I’ve just read an online article about what Google CEO Schmidt thinks about the future of the Internet, especially that he thinks that anonymity on the web will and should be something of the past… I thought that some people would fall into the trap of confusing anonymity and privacy, so I thought it might be “my duty” to help keep these two concepts apart…
Here is the article itself… my comment can be found below the text…
http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/google-ceo-schmidt-no-anonymity-future-web
But you, my dear blog readers, don’t have to go there, you can easily read on here and see what I’ve had to say/write about anonymity and privacy… Keep in mind that I wrote it for a public audience @networkworld.com – where I’m hardly a recognized or even known author… 🙂
Anonymity and privacy are two different, even if connected, concepts and we should not confuse them here! Anonymity is something that was “invented” or incidentally generated at a very large scale with the advent of the Internet, where people “come together” on a global scene that would “normally” (i.e., without digital technology) not have met… of course here I am anonymous in the sense that most of you (who read what I write) will not know me, personally… Imagine a pre-internet equivalent of this situation… Imagine we would meet, in person, for some reason, on a “forum”, a public place… and I would start telling you what I’m currently telling you now… how could I expect to be anonymous? in the sense that nobody would know that it’s me who’s performing the act that I’m performing… of course, to most of my audience, I would probably still be just some human being, that they don’t really know; but it would be possible to determine that I’m the source of this performance… in that sense I would not be anonymous… I think that’s what Schmidt is referring to, that it may seem reasonable (I don’t necessarily agree on that…) to re-establish AUTHORSHIP for acts done in the public place, which has been the “normal” state of affairs for ages and was clouded by the possibilities of the world-wide-web and the huge amount of people between which every single human author was hidden…
That’s a very different thing than privacy… Privacy is the right to be the author of certain acts in private places, disclosed from the public place and not meant to be directed to other people than those intended by these very acts… In a private place you rarely act in an anonymous way… people you direct your acts towards CAN generally very well tell (you or anybody else who cares to ask) that YOU were the author of that act… but we generally expect them not to tell anybody else, not involved in these acts… It thus seems to me, that “normally” privacy leads to non anonymity…
I’m not trying to argue that the web should become an all-public place, where no privacy is possible… I just think that we probably need some processes that will allow, under legal circumstances to be clearly defined, to establish authorship and personal identity… I don’t like to be fooled by other people, who can hide their identity or even fake to be somebody else… On the other hand, the end of anonymity does not logically have to mean that everything an identified or identifiable author does should be automatically and directly disclosed to a wider audience than the intended audience…