Privacy is obviously something we can parcel out in dribs and drabs; that’s what the new digital identity management systems enable. Anonymity sounds more binary, but because “who we are” is complex, so are the ways in which we can hold back information about who we are. An anonymous donor has probably identified herself to the organization that has agreed to withhold her name. An anonymous author may disclose that she has twenty years experience in the trade she’s writing about. An anonymous stranger who runs after you with the wallet you dropped makes no effort to hide her face, even if she refuses to give her name. And the range of ways in which we are pseudonymous is enormous.
We don’t have to sort this out entirely. Privacy, anonymity, publicness, responsibility, shame, freedom, self, community…these and other core terms are properly in a royal stew of meaning.
Before we have all this clear, we’re going to have to make some decisions. My fear is that we are in the process of building a new platform for identity in order to address some specific problems. We will create a system that, like packaged software, has defaults built in. The most important defaults in this case will not be the ones explicitly built into the system by the software designers. The most important defaults will be set by the contingencies of an economic marketplace that does not particularly value anonymity, privacy, dissent, social role playing, the exploration of what one is ashamed of, and the pure delight of wearing masks in public. Economics will drive the social norms away from the social values emerging. That is my fear.
I have confidence that the people designing these systems are going to create the right software defaults. The people I know firsthand in this are privacy fanatics and insistent that individuals be in control of their data. This is a huge and welcome shift from where digital ID was headed just a few years ago. We all ought to sigh in relief that these folks are on the job.
But, once these systems are in place, vendors of every sort will of course require strong ID from us. If I want to buy from, say, Amazon, they are likely to require me to register with some ID system and authenticate myself to them…far more strongly and securely than I do when I pay with a credit card in my local bookstore. Of course, I don’t have to shop at Amazon. But why won’t B&N make the same demand? And Powells? And then will come the blogs that demand I join an ID system in order to leave a comment. How long before I say, “Oh, to hell with it,” and give in? And then I’ve flipped my default. Rather than being relatively anonymous, I will assume I’m relatively identified.
Does that matter? I think it does, for the political, social and person reasons mentioned above. Don’t make me also argue against being on one’s best behavior and against being accountable for everything one does! I’m willing to do it! I will pull this car over and do it! Just try me!
The basic problem is, in my opinion, that the digital ID crew is approaching this as a platform issue. Most places on the Web have solved the identity problem sufficiently for them to operate. Some ask for the three digits on the back of your credit card. Some only sign you up if you confirm an email. Some only let you on if you can convince an operator you know the name of your first pet and the senior year season record of your high school’s football team. Sites come up with solutions as needed.
Good. Local solutions to local problems are less likely to change norms and defaults. But the push is on for an identity management platform. It’s one solution — federated, to be sure — that solves all identity problems at once. Because of Microsoft’s market dominance, its building identity management into the operating system is an important plank in the platform. Even the sprouting of multiple identity management systems results in a platform because they will make it possible for vendors to expect you to use one.
If you want to change a social default, build a platform. That’s not why they’re building it, but that will (I’m afraid) be the effect. It’s not enough that anonymity be possible or permitted by the platform. It’s about the norm, the default. If the default changes to being naked at the beach, saying, “Well, you can cover up if you want to,” doesn’t hide the fact that wearing a bathing suit now feels way different. Yes, there’s something wrong — and distracting — about the particulars of this analogy. But I think the overall point is right: We’re talking about defaults, not affordances.
There are serious problems caused by weaknesses in current identity solutions. Identity theft is nothing to sneer at, for example. But are we sure we want to institute a curfew instead of installing better locks?*
1. Anonymity isn’t just for criminals and terrorists.
2. You’d have to change the entire computing environment — hardware, software, operating systems, the network, the way Internet cafes work — to prevent bad people from operating anonymously.
This post is me blurting out that first point. The ground has shifted under the second point, however. Joho originally wrote a description of all you’d have to do to make it impossible for sufficiently motivated evil doers to act anonymously on the Net. The idea was that the list was obviously absurd. Now it is not. It is in fact the shape of the computing environment being imposed on us: Hardware with identifiers burned into it, operating systems that lock users out of their own computers in order to keep the computers “secure,” US government requirements for backdoor access to all software that talks on the Net, policies such as requiring showing a photo ID to use an Internet cafe (as I experienced in Italy).
The irony is that this will stop almost everyone from being anonymous except the people we’re trying to catch.
http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/mtarchive/anonymity_as_the_default_and_w.html
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