ONLamp.com -- The Long View of Identity - The Diigo Meta page

• 28 Jun 08
  

  tony curzon price

  
  When we go online to a forum on some topic that interests us, nobody knows us from Adam. We feel anonymous, and we possibly share personal information on that basis.
  
  In fact, identifying us is pretty easy. It's just that nobody bothers to try, unless a record company decides to make an example of us for uploading MP3 files or the Chinese government decides to call us in for questioning about some posts containing the word "democracy." Consider that:
  
  * Your ISP or system administrator knows your IP address at every moment. Many governments have passed laws or (as in the U.S.) are considering laws that would require the ISP to store this data about you for a long period of time.
  * Everything you've ever put online (including sophomoric postings to ancient newsgroups) is still there, and it's searchable.
  * Many people can be singled out through a combination of a few pieces of data (such as zip code, age, etc.) that they freely surrender to web sites.
  
  Our identity situation is the worst of both worlds: people with bad intentions can find our data, but we are isolated from the people with whom we'd like to form communities. This once again raises the tension between holistic identity and compartmentalized identity.

  montpelerin identity privacy

  • An example of how someone determined to stay in hiding can succeed for a long time appears, by coincidence, in the most recent Atlantic Monthly (July/August 2006). A cheerleader for al-Zarqawi's Iraqi insurgency posted terror training videos and other propaganda anonymously for years, despite coordinated efforts on several continents to track him down. I'm not sure that what he did would be illegal in the U.S., but it certainly was in the U.K., where he was finally located.

  • Stefan Brand. Brand admitted to feeling near despair sometimes, because we could easily move into a society where RFIDs are embedded in our bodies and every move is tracked. "I'm afraid that, despite all our best efforts, our technical solutions may drive us into totalitarianism." There were many responses that tried to assuage this fear, but no one could banish it.

      

    Perhaps our best hope was cited by Berkman Center fellow Mary Rundle, who said that we must maintain multiple sources of power that can constrain each other, so that "power cannot be used to amass more power."

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