tag:theconversation.com,2011:/global/topics/online-anonymity-8035/articlesOnline anonymity – The Conversation2022-07-14T04:25:36Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1866472022-07-14T04:25:36Z2022-07-14T04:25:36ZSendit, Yolo, NGL: anonymous social apps are taking over once more, but they aren’t without risks<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/473783/original/file-20220713-20-pkfvpq.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=170%2C161%2C5820%2C3826&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Have you ever told a stranger a secret about yourself online? Did you feel a certain kind of freedom doing so, specifically because the context was removed from your everyday life? Personal disclosure and anonymity have long been a potent mix laced through our online interactions. </p>
<p>We’ve recently seen this through the resurgence of anonymous question apps targeting young people, including Sendit and NGL (which stands for “not gonna lie”). The latter has been installed 15 million times globally, according to recent <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/11/anonymous-social-ngl-tops-15m-installs-2-4m-in-revenue-as-users-complain-about-being-scammed/">reports</a>.</p>
<p>These apps can be linked to users’ Instagram and Snapchat accounts, allowing them to post questions and receive anonymous answers from followers.</p>
<p>Although they’re trending at the moment, it’s not the first time we’ve seen them. Early examples include ASKfm, launched in 2010, and Spring.me, launched in 2009 (as “Fromspring”).</p>
<p>These platforms have a troublesome history. As a sociologist of technology, I’ve studied human-technology encounters in contentious environments. Here’s my take on why anonymous question apps have once again taken the internet by storm, and what their impact might be.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/473782/original/file-20220713-14-7p7h1u.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A series of screens advertising various features of the 'NGL' app." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/473782/original/file-20220713-14-7p7h1u.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/473782/original/file-20220713-14-7p7h1u.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=256&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/473782/original/file-20220713-14-7p7h1u.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=256&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/473782/original/file-20220713-14-7p7h1u.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=256&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/473782/original/file-20220713-14-7p7h1u.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=322&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/473782/original/file-20220713-14-7p7h1u.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=322&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/473782/original/file-20220713-14-7p7h1u.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=322&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">The app NGL is targeted at ‘teens’ on the Google app store.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nglreactnative&hl=en_US&gl=US">Screenshot/Google Play Store</a></span>
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<h2>Why are they so popular?</h2>
<p>We know teens are drawn to social platforms. These networks connect them with their peers, support their journeys towards forming identity, and provide them space for experimentation, creativity and bonding.</p>
<p>We also know they manage online disclosures of their identity and personal life through a technique sociologists call “audience segregation”, or “code switching”. This means they’re likely to <a href="https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/oso/9780199381265.001.0001/oso-9780199381265-chapter-3">present themselves differently</a> online to their parents than they are to their peers. </p>
<p>Digital cultures have long used <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1369118X.2015.1093531">online anonymity</a> to separate real-world identities from online personas, both for privacy and in response to online surveillance. And research has shown online anonymity <a href="https://spssi.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1540-4560.00247">enhances self-disclosure and honesty</a>.</p>
<p>For young people, having online spaces to express themselves away from the adult gaze is important. Anonymous question apps provide this space. They promise to offer the very things young people seek: opportunities for self-expression and authentic encounters.</p>
<h2>Risky by design</h2>
<p>We now have a generation of kids growing up with the internet. On one hand, young people are hailed as pioneers of the digital age – and on they other, we fear for them as its innocent victims. </p>
<p>A recent <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/29/anonymous-social-apps-shift-their-attention-to-instagram-in-the-wake-of-snapchats-ban/%22%22">TechCrunch</a> article chronicled the rapid uptake of anonymous question apps by young users, and raised concerns about transparency and safety. </p>
<p>NGL <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/ngl-anonymous-instagram-q-and-a-app-surging-in-popularity-2022-7">exploded in popularity</a> this year, but hasn’t solved the <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/ngl-anonymous-message-app-instagram-tests-link-bullying-rcna36152">issue of</a> hate speech and bullying. Anonymous chat app <a href="https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/04/yik-yak-is-dead-long-live-yik-yak/">YikYak</a> was shut down in 2017 after becoming littered with hateful speech – but has <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/16/yik-yak-is-back/">since returned</a>. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/473781/original/file-20220713-26-tsnljj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A screenshot of a Tweet from @Mistaaaman" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/473781/original/file-20220713-26-tsnljj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/473781/original/file-20220713-26-tsnljj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=296&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/473781/original/file-20220713-26-tsnljj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=296&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/473781/original/file-20220713-26-tsnljj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=296&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/473781/original/file-20220713-26-tsnljj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=372&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/473781/original/file-20220713-26-tsnljj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=372&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/473781/original/file-20220713-26-tsnljj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=372&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Anonymous question apps are just one example of anonymous online spaces.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://twitter.com/Mistaaaman/status/1126585149561421824">Screenshot/Twitter</a></span>
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<p>These apps are designed to hook users in. They leverage certain platform principles to provide a highly engaging experience, such as interactivity and gamification (wherein a form of “play” is introduced into non-gaming platforms).</p>
<p>Also, given their experimental nature, they’re a good example of how social media platforms have historically been developed with a “move fast and break things” attitude. This approach, first articulated by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, has arguably reached its <a href="https://hbr.org/2019/01/the-era-of-move-fast-and-break-things-is-over">use-by date</a>.</p>
<p>Breaking things in real life is not without consequence. Similarly, breaking away from important safeguards online is not without social consequence. Rapidly developed social apps can have harmful <a href="https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/15/11/2471">consequences</a> for young people, including cyberbullying, cyber dating abuse, image-based abuse and even online grooming. </p>
<p>In May 2021, <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/03/anonymous-snapchat-app-sendit-surges-with-3-5m-installs-after-snap-bans-yolo-and-lmk/">Snapchat suspended</a> integrated anonymous messaging apps Yolo and LMK, after <a href="https://www.scribd.com/document/507515040/Snap-Lawsuit">being</a> <a href="https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/rodriguez-meta-snap-complaint.pdf">sued</a> by the distraught parents of teens who committed suicide after being bullied through the apps. </p>
<p>Yolo’s developers <a href="https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/05/snap-cuts-off-yolo-lmk-anonymous-messaging-apps-after-lawsuit-over-teens-death/">overestimated</a> the capacity of their automated content moderation to identify harmful messages. </p>
<p>In the wake of these suspensions, Sendit soared through <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/17/following-suicides-and-lawsuits-snapchat-restricts-apps-building-on-its-platform-with-new-policies/">the app store charts</a> as Snapchat users sought a replacement. </p>
<p>Snapchat then <a href="https://www.snap.com/en-US/safety-and-impact/post/announcing-new-policies-for-snaps-developer-platform">banned</a> anonymous messaging from third-party apps in March this year, in a bid to limit bullying and harassment. Yet it <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jW-IRuXj4g">appears</a> Sendit can still be linked to Snapchat as a third-party app, so the implementation conditions are variable.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1546246767695519762"}"></div></p>
<h2>Are kids being manipulated by chatbots?</h2>
<p>It also seems these apps may feature automated <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666827020300062">chatbots</a> parading as anonymous responders to prompt interactions – or at least that’s what staff at Tech Crunch found. </p>
<p>Although chatbots can be harmless (or even helpful), problems arise if users can’t tell whether they’re interacting with a bot or a person. At the very least it’s likely the apps are not effectively screening bots out of conversations. </p>
<p>Users can’t do much either. If responses are <a href="https://screenrant.com/ngl-link-qna-instagram-anonymous-explained/">anonymous</a> (and don’t even have a profile or post history linked to them), there’s no way to know if they’re communicating with a real person or not.</p>
<p>It’s difficult to confirm whether bots are widespread on anonymous question apps, but we’ve seen them cause huge problems on other platforms – opening avenues for deception and exploitation.</p>
<p>For example, in the case of <a href="https://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/6426/5525">Ashley Madison</a>, a dating and hook-up platform that was hacked in 2015, bots were used to chat with human users to keep them engaged. These bots used fake profiles created by Ashley Madison employees. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/anorexia-coach-sexual-predators-online-are-targeting-teens-wanting-to-lose-weight-platforms-are-looking-the-other-way-162938">'Anorexia coach': sexual predators online are targeting teens wanting to lose weight. Platforms are looking the other way</a>
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<h2>What can we do?</h2>
<p>Despite all of the above, <a href="https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3134711">some research</a> has found many of the risks teens experience online pose only brief negative effects, if any. This suggests we may be overemphasising the risks young people face online.</p>
<p>At the same time, implementing parental controls to mitigate online risk is often in tension with young people’s <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1461444816686318">digital rights</a>. </p>
<p>So the way forward isn’t simple. And just banning anonymous question apps isn’t the solution.</p>
<p>Rather than avoid anonymous online spaces, we’ll need to trudge through them together – all the while demanding as much accountability and transparency from tech companies as we can.</p>
<p>For parents, there are some <a href="https://www.esafety.gov.au/parents/resources">useful resources</a> on how to help children and teens navigate tricky online environments in a sensible way.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/ending-online-anonymity-wont-make-social-media-less-toxic-172228">Ending online anonymity won't make social media less toxic</a>
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<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/186647/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alexia Maddox does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Anyone who has trawled through an internet forum will have seen how anonymity can change people. What happens when young people are thrown into the mix?Alexia Maddox, Research Fellow, Blockchain Innovation Hub, RMIT, RMIT UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1722282021-11-25T01:03:00Z2021-11-25T01:03:00ZEnding online anonymity won’t make social media less toxic<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/433659/original/file-20211124-27-jfds9c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=2%2C0%2C1994%2C1305&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In recent months the government has proposed <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/oct/07/barnaby-joyce-urges-crackdown-on-social-media-misinformation-as-defamation-changes-mooted">cracking down on online anonymity</a>. The idea is that attaching online posts to a person’s real name will reduce abuse and increase accountability. </p>
<p>Online bullying and misinformation are growing problems, and government action to address them is overdue. </p>
<p>However, limiting anonymity alone won’t make social media less toxic. It will only work combined with broader reforms to platform design and business models, which drive polarisation, negativity, abuse and misinformation. </p>
<p>Reforms must also protect free speech and account for power imbalances between citizens and the state. The mooted changes come alongside suggestions of <a href="https://www.news.com.au/national/politics/peter-dutton-suggests-publicfunded-legal-fund-for-mps-to-sue-for-defamation/news-story/69ed36299b449a58b0f1abeba886612e">public funding</a> for defamation actions by parliamentarians. Cynics might view these two suggestions together as an effort to silence reproach. </p>
<h2>Potential anonymity reforms</h2>
<p>In April this year, a parliamentary committee recommended requiring users to provide <a href="https://www.news.com.au/technology/online/security/government-considering-100-points-of-id-to-get-facebook-tinder-account/news-story/624550c621d662da7d3bd98ff3f0e888">ID documents</a> before opening social media accounts.</p>
<p>This was not implemented, but in June the Online Safety Act was <a href="http://classic.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/bill_em/osb2021164/memo_0.html">changed </a> to empower the e-Safety Commissioner to require platforms to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/oct/30/what-is-the-australian-government-doing-to-crack-down-on-big-tech-and-why">disclose personal information</a> of alleged online bullies. </p>
<p>In September, the <a href="https://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdoc/au/cases/cth/HCA/2021/27.html">High Court held</a> that media outlets can be liable for defamatory third-party comments on their social media posts. </p>
<p>Government comments indicate intent to further regulate online anonymity. Prime Minister Scott Morrison <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/oct/07/barnaby-joyce-urges-crackdown-on-social-media-misinformation-as-defamation-changes-mooted">recently described</a> social media as a “coward’s palace”, pressuring platforms to expose the identities of anonymous trolls. </p>
<p>Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce also <a href="https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/politics/australian-politics/2021/10/07/barnaby-joyce-family-rumours/">criticised</a> platforms professing to be “vessels of free speech” while enabling users to conceal their identities. </p>
<h2>Risks</h2>
<p>There are risks with the proposed policy direction. First, anonymity regulation alone may be <a href="https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/naming-names-wont-stop-abuse-on-social-media/">ineffective</a> in <a href="https://theconversation.com/online-abuse-banning-anonymous-social-media-accounts-is-not-the-answer-170224">stopping abuse</a> and misinformation. </p>
<p>Second, reforms must be scrutinised to ensure they serve public rather than political interests. While the state stifling dissent may seem less of a concern in a democracy like Australia than in authoritarian regimes, it is important to ensure new measures won’t unreasonably <a href="https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/2021/10/10/facebook-identify-anonymous-users/">compromise</a> free speech and privacy.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/online-abuse-banning-anonymous-social-media-accounts-is-not-the-answer-170224">Online abuse: banning anonymous social media accounts is not the answer</a>
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<p>This concern is underscored by <a href="https://9now.nine.com.au/a-current-affair/mp-andrew-laming-legal-email-for-group-of-grandmothers/bd4dfc3b-e89d-4bd1-b221-26e3fc60d991">politicians</a> issuing <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/apr/07/peter-dutton-issues-defamation-threats-to-social-media-users">legal threats</a> to citizens for voicing <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/federal-liberal-mp-andrew-laming-threatens-10-mps-and-journalists-with-legal-action-20210628-p584tc.html">online critiques</a>. </p>
<p>In combination with Australia’s defamation laws, removing online anonymity may further expose users and <a href="https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/2021/11/13/the-uneven-justice-australias-defamation-laws/163672200012865#hrd">chill democratic debate</a>.</p>
<h2>Complex drivers of toxicity</h2>
<p>Anonymity is only <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17512786.2013.813194">one factor</a> contributing to online toxicity. </p>
<p>Most current platforms are designed to maximise user engagement. Platform algorithms, in combination with human behaviour, mean negative and angry content outcompetes positive content. This <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/social-media-facebook-twitter-politics-b1870628.html">promotes negativity</a>, polarisation and extremism. </p>
<p>Engagement-driven business models also incentivise <a href="https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/LHTN-07-2017-0054/full/html">fake news</a>. Mistruths attract more engagement, so falsity is <a href="https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aap9559">70% more likely</a> to be retweeted than fact. </p>
<p>Research further shows sharing of political misinformation is driven by <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/techstream/how-partisan-polarization-drives-the-spread-of-fake-news/">partisanship</a> more than ignorance. Online polarisation therefore propels misinformation in aid of the culture wars. </p>
<p>For example, the COVID-19 hashtag “#Danliedpeopledied” was driven by <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-story-of-danliedpeopledied-how-a-hashtag-reveals-australias-information-disorder-problem-144403">hyper-partisan and fake accounts</a>. An anti-vax “<a href="https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0247642">infodemic</a>” now spreads online, propelled by tribal influencers and anti-vaxxer communities. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-story-of-danliedpeopledied-how-a-hashtag-reveals-australias-information-disorder-problem-144403">The story of #DanLiedPeopleDied: how a hashtag reveals Australia's 'information disorder' problem</a>
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<p>Online toxicity is exacerbated by social media’s addictiveness. Each “like” and comment gives users “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/04/has-dopamine-got-us-hooked-on-tech-facebook-apps-addiction">a little dopamine hit</a>”. <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-020-00550-7">Outrage and negativity</a> equal more engagement, which means more dopamine rewarding the behaviour.</p>
<h2>Connection</h2>
<p>While we turn to social media for company and validation, heavy use can make us <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28279545/">feel alone</a>. Isolation may leave us more susceptible to tribes that <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/016059760402800105?journalCode=hasa">foster belonging</a>. </p>
<p>Tribalism can encourage group attacks, reinforcing tribal connection. Social media “pile-ons” can be devastating for the target. Such bullying would probably not occur in person. But online, we have fewer physical and visual cues to encourage empathy. </p>
<p>While some (especially anonymous trolls) find courage on social media, others are frightened off. Negative online encounters can create a <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2016.1218526">“spiral of silence”</a>, discouraging moderate users from participating. This creates more room for fringe voices emboldened by the echo chamber. </p>
<h2>What reforms are needed?</h2>
<p>Anonymity regulation will only help with bullying and misinformation if part of broader reforms tackling other drivers of toxicity, like engagement-driven polarisation. This means addressing platform business models and design – a complex task.</p>
<p>Reforms must also be fair. </p>
<p>First, anonymity regulation must apply equally to parliamentarians. Some politicians have used <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/may/01/well-done-me-angus-taylor-praises-himself-as-fantastic-in-twitter-fail">fake accounts</a> to <a href="https://www.pedestrian.tv/news/amanda-stoker-mandy-jane-facebook/">confect support</a>, which undermines healthy debate. </p>
<p>A parliamentary <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/jul/12/regulations-governing-conduct-of-australias-federal-mps-are-weakest-of-comparable-nations-study-finds">code of conduct</a> could define standards for politicians’ behaviour, both online and offline. Regulating <a href="https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/open-letter-39-prominent-australians-call-for-truth-in-political-advertising-laws/">truth in political advertising</a> may curtail dishonesty.</p>
<p>Second, if anonymity is regulated, it is even more crucial to ensure citizens are not gratuitously sued or threatened by politicians for voicing opinions online. </p>
<p>Protection of reputation and accuracy are important, but we must safeguard fair debate. Politicians enjoy free speech bolstered by parliamentary privilege and media platforms. </p>
<p>Social media has disrupted politicians’ domination of political discourse, which helps explain the recent explosion of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/law/2021/jun/13/defamation-nation-why-are-australian-politicians-so-quick-to-sue">defamation threats</a> and <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-11-24/peter-dutton-wins-defamation-case-against-shane-bazzi/100645832">actions</a> by politicians. </p>
<p>Any anonymity regulation must be balanced by free speech protections, including <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-defamation-suits-in-australia-are-so-ubiquitous-and-difficult-to-defend-for-media-organisations-157143">more robust</a> defamation defences accounting for power imbalances between citizens and the state. </p>
<p>Given their positions of power, politicians should accept a higher threshold of criticism. </p>
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<p><em>This article was co-authored with Andrew Ball, who is an Associate Director at IT consultancy firm Accenture.</em></p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/why-defamation-suits-in-australia-are-so-ubiquitous-and-difficult-to-defend-for-media-organisations-157143">Why defamation suits in Australia are so ubiquitous — and difficult to defend for media organisations</a>
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<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/172228/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Shireen Morris is affiliated with the Australian Labor Party. She is a Research Fellow with Per Capita Think Tank and a Managing Committee member with the John Curtin Research Centre.</span></em></p>Calls to reveal the true identities of social media users won’t make the internet safer without deeper reform of online platforms.Shireen Morris, Senior lecturer, Macquarie UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1702242021-10-20T13:20:48Z2021-10-20T13:20:48ZOnline abuse: banning anonymous social media accounts is not the answer<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/427514/original/file-20211020-17-59a0ix.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=6%2C0%2C4063%2C2709&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://unsplash.com/photos/npxXWgQ33ZQ">Glenn Carstens-Peters/Unsplash</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In the wake of the tragic death of the member of parliament for Southend West, <a href="https://theconversation.com/david-amess-killing-threats-of-violence-and-harassment-have-become-commonplace-for-politicians-170078">David Amess</a>, fellow MPs have been talking about how to best protect both politicians and the public from abuse and harm. This has included <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/oct/18/pm-urged-to-enact-davids-law-against-social-media-abuse-after-amesss-death">a strong focus</a> on enacting laws designed to halt online abuse, even though police <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/oct/18/pm-urged-to-enact-davids-law-against-social-media-abuse-after-amesss-death">have not linked</a> Amess’s killing to this issue directly. </p>
<p>There have been suggestions that such abuse can be attributed, at least in part, to <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/priti-patel-david-amess-social-media-b1939775.html">online anonymity</a> – that is, the fact many social media users set up their accounts using aliases, and without images that reveal who they are, in order to conceal their identity. Speaking <a href="https://youtu.be/UyPS_jJzmN8?t=956">on Sky News</a>, Home Secretary Priti Patel indicated there was a need to address anonymous accounts. Asked if she would consider legislation to remove the right to anonymity on social media, Patel responded: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I want us to look at everything. And there is work taking place already […] But we can’t carry on like this. I spend too much time actually with communities who have been under attack basically, who have had all sorts of postings put online, and it’s a struggle to get those postings taken down. We want to make some big changes on that.</p>
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<p>The idea has since <a href="https://www.publictechnology.net/articles/news/cabinet-ministers-lend-weight-calls-end-online-anonymity">gained traction</a>, with <a href="https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/davids-law-sir-david-amess-boris-johnson-online-law-mark-francois-b961203.html">other MPs</a> calling for a ban on anonymous social media accounts as a way to mitigate online abuse. </p>
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<p>Yet while it’s clear there is a need to address how we engage with and on social media, removing anonymity isn’t going to solve the problems of online abuse. In fact, removing the right to anonymity online could cause harm to many users, especially those from marginalised groups.</p>
<h2>Anonymity as a form of protection</h2>
<p>While there are many examples of people using anonymous social media accounts to abuse others online, it’s equally clear that anonymity can be a lifeline to many users and communities. Posting anonymously can allow people to <a href="https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/bitstream/10125/70925/0248.pdf">protect themselves</a> – to openly discuss and deal with complex topics safely. It can allow people to <a href="https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/right-anonymity-vital-free-expression-now-and-always">speak out about abuse</a>, and seek information.</p>
<p>For example, social media users in <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19359705.2013.777007?casa_token=aLPueL8tEScAAAAA%3AB7Lkkcz_1IEFETgWQdEOLNCSj-E8AZ-KtO5wAIU5l65v1tkvdwEMsk3NA5uNlW1TEPl0sDIHfXIt">LGBTQIA+ communities</a> have spoken about the importance of online anonymity as a way to negotiate discussions of sexuality safely, where disclosing their name might put them at significant risk of abuse and harm online and offline. Some said anonymity allowed them to access valuable information online as they navigated their own identities.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/anonymous-apps-risk-fuelling-cyberbullying-but-they-also-fill-a-vital-role-119836">Anonymous apps risk fuelling cyberbullying but they also fill a vital role</a>
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<p>In my own research for <a href="https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811557156">my 2020 book</a> about social media design and identity, my participants talked about the many ways in which they felt anonymity helped them to develop a sense of community. One participant discussed how social relationships were formed via comment boards with others using pseudonyms: “I know some really personal stuff about all of them, apart from the fact that I don’t know their names.”</p>
<p>While respondents did talk about incidents of abuse online from anonymous users, it was clear that equally, anonymity provided pathways to building communities and support networks. An insistence on real names can present barriers and challenges to <a href="http://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/6791">already marginalised</a> communities and users for whom “real names” are a complex issue. These include gender non-conforming users, drag queens, Native Americans and survivors of abuse. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A young woman sitting on a park bench looking at her smartphone. She appears stressed." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/427517/original/file-20211020-19-16iknk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/427517/original/file-20211020-19-16iknk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/427517/original/file-20211020-19-16iknk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/427517/original/file-20211020-19-16iknk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/427517/original/file-20211020-19-16iknk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/427517/original/file-20211020-19-16iknk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/427517/original/file-20211020-19-16iknk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Forcing users out of anonymity could be harmful to people who already face significant abuse online.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/worried-hipster-teenager-girl-looking-her-528186055">Eak.Temwanich/Shutterstock</a></span>
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<h2>Many abusers are not anonymous</h2>
<p>Anonymity can be used to abuse “othered” groups such as women, LGBTQIA+ people and Muslims. However, <a href="https://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/5615/4346">research shows</a> that people using their real names perpetrate abuse and bullying too. </p>
<p>On social media we continue to see users willing to say abusive things and share dangerous content with their full names, job titles and information <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08164649.2018.1542592?casa_token=vN7p_DUCxmUAAAAA%3AgToNVtHgobCoct0Xh5kOsEaL58J82OQE56egZ6MlXAPDF6xPBEhD66I57QMQEkfpEEV0BoLEKaSb">on display</a>. Banning anonymous social media profiles therefore isn’t going to <a href="https://www.democraticaudit.com/2017/05/04/trolling-democracy-anonymity-doesnt-cause-conflicts-bad-site-design-does/">address the root</a> of the hate we see online, be that directed at marginalised communities or at MPs. </p>
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<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/tor-the-last-bastion-of-online-anonymity-but-is-it-still-secure-after-silk-road-35395">Tor: the last bastion of online anonymity, but is it still secure after Silk Road?</a>
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<p>Research shows <a href="https://www.amnesty.org.uk/online-violence-women-mps">Black and Asian female MPs</a> face the most abuse aimed at female MPs online, suggesting the issue of anonymity is perhaps not the root cause of abuse, but a way for deeper social issues to manifest online. Katrin Tiidenberg and Emily van der Nagel write in their book <a href="https://books.emeraldinsight.com/page/detail/Sex-and-Social-Media/?k=9781839094095">Sex and Social Media</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Whether anonymous or not, people look at existing posts and comments for cues regarding what is allowed in a particular online space and behave accordingly. It’s not simply a matter of anonymous people being up to no good: platform design and moderation has a lot to do with what kinds of behaviours are allowed, and thrive, on social media.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I would agree with this, and call on platforms to take more responsibility for the communities they foster, and the voices and discourses they emphasise and minimise online. While it’s refreshing to see politicians’ desire to tackle online abuse, banning anonymity isn’t the answer. Anonymity can be a vital lifeline for already marginalised communities, and removing it could inadvertently harm the very communities MPs seek to protect.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/170224/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Harry T Dyer does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>In the wake of the tragic death of Sir David Amess, some politicians are calling for a law banning anonymous social media profiles. But it’s not the right way to tackle online abuse.Harry T Dyer, Lecturer in Education, University of East AngliaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1386132020-05-28T03:29:24Z2020-05-28T03:29:24ZDon’t be phish food! Tips to avoid sharing your personal information online<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/337870/original/file-20200527-141320-1a7ikl1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=44%2C14%2C4947%2C3308&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/anonymous-mask-hide-identity-on-computer-518835055">Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Data is the <a href="https://www.wired.com/insights/2014/07/data-new-oil-digital-economy/">new oil</a>, and online platforms will siphon it off at any opportunity. Platforms increasingly demand our personal information in exchange for a service. </p>
<p>Avoiding online services altogether can limit your participation in society, so the advice to just opt out is easier said than done. </p>
<p>Here are some tricks you can use to avoid giving online platforms your personal information. Some ways to <a href="https://www.scamwatch.gov.au/get-help/protect-yourself-from-scams">limit your exposure</a> include using “alternative facts”, using guest check-out options, and a burner email.</p>
<h2>Alternative facts</h2>
<p>While “alternative facts” is a term coined by <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-00813-0_4">White House press staff</a> to describe factual inaccuracies, in this context it refers to false details supplied in place of your personal information.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/hackers-are-now-targeting-councils-and-governments-threatening-to-leak-citizen-data-126190">Hackers are now targeting councils and governments, threatening to leak citizen data</a>
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<p>This is an effective strategy to avoid giving out information online. Though platforms might insist you complete a user profile, they can do little to check if that information is correct. For example, they can check whether a phone number contains the correct amount of digits, or if an email address has a valid format, but that’s about it.</p>
<p>When a website requests your date of birth, address, or name, consider how this information will be used and whether you’re prepared to hand it over. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1147173290181627904"}"></div></p>
<p>There’s a distinction to be made between which platforms <a href="https://www.wired.com/2014/04/why-we-need-online-alter-egos-now-more-than-ever/">do or don’t warrant</a> using your real information. If it’s an <a href="https://www.avg.com/en/signal/website-safety">official</a> banking or educational institute website, then it’s important to be truthful.</p>
<p>But an online shopping, gaming, or movie review site shouldn’t require the same level of disclosure, and using an alternative identity could protect you.</p>
<h2>Secret shopper</h2>
<p>Online stores and services often encourage users to set up a profile, offering convenience in exchange for information. Stores value your profile data, as it can provide them additional revenue through targeted advertising and emails. </p>
<p>But many websites also offer a guest checkout option to streamline the purchase process. After all, one thing as valuable as your data is your money. </p>
<p>So unless you’re making very frequent purchases from a site, use guest checkout and skip profile creation altogether. Even without disclosing extra details, you can still track your delivery, as tracking is provided by transport companies (and not the store). </p>
<p>Also consider your payment options. Many credit cards and payment merchants such as PayPal provide additional <a href="https://www.paypal.com/au/smarthelp/article/what-is-paypal-buyer-protection-faq1269">buyer protection</a>, adding another layer of separation between you and the website. </p>
<p>Avoid sharing your bank account details online, and instead use an intermediary such as PayPal, or a credit card, to provide additional protection. </p>
<p>If you use a credit card (even prepaid), then even if your details are compromised, any potential losses are limited to the card balance. Also, with credit cards this balance is effectively the bank’s funds, meaning you won’t be charged out of pocket for any fraudulent transactions.</p>
<h2>Burner emails</h2>
<p>An email address is usually the first item a site requests. </p>
<p>They also often require email verification when a profile is created, and that verification email is probably the only one you’ll ever want to receive from the site. So rather than handing over your main email address, consider a burner email.</p>
<p>This is a fully functional but disposable email address that remains active for about 10 minutes. You can get one for free from online services including <a href="https://maildrop.cc/">Maildrop</a>, <a href="https://www.guerrillamail.com/">Guerilla Mail</a> and <a href="https://10minutemail.com/">10 Minute Mail</a>.</p>
<p>Just make sure you don’t forget your password, as you won’t be able to recover it once your burner email becomes inactive.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/337853/original/file-20200527-141287-1igcflj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/337853/original/file-20200527-141287-1igcflj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/337853/original/file-20200527-141287-1igcflj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=276&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/337853/original/file-20200527-141287-1igcflj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=276&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/337853/original/file-20200527-141287-1igcflj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=276&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/337853/original/file-20200527-141287-1igcflj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=346&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/337853/original/file-20200527-141287-1igcflj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=346&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/337853/original/file-20200527-141287-1igcflj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=346&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The 10 Minute Mail website offers free burner emails.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://10minutemail.com/">screenshot</a></span>
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<h2>The risk of being honest</h2>
<p>Every online profile containing your personal information is another potential target for attackers. The more profiles you make, the greater the chance of your details being breached.</p>
<p>A breach in one place can lead to others. Names and emails alone are sufficient for email <a href="https://www.staysmartonline.gov.au/protect-yourself/recover-when-things-go-wrong/phishing">phishing attacks</a>. And a phish becomes more convincing (and more likely to succeed) when paired with other details such as your recent purchasing history. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/google-survey-finds-two-users/">Surveys indicate</a> about <a href="https://blog.avast.com/strengthening-passwords-on-world-password-day">half of us</a> recycle passwords across multiple sites. While this is convenient, it means if a breach at one site reveals your password, then attackers can hack into your other accounts.</p>
<p>In fact, even just an email address is a valuable piece of intelligence, as emails are used as a login for many sites, and a login (unlike a password) can sometimes be impossible to change. </p>
<p>Obtaining your email could open the door for targeted attacks on your other accounts, such as social media accounts.</p>
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<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-ugly-truth-tech-companies-are-tracking-and-misusing-our-data-and-theres-little-we-can-do-127444">The ugly truth: tech companies are tracking and misusing our data, and there's little we can do</a>
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<p>In “password spraying” <a href="https://www.microsoft.com/security/blog/2020/04/23/protecting-organization-password-spray-attacks/">attacks</a>“, cybercriminals test common passwords against many emails/usernames in hopes of landing a correct combination.</p>
<p>The bottom line is, the safest information is the information you never release. And practising alternatives to disclosing your true details could go a long way to limiting your data being used against you.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/138613/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Nik Thompson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>While some online services such as banking do warrant using your true information, many sites shouldn’t require the same level of disclosure. Here’s how to protect yourself in such cases.Nik Thompson, Senior Lecturer, Curtin UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1212792019-08-02T10:53:59Z2019-08-02T10:53:59ZLifelong anonymity orders: do they still work in the social media age?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/286723/original/file-20190802-117866-1b0od5z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/male-person-silhouette-over-white-1022189416?src=-1-22&studio=1">GlebSStock/Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Lifelong anonymity orders for adults who were convicted of crimes as children are rarely granted. In theory, these orders legally prevent a person ever being identified. But given that information is now shared at lightning speed across different platforms, can these orders still work in practice?</p>
<p>Recently, a child approaching the age of 18 – referred to in court as “<a href="https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/RXG-v-MoJ-2019-EWHC-2026-QB-Final-Judgment-as-handed-down-003.pdf">RXG</a>” – was granted an anonymity order which will protect him from being named for the rest of his life. RXG is the youngest person ever to be convicted of a terrorist offence in the UK. Twice in March 2015, when he was 14 years old, RXG incited <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-06-30/sevdet-besim-pleads-guilty-anzac-day-terror-plot/7557574">another person to commit acts of terrorism overseas</a> from his home in the UK. The plot was stopped by the Australian Federal Police. After pleading guilty, RXG was sentenced to detention for life with a minimum term of five years.</p>
<p>The principle of protecting children who offend from stigmatisation, thereby increasing their chances of resettling into society, is long established in English law. It is at <a href="https://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/crc.aspx">the heart of</a> several <a href="https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/ProfessionalInterest/beijingrules.pdf">international standards</a> too. </p>
<p>At the time of RXG’s original trial, <a href="https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/RXG-v-MoJ-2019-EWHC-2026-QB-Final-Judgment-as-handed-down-003.pdf">the sentencing court</a> imposed <a href="https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1999/23/contents">reporting restrictions</a> prohibiting his identification, but these only last until a defendant turns 18. Legislation provides extended protections for children involved in criminal proceedings after the age of 18, but only if they are victims or witnesses, not defendants. </p>
<p>There have been past exceptions, however, but in only a handful of cases. The most well known is that of <a href="https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/QB/2001/32.html">Jon Venables and Robert Thompson</a> who, in 1993, were convicted aged 11 of the murder of two-year-old James Bulger. They were named on conviction but given new names and granted anonymity when they turned 18. Only three other cases have seen the exception being used – <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/media/2003/may/22/privacy.childprotection">Mary Bell</a>, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/media/2005/feb/24/pressandpublishing.privacy1">Maxine Carr</a> and the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/dec/09/edlington-attack-two-brothers-granted-lifelong-immunity">Edlington brothers</a>. </p>
<p>The process of being granted anonymity and confidentiality as a minor is not always straightforward, but serious problems arise if the crime is still in the public consciousness by the time the convicted child turns 18, and <a href="https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1999/23/contents">reporting restrictions</a> cease to protect them. As RXG approached his 18th birthday, the High Court was asked to grant an injunction against anyone identifying him after he turned 18. </p>
<p>Unlike Thompson and Venables, the High Court was not satisfied that there was a real and immediate risk of RXG coming to serious physical harm if his identity was released into the public domain. But, in light of the evidence, the court found that identification would have a “<a href="https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/RXG-v-MoJ-2019-EWHC-2026-QB-Final-Judgment-as-handed-down-003.pdf">profound impact on his psychological well-being</a>”. It concluded that RXG’s individual characteristics, vulnerability to exploitation, and the prospect of his rehabilitation tipped the balance in his favour. </p>
<h2>Protecting anonymity online</h2>
<p>The problem here is not the granting of anonymity orders but whether such exceptional interference with freedom of expression can be realistically upheld in the internet age. When the first lifelong anonymity orders were made in the early 2000s, technology was very different. Now many <a href="https://www.holdthefrontpage.co.uk/2019/news/law-column-will-lifelong-anonymity-orders-become-ever-rarer/">critical commentators</a> argue that such orders are likely to be made redundant because information moves so fast that individuals’ identities may already be widely known. </p>
<p>Media and public interest in high profile cases remains long after convictions, and in the digital age coverage can be widely accessed for years. The internet brings permanency of imagery and details that would not have been possible before news went online. Social media platforms also provide opportunities for people to share details – although doing so can result in members of the public being charged with contempt of court. Earlier this year actress <a href="https://www.judiciary.uk/publications/committal-for-contempt-of-court-at-the-royal-courts-of-justice-malone/">Tina Malone</a> was charged with contempt of court for reposting a photo said to be of Venables on Facebook. And a 51-year-old man has been jailed after tweeting a photo and alias which is also said to have <a href="https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/man-who-tweeted-image-new-18811645">revealed Venables’s identity</a>.</p>
<p>When making its decision to grant RXG anonymity, the High Court was shown evidence of the violence being threatened against him in comments on news articles and social media. <a href="https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9781137606815">Research has shown</a> that comments can stir up anger in communities and leave children vulnerable to physical violence and mental abuse. Although RXG himself was physically protected from the public within a secure institution, there were doubts over whether he could be psychologically protected. The exposure of his traumatised family was also taken into account.</p>
<p>Despite digital challenges, cases like RXG’s demonstrate that there can still be a pressing need to place limits on open justice in order to protect other fundamental human rights. Anonymity orders are not taken lightly, courts undertake a balancing exercise between privacy and freedom of expression in these cases. But we believe that is essential that children’s rights are given sufficient weight in that exercise. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/are-you-really-anonymous-online-your-friends-on-twitter-may-give-you-away-71860">Are you really anonymous online? Your friends on Twitter may give you away</a>
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<p>In cases where this is a continued risk for children into adulthood, lifelong anonymity orders should automatically continue, with reporting restrictions seriously enforced. After all, irresponsible communication is not in the public interest. Meanwhile new and more effective methods of ensuring that information and imagery do not originate online need to be urgently devised, as do new ways of promptly removing anything that may break an anonymity order. </p>
<p>Breaches of lifelong anonymity orders that have occurred to date show that policymakers, social media platform providers and media regulators need to keep up with <a href="https://theconversation.com/guilty-until-proven-innocent-how-a-legal-loophole-is-being-used-to-name-and-shame-children-86073">advances in online and social media practices</a>. They have a duty to ensure that rights are not being breached and safety is not being put at a higher risk.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/121279/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Lifelong anonymity orders are a rare and exceptional interference with freedom of expression.Faith Gordon, Lecturer in Criminology, Monash UniversityJulie Doughty, Lecturer in Law, Cardiff UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1198362019-07-11T13:14:41Z2019-07-11T13:14:41ZAnonymous apps risk fuelling cyberbullying but they also fill a vital role<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/283688/original/file-20190711-173334-p8y2rr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/woman-covering-her-face-blank-tablet-314384858?src=g8ZKOeS6RfQ1Vj7CeDN4qA-1-43&studio=1">Anotnio Guillem/Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>When the anonymous social media app YOLO was launched in May 2019, it <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-48214413">topped the iTunes downloads chart</a> after just one week, despite the lack of a major marketing campaign. Designed to be used with social network Snapchat, YOLO lets users invite people to send them anonymous messages. Its viral popularity followed that of other apps, such as the now infamously defunct <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/28/15480052/yik-yak-shut-down-anonymous-messaging-app-square">Yik Yak</a> as well as Whisper, Secret, Spout, Swiflie and Sarahah. All these cater to a desire for anonymous interaction online. </p>
<p>The explosive popularity of YOLO has led <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/yolo-app-most-popular-snapchat-danger-online-abuse-security-a8907836.html">to warnings</a> of the same problem that led to Yik Yak’s shutdown, namely that its anonymity could lead to cyberbullying <a href="https://www.afr.com/technology/social-media/time-to-end-the-age-of-anonymity-online-20190503-p51jyd">and hate speech</a>. </p>
<p>But in an age of online surveillance and <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/the-spiral-of-silence-how-social-media-encourages-self-censorship-online-9693044.html">self-censorship</a>, proponents view anonymity as an essential component of <a href="https://privacyinternational.org/blog/1111/two-sides-same-coin-right-privacy-and-freedom-expression">privacy and free-speech</a>. And our <a href="https://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/EJM-01-2017-0016">own research</a> on anonymous online interactions among teenagers in the UK and Ireland has revealed a wider range of interactions that extend beyond the toxic to the benign and even beneficial.</p>
<p>The problem with anonymous apps is the torrent of reports of <a href="https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/jun/2/lizzie-pettinato-bullied-teen-pushes-ban-anonymous/">cyberbullying</a>, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/millions-of-teens-are-using-a-new-app-to-post-anonymous-thoughts-and-most-parents-have-no-idea/2015/12/08/1532a98c-9907-11e5-8917-653b65c809eb_story.html?utm_term=.4acfdae1e7fe">harassment and threats</a> that appear to be even more of a feature than in regular social networks. Psychologist John Suler, who specialises in online behaviour, describes this phenomenon as the “<a href="https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/c70a/ae3be9d370ca1520db5edb2b326e3c2f91b0.pdf">online disinhibition effect</a>”. This means people feel less accountable for their actions when they feel removed from their real identities.</p>
<p>The veil provided by anonymity enables people to become rude, critical, angry, hateful and threatening towards one another, without fear of repercussion. But this opportunity for uninhibited expression is also what makes anonymous apps both attractive to and beneficial for people who want to use them in a positive way. </p>
<h2>Freedom from social media’s tyranny</h2>
<p>Recent studies highlight that young people are becoming increasingly <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886910004654">dissatisfied with the narcissistic culture</a> that dominates networks such as Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat. Due to the nature of their design, these platforms encourage people to present idealised versions of themselves. Not only is this emotionally taxing, but deploying the camera filters and other image augmentation tools involved in these idealised presentations means this process can involve a significant workload.</p>
<p>Young people <a href="http://time.com/4793331/instagram-social-media-mental-health">increasingly feel</a> that social media can lead to anxiety and feelings of inadequacy that they take from constantly comparing themselves to unrealistic images of other people. In light of these pressures, it’s less surprising that young people are increasingly turning to various forms of anonymous interaction that free them from the need to present a perfect avatar.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/283689/original/file-20190711-173360-ywrei0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/283689/original/file-20190711-173360-ywrei0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/283689/original/file-20190711-173360-ywrei0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/283689/original/file-20190711-173360-ywrei0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/283689/original/file-20190711-173360-ywrei0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/283689/original/file-20190711-173360-ywrei0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/283689/original/file-20190711-173360-ywrei0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">shutterstock.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/teenage-girl-being-bullied-by-text-268226264?src=FVmQaQjcLTiV7g6kuM0sVg-1-10&studio=1">SpeedKingz/Shutterstock</a></span>
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<p>Instead, anonymous apps provide a forum for young people to engage in what they consider to be more authentic modes of interaction, expression and connection. This can take various forms. For some, anonymity opens up space to be honest about the problems they suffer and seek support for issues that carry stigma – such as anxiety, depression, self-harm, addiction and body dysphoria. It can provide an important <a href="https://www.denverpost.com/2014/08/01/anonymous-app-secret-has-defied-critics-to-make-catharsis-social">outlet for catharsis</a> and, at times, comfort.</p>
<p>For others, anonymity gives them a way to pronounce their harsh “truths” on important social issues without fear of retribution for going against popular opinions of their peers. One aspect of the idealised self-presentation of social media is supporting certain views because they are seen to be fashionable among a certain group of people, rather than because they are truly held beliefs. </p>
<p>This so-called “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/30/opinion/sunday/virtue-signaling.html">virtue signalling</a>” is part of the debate about the authenticity of interactions online. While anonymity doesn’t necessarily create more intellectual discussion, it does provide a more open forum where people can represent their true opinions without fear of being ostracised or harassed for saying the wrong thing.</p>
<h2>A ban would be shortsighted</h2>
<p>Anonymity is not perfect, it is not always good, but equally it is not always bad. Cyberbullying is an undoubtedly a serious issue that needs to be tackled. Yet content moderation and the determination of what can, and cannot, be said or shared online is subjective. It is an imperfect system, but calls for an outright ban on anonymity may be <a href="https://www.wired.co.uk/article/real-name-policies-anonymity-online-harassment">short-sighted</a>. They tend to underline the negative associations of anonymity without showing awareness of its positive potential. </p>
<p>What is truly needed is education. Certainly more needs to be done to educate young people about the perils of social media consumption. Updated curricula in schools, colleges and universities can, and should, do much more in this respect. </p>
<p>But equally, app designers and service providers need to become more aware of the negative effects that their offerings can have. Safeguarding should top the agendas of Silicon Valley companies, especially when they are targeting young people and freeing people to say whatever they like without fear of repercussions.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/119836/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Warning about anonymous messaging app YOLO miss the potential benefits it could have.Killian O'Leary, Lecturer in Consumer Behaviour, Lancaster UniversityStephen Murphy, Lecturer in Marketing, University of EssexLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1055422018-10-30T10:46:09Z2018-10-30T10:46:09ZIlluminating the ‘dark web’<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/242822/original/file-20181029-76402-1x7avti.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">It might sound scary, but the 'dark web' is not much different from the rest of the internet.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/pretty-scary-frightening-spider-web-halloween-151934447">Willequet Manuel/Shutterstock.com</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In the wake of recent violent events in the U.S., many people are expressing concern about the tone and content of online communications, including talk of the “dark web.” Despite the sinister-sounding phrase, there is not just one “dark web.” The term is actually fairly technical in origin, and is often used to describe some of the lesser-known corners of the internet. As I discuss in my new book, “<a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/weaving-dark-web">Weaving the Dark Web: Legitimacy on Freenet, Tor, and I2P</a>,” the online services that make up what has become called the “dark web” have been evolving since the early days of the commercial internet – but because of their technological differences, are not well understood by the public, policymakers or the media.</p>
<p>As a result, people often think of the dark web as a place where people sell drugs or exchange stolen information – or as some rare section of the internet Google can’t crawl. It’s both, and neither, and much more. </p>
<h2>Seeking anonymity and privacy</h2>
<p>In brief, dark websites are just like any other website, containing whatever information its owners want to provide, and built with standard web technologies, like hosting software, HTML and JavaScript. Dark websites can be viewed by a standard web browser like Firefox or Chrome. The difference is that they can only be accessed through special network-routing software, which is designed to provide anonymity for both visitors to websites and publishers of these sites.</p>
<p>Websites on the dark web don’t end in “.com” or “.org” or other more common web address endings; they more often include long strings of letters and numbers, ending in “.onion” or “.i2p.” Those are signals that tell software like <a href="https://freenetproject.org/">Freenet</a>, <a href="https://geti2p.net/en/">I2P</a> or <a href="https://www.torproject.org/">Tor</a> how to find dark websites while keeping users’ and hosts’ identities private. </p>
<p>Those programs got their start a couple of decades ago. In 1999, Irish computer scientist Ian Clarke started Freenet as a <a href="https://doi.org/10.1145/1831407.1831427">peer-to-peer system</a> for computers to distribute various types of data in a decentralized manner rather than through the more centralized structure of the mainstream internet. The structure of Freenet <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44702-4_4">separates the identity of the creator</a> of a file from its content, which made it attractive for people who wanted to host anonymous websites. </p>
<p>Not long after Freenet began, the <a href="https://www.torproject.org/">Tor Project</a> and the <a href="https://geti2p.net/en/">Invisible Internet Project</a> developed <a href="http://doi.org/10.1109/NSS.2010.47">their own distinct methods</a> for <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comcom.2013.04.009">anonymously hosting websites</a>.</p>
<p>Today, the more commonly used internet has billions of websites – but the dark web is tiny, with tens of thousands of sites at the most, at least according to the <a href="https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/best-deep-web-search-engines/">various indexes and search engines</a> that crawl these three networks.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/242816/original/file-20181029-76390-1uarw29.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/242816/original/file-20181029-76390-1uarw29.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/242816/original/file-20181029-76390-1uarw29.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=497&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242816/original/file-20181029-76390-1uarw29.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=497&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242816/original/file-20181029-76390-1uarw29.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=497&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242816/original/file-20181029-76390-1uarw29.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=625&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242816/original/file-20181029-76390-1uarw29.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=625&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242816/original/file-20181029-76390-1uarw29.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=625&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">The Tor Project promotes and encourages online anonymity.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.torproject.org">Screenshot by The Conversation</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span>
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<h2>A more private web</h2>
<p>The most commonly used of the three anonymous systems is <a href="https://theconversation.com/securing-web-browsing-protecting-the-tor-network-56840">Tor</a> – which is so prominent that mainstream websites like Facebook, The New York Times and The Washington Post operate versions of their websites accessible <a href="https://theconversation.com/tor-upgrades-to-make-anonymous-publishing-safer-73641">on Tor’s network</a>. Obviously, those sites don’t seek to keep their identities secret, but they have piggybacked on Tor’s anonymizing web technology in order to allow users to connect privately and securely without governments knowing.</p>
<p>In addition, Tor’s system is set up to allow users to anonymously browse not only dark websites, but also regular websites. Using Tor to access the regular internet privately is much more <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/the-grand-tor/">common than using it to browse the dark web</a>.</p>
<h2>Moral aspects of ‘dark’ browsing</h2>
<p>Given the often sensationalized media coverage of the dark web, it’s understandable that people think the term “dark” is a moral judgment. Hitmen for hire, terrorist propaganda, child trafficking and exploitation, guns, drugs and stolen information markets do sound pretty dark.</p>
<p>Yet people commit crimes throughout the internet with some regularity – including trying to <a href="https://www.cnet.com/news/its-still-not-a-good-idea-to-hire-a-hitman-on-craigslist-powerpoint/">hire killers on Craigslist</a> and <a href="https://www.cnet.com/g00/news/how-to-get-caught-buying-drugs-on-venmo-this-twitter-bot/">using Venmo to pay for drug purchases</a>. One of the activities often associated with the dark web, terrorist propaganda, is <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/00396338.2016.1142085">far more prevalent on the regular web</a>.</p>
<p>Defining the dark web only by the bad things that happen there ignores the <a href="https://ahmia.fi/">innovative search engines</a> and <a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1461444814554900">privacy-conscious social networking</a> – as well as important <a href="https://thetinhat.com/blog/else/new-tin-hat-portal.html">blogging by political dissidents</a>.</p>
<p>Even complaining that dark web information isn’t indexed by search engines misses the crucial reality that search engines never see huge swaths of the regular internet either – such as email traffic, online gaming activity, streaming video services, documents shared within corporations or on data-sharing services like Dropbox, academic and news articles behind paywalls, interactive databases and even posts on social media sites. Ultimately, though, the <a href="https://theconversation.com/searching-deep-and-dark-building-a-google-for-the-less-visible-parts-of-the-web-58472">dark web is indeed searchable</a> as I explain in a chapter of my book.</p>
<p>Thus, as I suggest, a more accurate connotation of “dark” in “dark web” is found in the phrase “<a href="https://theconversation.com/real-security-requires-strong-encryption-even-if-investigators-get-blocked-84252">going dark</a>” – moving communications out of clear and public channels and into encrypted or more private ones.</p>
<h2>Managing anxieties</h2>
<p>Focusing all this fear and moral judgment on the dark web risks both needlessly scaring people about online safety and erroneously reassuring them about online safety. </p>
<p>For instance, the financial services company Experian sells services that purport to “<a href="https://www.ispot.tv/ad/w_5i/experian-dark-web-scan-protect-yourself-featuring-rudy-giuliani">monitor the dark web</a>” to alert customers when their personal data has been compromised by hackers and offered for sale online. Yet to sign up for that service, customers have to <a href="http://www.experian.com/blogs/ask-experian/what-is-the-dark-web/">give the company all sorts of personal information</a> – including their Social Security number and email address – the very data they’re seeking to protect. And they have to hope that Experian doesn’t get hacked, as <a href="https://money.cnn.com/2018/02/09/pf/equifax-hack-senate-disclosure/index.html">its competitor Equifax was</a>, compromising the personal data of <a href="https://www.zdnet.com/article/us-government-releases-post-mortem-report-on-equifax-hack/">nearly every adult in the U.S.</a></p>
<p>It’s inaccurate to assume that online crime is based on the dark web – or that the only activity on the dark web is dangerous and illegal. It’s also inaccurate to see the dark web as content beyond the reach of search engines. Acting on these incorrect assumptions would encourage governments and corporations to want to monitor and police online activity – and risk giving public support to privacy-invading efforts.</p>
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<header>Robert Gehl is the author of:</header>
<p><a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/weaving-dark-web">Weaving the Dark Web: Legitimacy on Freenet, Tor, and I2P</a></p>
<footer>MIT Press provides funding as a member of The Conversation US.</footer>
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</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/105542/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>MIT Press provides funding as a member of The Conversation US.</span></em></p>Begun as part of efforts to preserve online anonymity and privacy, Freenet, Tor and the Invisible Internet Project are, like the rest of the web, home to both crime and free expression.Robert W. Gehl, Associate Professor of Communication, University of UtahLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/822822017-09-26T00:17:32Z2017-09-26T00:17:32ZBy concealing identities, cryptocurrencies fuel cybercrime<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/186884/original/file-20170920-16382-1vgnjm0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Can criminals use cryptocurrency to hide their identities and activities?</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/hacker-stealing-dollars-bank-557329258">Elnur/Shutterstock.com</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>When hackers hold their victims’ data for ransom, as happened in the WannaCry and NotPetya <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/wannacry-ransomware-attacks-wannacry-virus-losses/">ransomware attacks</a> that spread across the globe in mid-2017, a key to the criminals’ success is getting away with the money. That often means they use cryptocurrencies like bitcoin to collect payment, hoping to remain <a href="https://doi.org/10.1108/JMLC-07-2016-0027">hidden behind a digital mask</a>. </p>
<p>The WannaCry hackers went a step farther, though. They <a href="https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/08/researchers-say-wannacry-operator-moved-bitcoins-to-untraceable-monero/">converted their bitcoins into Monero</a>, another e-currency designed to offer <a href="https://www.monero.how/how-does-monero-privacy-work">even stronger privacy</a>. </p>
<p>At the <a href="http://www.initc3.org/">Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts</a>, we have explored the ways cryptocurrency systems protect users’ anonymity. Anonymity in cryptocurrencies is fueling crime by enabling criminals to evade identification by law enforcement. We believe that this problem will get worse as cryptocurrencies evolve stronger privacy protections and become more flexibly programmable. We also believe there’s no simple solution.</p>
<h2>Masking criminal identities</h2>
<p>All cryptocurrency systems work in roughly the same way. Groups of computers receive transaction information directly from users who want to send each other money. The computers order and permanently record these transactions in a public ledger so that anyone can read them. The <a href="https://theconversation.com/blockchains-focusing-on-bitcoin-misses-the-real-revolution-in-digital-trust-58125">public ledger</a> also makes it possible to keep track of how much currency individual users own. Developers tweak the code in <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/s/607947/the-cryptocurrency-market-is-growing-exponentially/">different cryptocurrency systems</a> to add additional features, like fast transaction processing or improved anonymity.</p>
<p>The first major cryptocurrency system, bitcoin, allows users to conceal their real names. But users’ transaction amounts and bitcoin account numbers (known as “addresses”) are <a href="https://twitter.com/actual_ransom">visible to anyone</a> – even people who don’t use bitcoin but know how to read the transaction ledger. This approach offers more privacy than credit cards and bank accounts, even against powerful entities like governments who might try to trace money obtained by criminals. Bitcoin’s privacy both attracts users – law-abiding and otherwise – and <a href="https://www.fincen.gov/news/news-releases/fincen-awards-recognize-law-enforcement-success-stories-supported-bank-secrecy">raises law enforcement agencies’ suspicions</a>.</p>
<p>It is true that bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies create opportunities for tax evasion, ransomware and <a href="http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2488408">illicit marketplaces</a> selling everything from narcotics to illegal arms. Some concerns, though, like the potential uses for terrorists, <a href="https://blogs.wsj.com/riskandcompliance/2017/03/07/the-morning-risk-report-terrorism-financing-via-bitcoin-may-be-exaggerated/">are probably overblown</a>.</p>
<p>When crimes happen that involve bitcoin, law enforcement and security experts can exploit the system’s privacy defects. They study illicit activity by <a href="https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/03/why-criminals-cant-hide-behind-bitcoin">analyzing chains of transactions</a>. Sometimes they can trace criminals to systems where their true identities can be discovered.</p>
<p>If this isn’t possible, they can often still obtain clues about criminals’ behavior. For example, analysis of the bitcoin transaction patterns of WannaCry quickly showed that victims would not automatically receive decryption keys for their ransom payments. To identify a payer, bitcoin requires that the payer send payment to a unique address. This address acts like a kind of transaction serial number. WannaCry victims were all told to pay into <a href="https://www.redsocks.eu/news/ransomware-wannacry/">just three bitcoin addresses</a>. Because payments were commingled in this way, investigators realized that the WannaCry perpetrators <a href="https://www.wired.com/2017/05/wannacry-ransomware-hackers-made-real-amateur-mistakes/">could not figure out</a> which victims actually paid the ransom.</p>
<p>Systems with stronger privacy have arisen to shield users – and criminals – from such scrutiny. One type, called “mixes,” such as <a href="https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/824">CoinShuffle++</a> and <a href="https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/575">TumbleBit</a>, bundle transactions together, allowing bitcoin users to launder their money and achieve stronger anonymity. Distinct new cryptocurrencies have arisen that offer very strong privacy using powerful built-in mixes. These include <a href="https://www.getmonero.org/">Monero</a>, <a href="https://z.cash/">Zcash</a> and <a href="https://www.coindesk.com/sorting-hat-time-mimblewimble-weighs-own-blockchain-launch/">MimbleWimble</a>. </p>
<p>Their success has been limited so far. <a href="http://hackingdistributed.com/2017/04/19/monero-linkability/">Technical problems</a> are one reason, but mainly their technical complexity and limited software support makes them hard for people to use. Ransomware usually requests payment in bitcoin. It is simply easier for victims to buy bitcoins than more exotic cryptocurrencies that better conceal ransomware creators’ identities. Ransomware creators hope to get the best of both worlds – enabling easy payment for victims in bitcoins, but then converting ransom payments to currencies like Monero to obtain strong privacy. Someday, once privacy-hardened cryptocurrencies are easier to use, though, ransomware creators and other criminals will be able to bypass this two-step process.</p>
<h2>Criminal smart contracts</h2>
<p>Cryptocurrencies are not limited to simple money transfers. Newer systems like <a href="http://www.ethereum.org">Ethereum</a> also include in the public ledger not just a record of which account sent money to whom, but small computer programs called “smart contracts.” Once entered into the ledger, these programs remain forever executable. They can store and send money in arbitrarily complex ways. Any user – or another smart contract – can trigger execution of a smart contract simply by sending it a transaction.</p>
<p>When autonomous smart contracts are combined with anonymous cryptocurrency, they provide opportunities to handle money in complicated ways that hackers can exploit. Twice, money has been <a href="https://thehackernews.com/2017/07/ethereum-cryptocurrency-hacking.html">stolen from Ethereum contracts</a> in <a href="http://hackingdistributed.com/2017/07/22/deep-dive-parity-bug/">heists</a> that each involved more money than the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bank_robbers_and_robberies#United_States">largest bank robbery in the United States</a>. The identities of the thieves remain unknown.</p>
<p>In the future, “<a href="http://www.arijuels.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Gyges.pdf">criminal smart contracts</a>” may emerge. These might be programmed to make automatic payments when specific secrets are stolen, when particular websites are hacked and defaced, or even for physical crimes ranging from vandalism to terrorism. A person who wanted a particular crime to be committed could post a smart contract reward to be paid out to the criminal who actually does the deed. Someone seeking to claim the reward would, before committing the crime, add an encoded message to the smart contract containing specific details only the criminal would know beforehand – such as a unique phrase or long string of numbers to be posted on a hacked website.</p>
<p>When the crime is committed, the person who did the deed would decode the added message, revealing the details that had been specified in advance. The smart contract could then check the actual details of the crime and, if they matched, pay out the reward. The anonymity of the underlying cryptocurrency would hide the criminal’s identity. </p>
<p>Today, smart contracts cannot easily obtain trustworthy data from the internet about crimes like vandalism in a form that computer programs can easily understand. So criminal smart contracts have not yet come about. But advances in crime driven by smart contracts will eventually emerge, aided by continuing improvements in anonymity technologies.</p>
<h2>The hard quest for balance</h2>
<p>Anonymity isn’t all bad, of course. On the contrary, it’s a key ingredient of privacy-preserving systems, and necessary to prevent overreach and abuses by governments. Cryptocurrency cannot thrive without privacy protections. What’s hard is finding a socially responsible blend of privacy and accountability. </p>
<p>Today, law enforcement authorities can exploit privacy weaknesses in systems like bitcoin to identify certain cryptocurrency as belonging to criminals and thus as “tainted.” They <a href="https://thenextweb.com/eu/2017/02/21/danish-police-hunt-down-criminals-using-bitcoin/">try to catch criminals</a> when, for example, they convert tainted currency into ordinary currency like U.S. dollars or euros. This strategy will no longer work when stronger privacy technologies conceal tainted cryptocurrency.</p>
<p>Scientists have for decades sought to design <a href="https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e6c8/c217fb3f94f17cfc79efd135ae0525033cc6.pdf">systems that balance law enforcement needs with individual privacy</a> in digital currency. Most of these systems provide what is called “conditional anonymity,” allowing authorities to learn user identities selectively through a technical process that can involve courts or other overseers. Appealing as it sounds, <a href="https://theconversation.com/bypassing-encryption-lawful-hacking-is-the-next-frontier-of-law-enforcement-technology-74122">this approach is unworkable</a>. If one authority, say the U.S. federal court system, has the ability to strip users of anonymity, then all authorities will want it. Privacy will then be meaningless.</p>
<p>Crime-fighting tools require empowerment of authorities. Cryptocurrencies are innately anti-authority technologies. How this tension is resolved will determine the future of the world’s monetary systems. There is no simple answer.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/82282/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ari Juels receives relevant funding from the National Science Foundation. He is a member of the Initiative for CryptoCurrencies and Contracts, which is funded by industry partners listed at <a href="http://www.initc3.org/partners.html">http://www.initc3.org/partners.html</a>. He advises SmartContract.com. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Iddo Bentov is a member of the Initiative for CryptoCurrencies and Contracts, which is funded by industry partners listed at <a href="http://www.initc3.org/partners.html">http://www.initc3.org/partners.html</a>.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ittay Eyal is a member of the Initiative for CryptoCurrencies and Contracts, which is funded by industry partners listed at <a href="http://www.initc3.org/partners.html">http://www.initc3.org/partners.html</a>. </span></em></p>As cryptocurrency systems improve, they will better protect criminals’ identities and even allow people to offer anonymous rewards for crimes they want committed.Ari Juels, Professor of Computer Science, Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute, Cornell Tech, and Co-Director, Initiative for CryptoCurrencies and Contracts (IC3), Cornell UniversityIddo Bentov, Postdoctoral Associate in Computer Science, Cornell UniversityIttay Eyal, Research Associate, Computer Science and Associate Director, Initiative For Cryptocurrencies and Contracts (IC3), Cornell UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/806622017-07-11T01:08:27Z2017-07-11T01:08:27ZCNN-Reddit saga exposes tension between the internet, anonymity and power<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/177564/original/file-20170710-5918-125a5n3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">It originated as a Reddit post. The president tweeted it. Then all hell broke loose.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/881503147168071680?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2017%2F07%2F02%2Fbusiness%2Fmedia%2Ftrump-wrestling-video-cnn-twitter.html">HanAssholeSolo/Reddit</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>On July 2, President Trump <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/881503147168071680">tweeted</a> a video of himself fighting Vince McMahon in a WWE match with a CNN logo superimposed over McMahon’s head.</p>
<p>By July 5, CNN political reporter Andrew Kaczynski <a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2017/07/04/politics/kfile-reddit-user-trump-tweet/index.html">had tracked down the identity of the video’s creator</a>, a Reddit user with the handle HanAssholeSolo, who had posted an apology on Reddit. After being contacted by Kaczynski, HanAssholeSolo asked him not to publish his name, fearing public backlash. </p>
<p>Kaczynski’s story also contained a line some perceived as blackmail: “CNN reserves the right to publish his identity” should HanAssholeSolo publish offensive posts in the future. </p>
<p>As a scholar of communication technology, I saw the events of the past week as a microcosm of concerns at the forefront of online discourse: the ability for people to possess shifting identities, the way anonymity can influence how people act and the power dynamics involved.</p>
<h2>The internet and identity</h2>
<p>A promise – and problem – of online social interaction is the <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167201275002">possibility of anonymous communication</a>. In the <a href="http://mentalfloss.com/article/58766/tour-internet-1993">early days of the internet</a>, there were spaces where people could achieve complete anonymity. Newsgroups and early message boards allowed people to post with a simple user handle, and there wasn’t a way to upload identifying images like self-portraits. </p>
<p>However, social media introduced a new kind of internet identity – one explicitly <a href="http://ross.mayfirst.org/files/zhao-Identity-construction-facebook.pdf">anchored to your offline self</a>. Some sites – most famously Facebook – began to require users to give their real names, while giving them the opportunity to upload photographs of themselves. </p>
<p>Today, online social spaces exist on a continuum where identity is somewhere between <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Navigating_New_Media_Networks.html?id=qrt2rgEACAAJ">fixed and flexible</a>. </p>
<p>In fully flexible spaces, people can act in ways that aren’t connected to their embodied selves. They also don’t have to possess a stable identity when interacting with other people on the network. Imageboard sites like 4chan and 8chan might be thought of as the ultimate flexible network: Every member is literally <a href="https://www.canopycanopycanopy.com/issues/15/contents/our_weirdness_is_free">called “Anonymous.”</a> A user can take one side of an argument one day, take the opposing side the next day, and no one would know it was the same person. </p>
<p>Social network sites like Facebook anchor the other end of the continuum – a fixed network. When people use Facebook, something called “<a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1461444810365313">context collapse</a>” takes place: They feel pressured to act in ways that are <a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0270467610385893">coherent</a> across multiple network segments. In other words, when posting messages, you’ll probably want to craft them in a way that fits with how you want your grandmother, your friends and your co-workers to perceive you in real life.</p>
<p>Because posts on a fixed network are tied to a stable offline identity, they have real-world consequences. Relatives may express displeasure or support about a political opinion that’s been posted, while employers have fired people for opinions posted on fixed networks.</p>
<h2>The threat of exposure</h2>
<p>Reddit exists toward the flexible end of the continuum. Redditors can have a stable identity through a user name, but they can also choose to use multiple accounts. </p>
<p>People can then use these flexible networks for good and for ill. They can safely express <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Kimberly_Christopherson/publication/222428988_The_positive_and_negative_implications_of_anonymity_in_Internet_social_interactions_On_the_Internet_Nobody_Knows_You're_a_Dog/links/554241b30cf24107d393d7bd/The-positive-and-negative-implications-of-anonymity-in-Internet-social-interactions-On-the-Internet-Nobody-Knows-Youre-a-Dog.pdf">minority views</a> and <a href="http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/cpb.2005.8.580">build social support networks</a> without fear of oppression or persecution. But flexible networks can also foster <a href="http://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/30420106/suler.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAIWOWYYGZ2Y53UL3A&Expires=1499364443&Signature=VrKZdFJYsYsutw%2BqTWDs2J%2BvqcE%3D&response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3DThe_online_disinhibition_effect.pdf">derogatory</a>, <a href="http://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1570&context=iplj">objectifying</a> and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/series/racism-in-a-digital-age">discriminatory</a> messages. Many posters might not want these message connected to their offline identities. Thus they find the threat of being <a href="http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=doxing">doxed</a> – or outed – highly concerning.</p>
<p>HanAssholeSolo isn’t the first Reddit user to be <a href="http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=doxing">doxed</a> by a media source. In 2012, Gawker reporter <a href="http://gawker.com/5950981/unmasking-reddits-violentacrez-the-biggest-troll-on-the-web">Adrian Chen</a> went a step further and published the name of Violentacrez, the moderator of subreddits such as r/jailbait and r/picsofdeadkids. After a <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/18/us/internet-troll-apology/index.html">CNN interview</a>, Violentacrez was <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/oct/16/reddit-violentacrez-gawker-expose">banned from Reddit and lost his job</a>. </p>
<p>Perhaps HansAssholeSolo had Violentacrez’s experience in mind when he posted an <a href="http://archive.is/CAzzg#selection-2647.124-2647.301">extensive apology</a>. He discovered – like Violentacrez did five years ago – that flexible spaces are flexible only until someone has the power to tie anonymous messages to the poster’s fixed self.</p>
<h2>Power and privacy</h2>
<p>Because flexible online spaces allow citizens to engage in political satire, organize movements and protest, they can be seen as a form of empowerment.</p>
<p>To dox someone – to tie the messages posted in flexible spaces to fixed identities – is to take away this power. Online vigilante networks, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2014/10/27/anonymous-gamergate-and-the-impossible-dream-of-vigilante-justice/?utm_term=.5488e9bfad3d">like the dueling factions of Gamergate</a>, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/oct/23/felicia-days-public-details-online-gamergate">know this well</a>. </p>
<p>In this case, however, CNN reporter Andrew Kaczynski <a href="https://twitter.com/KFILE/status/882417992717537280">seemed surprised</a> by the public’s reaction. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"882417992717537280"}"></div></p>
<p>Just days earlier, CNN received <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/president-trump-tweets-wwe-video-himself-attacking-cnn-n779031">public sympathy</a> for being metaphorically punched by the president. Now the network <a href="http://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/06/cnn-faces-backlash-over-handling-of-doctored-trump-video.html">incurred wrath</a> for tracking down the video’s creator. </p>
<p>America is generally in favor of <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/studamerhumor.2.2.0153?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">punching up</a> – <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/04/the-abuse-of-satire/390312/">not down</a>. Trump’s tweet was a form of punching down: He was using the bully pulpit of the nation’s highest office to go after a media outlet. But in finding the video’s creator, the corporate media conglomerate was viewed as punching down by going after an average citizen who created satirical video.</p>
<p>Political, corporate and media power are <a href="http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s8086.html">complex</a> and <a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1464884910367587">intertwined</a> in <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Democracy_in_an_Age_of_Corporate_Coloniz.html?id=IwOHrzKA6AsC">America</a>. CNN’s reserving the right to publish HanAssholeSolo’s identity – if not a direct threat to HanAssholeSolo – is an <a href="https://www.academia.edu/4103874/Compressed_Crystals">implicit threat</a> for those engaging in online political discourse. </p>
<p>The threat is that political or satirical messages will have <a href="https://www.academia.edu/4103874/Compressed_Crystals">consequences</a>. They may not mean going to jail, but repercussions like <a href="http://gawker.com/justine-sacco-is-good-at-her-job-and-how-i-came-to-pea-1653022326">losing one’s job</a> can be devastating.</p>
<h2>Moving forward</h2>
<p>“I was trolling and posting things to get a reaction from the subs on reddit and never meant any of the hateful things I said in those posts,” HanAssholeSolo <a href="http://archive.is/CAzzg">wrote in his apology</a>.</p>
<p>The saga of HanAssholeSolo raises important questions about the role of online communication in our civic and political discourse. Do we protect anonymous speech, no matter the topic? Should we regulate online speech? Can we determine the differences between hate, “trolling” and satire? Is “just kidding” an acceptable defense for hateful speech?</p>
<p><a href="https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/9652/3b93617c11a3127e9bfea0ad6675d7d43882.pdf">Some</a> <a href="https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/08/randi-zuckerberg-runs-wrong-direction-pseudonymity">argue</a> the answer is to make all internet spaces fixed networks through “<a href="http://firstmonday.org/article/view/5615/4346">real name</a>” policies. Yet such policies ignore that fixed online spaces have a <a href="https://blog.coralproject.net/the-real-name-fallacy/">host of problems</a> and can lead to “<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/why-facebook-and-googles-concept-of-real-names-is-revolutionary/243171/">identity</a> <a href="https://www.academia.edu/4103874/Compressed_Crystals">compression</a>,” which is what happens when people repress facets of their self in order to meet the expectations of their network. </p>
<p>The emerging answers will require more nuance. Like all communication norms, they will gradually crystallize through the creation of social norms, market forces and regulations. </p>
<p>But as HanAssholeSolo could probably tell you, we have a ways to go.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/80662/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Bree McEwan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The national story of an anonymous Reddit user’s post – and the threat to unmask him – raises important questions about the role of online communication in our society.Bree McEwan, Assistant Professor of Communication and Technology, DePaul UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/804862017-07-07T11:01:48Z2017-07-07T11:01:48ZBitcoin’s central appeal could also be its biggest weakness<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/177299/original/file-20170707-3005-1psg20m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption"></span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Bitcoin reached a huge new peak in value in June 2017, when one unit of the virtual currency <a href="http://www.coindesk.com/price/">was worth US$2,851</a> (£2,208), up from around US$600 just a year earlier. <a href="https://coinjournal.net/report-estimates-10-million-bitcoin-holders-worldwide">More than 10m</a> people worldwide are now thought to own bitcoin and <a href="http://spendbitcoins.com">more than 100,000 merchants</a> accept it for goods (not counting all those using it to sell drugs and other illegal items on the black market).</p>
<p>Part of bitcoin’s appeal for many of its users is the <a href="https://theconversation.com/governments-will-struggle-to-put-bitcoin-under-lock-and-key-20731">lack of centralised control or regulation</a> by any government or bank. Instead it relies on a technology known as blockchain to underpin and secure transactions. But research my colleagues and I have conducted suggests that the lack of any social trust in the way blockchain operates poses a challenge for bitcoin’s further spread.</p>
<p><a href="https://theconversation.com/demystifying-the-blockchain-a-basic-user-guide-60226">Blockchain is</a> a public database that records digital transactions. These are validated by computers working within a worldwide network that solve complex coded problems. Whereas traditional bank transactions are authorised by financial institutions and controlled by governments through taxation and contracts between parties with known identities, blockchain is decentralised, unregulated and anonymous.</p>
<p>In our <a href="http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2838821">studies of blockchain’s users</a> we found that these features <a href="http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2892500">appeal to bitcoin users</a> because of increasing distrust of financial institutions and governments. The technology empowers people to regain control over their money, with <a href="http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3025886">no restrictions</a> over where and when they can send it.</p>
<p>But our findings also indicate that two core aspects of blockchain’s design – the fact that transactions are anonymous and irreversible – pose <a href="http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3025886">significant challenges</a> to the social trust among its users. Anonymity has an obvious appeal for people looking to avoid government control. And irreversible transactions were built into blockchain’s original design as a positive feature to address banks’ privilege of reversing transactions, even when the contract states that they were final. </p>
<p>But in practice, these features are a problem for many people. Most people are used to relying on the reputation of a seller to decide whether or not to buy from them – and the ability of the financial and legal system to help them if something goes wrong. But neither of these things are possible through blockchain.</p>
<h2>Paper trails have their advantages</h2>
<p>Most transactions don’t just involve moving bitcoin from one electronic wallet to another. In practice, they are often part of a larger, two-way transactions where both parties send and receive assets such as bitcoins, real world currency or physical goods.</p>
<p>The issue is that the blockchain only records the movement of bitcoin, not the movement of other currencies or goods. Because there is no authority to complain to, this raises a major risk that users could fall prey to dishonest traders who fail to deliver their side of the deal.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/177300/original/file-20170707-3010-16nvv5z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/177300/original/file-20170707-3010-16nvv5z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177300/original/file-20170707-3010-16nvv5z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177300/original/file-20170707-3010-16nvv5z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177300/original/file-20170707-3010-16nvv5z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177300/original/file-20170707-3010-16nvv5z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177300/original/file-20170707-3010-16nvv5z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">You could be dealing with anyone.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In our latest study, we interviewed 20 bitcoin users recruited from five online groups from Malaysia, most of them with more than two years experience of using bitcoins. <a href="http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3025886">Our research</a> indicates that more than 50% of participants would prefer blockchain’s transactions to be regulated and identifiable, so that transactions can be either reversed or the dishonest trader legally sanctioned.</p>
<p>This shows there is a tension between the freedom and empowerment of blockchain’s unregulated nature, and the lack of security that most people are accustomed to receiving from traditional financial institutions. If this is not addressed, such tension may limit the spread of bitcoin beyond its current base. It could even reduce the number of bitcoin users involved in such two-way transactions, as more people become aware of the risks of dishonest traders. In contrast, the use of blockchain for one-way transactions such as remittance payments will continue to grow, as they are less affected by dishonest traders.</p>
<h2>What can be done?</h2>
<p>Even bitcoin’s current users still operate largely under the traditional mindset of centralised and regulated currencies. Bitcoin advocates may need to find ways to encourage users to develop a new mental approach to unregulated blockchain technology.</p>
<p>But developers could also build tools to address some of bitcoin users’ concerns. For example, there may be a way to record whether the real-world elements of bitcoin transactions are also verified, authorised and stored on the public ledger. Electronic wallets could be linked to a reputation file that users could view before agreeing to a deal, much like sites such as eBay allow consumers to rate sellers. And new mechanisms built on top of the irreversible blockchain protocol could enable individual two-way transactions to be reversed. </p>
<p>Without doing something to tackle these challenges, the very thing that caught people’s attention about bitcoin in the first place could end up stifling its growth and eventually consigning it to history.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/80486/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Corina Sas receives funding from AHRC and European Commission, TSB. </span></em></p>Bitcoin’s central appeal of anonymous, irreversible transactions could become its biggest weakness.Corina Sas, Senior lecturer, Lancaster UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/736412017-03-20T01:32:32Z2017-03-20T01:32:32ZTor upgrades to make anonymous publishing safer<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/160793/original/image-20170314-10759-385iv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Tor's improvements can help users stay private and anonymous online.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-illustration/anonymous-browsing-flat-illustration-concept-laptop-326161724">Anonymous online via shutterstock.com</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In the coming months, the Seattle-based nonprofit <a href="https://www.torproject.org">The Tor Project</a> will be making some changes to improve how the Tor network protects users’ privacy and security. The free network lets users browse the internet anonymously. For example, using Tor can reduce the risk of being identified when dissidents speak out against their governments, whistleblowers communicate with journalists and victims of domestic abuse seek help.</p>
<p>In its most common, and best-known, function, a person using the free <a href="https://www.torproject.org/download/download-easy.html.en">Tor Browser</a> – essentially a privacy-enhanced version of Firefox – uses the internet mostly normally. Behind the scenes, the browser and the network handle the web traffic by bouncing the communications through a chain of three randomly chosen computers from all over the world, called “relays.” As of March 2017, the Tor network <a href="https://metrics.torproject.org/networksize.html?start=2016-12-13&end=2017-03-13">counts almost 7,000 of these relays</a>. The goal of leveraging these relays is to decouple a user’s identity from her activity.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/158813/original/image-20170228-13104-ylxylj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/158813/original/image-20170228-13104-ylxylj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=318&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158813/original/image-20170228-13104-ylxylj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=318&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158813/original/image-20170228-13104-ylxylj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=318&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158813/original/image-20170228-13104-ylxylj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158813/original/image-20170228-13104-ylxylj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158813/original/image-20170228-13104-ylxylj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Tor bounces web traffic over three randomly selected Tor relays out of a total of around 7,000 relays.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But those users are still, generally speaking, using others’ websites, which can be <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/02/the-research-pirates-of-the-dark-web/461829/">shut down</a> or <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-11928899">pressured into censoring online activity</a>. My own work as a scholar and volunteer member of The Tor Project also looks at the network’s way of allowing people to host websites privately and anonymously, which is where most of the upgrades to the system will come. </p>
<p>Called “onion services,” this element of the Tor network makes it possible for a person to run a website (or filesharing site, or chat service or even video calling system) from a dedicated server or even her own computer without exposing where in the world it is. That makes it much harder for authorities or opponents to take down. <a href="https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/tree/proposals/224-rend-spec-ng.txt">The upcoming changes</a> will fix flaws in the system’s original design, and employ modern-day cryptography to make the system future-proof. They will improve security and anonymity for existing Tor users and perhaps draw additional users who were concerned the prior protections were not enough when communicating and expressing themselves online.</p>
<h2>Understanding onion services</h2>
<p>As of March 2017, an estimated <a href="https://metrics.torproject.org/hidserv-dir-onions-seen.html?start=2016-12-15&end=2017-03-15">50,000 onion services</a> are operating on the Tor network. Onion services continuously come online and offline, though, so it is difficult to obtain exact numbers. Their name comes from the fact that, like Tor users, their identities and activities are protected by multiple layers of encryption, like those of an onion.</p>
<p>While <a href="https://doi.org/10.1109/ISI.2016.7745452">criminals are frequently early adopters</a> of anonymity
technology, as more people use the system, legal and ethical uses become far more common than illegal ones. Many onion services host websites, chat sites and video calling services. We don’t know all of what they’re doing because The Tor Project <a href="https://www.ipc.on.ca/wp-content/uploads/Resources/7foundationalprinciples.pdf">designs privacy into its technology</a>, so it does not and cannot keep track. In addition, when new onion services are set up, their very existence is private by default; an operator must choose to broadcast a service’s existence publicly.</p>
<p>Many owners do announce their sites’ existence, however, and the <a href="https://ahmia.fi">Ahmia search engine</a> provides a convenient way to find all publicly known onion services. They are as diverse as the internet itself, including a <a href="http://3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion">search engine</a>, a <a href="http://toristinkirir4xj.onion">literary journal</a> and an <a href="http://n3q7l52nfpm77vnf.onion">archive of Marxist and related writing</a>. <a href="https://facebookcorewwwi.onion">Facebook</a> even has a way for Tor users to <a href="https://www.facebook.com/notes/protect-the-graph/making-connections-to-facebook-more-secure/1526085754298237/">connect directly to its social media service</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/158350/original/image-20170224-22978-rchc2h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/158350/original/image-20170224-22978-rchc2h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/158350/original/image-20170224-22978-rchc2h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=417&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158350/original/image-20170224-22978-rchc2h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=417&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158350/original/image-20170224-22978-rchc2h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=417&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158350/original/image-20170224-22978-rchc2h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=524&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158350/original/image-20170224-22978-rchc2h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=524&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158350/original/image-20170224-22978-rchc2h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=524&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Facebook’s onion service, facebookcorewwwi.onion, when accessed through the Tor Browser.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Creating an onion site</h2>
<p>When a privacy-conscious user sets up an onion service (either <a href="https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-manual.html.en">manually</a> or with a third-party tool such as <a href="https://onionshare.org">onionshare</a>), people who want to connect to it must use the Tor Browser or other Tor-enabled software; normal browsers such as Chrome and Firefox cannot connect to domains whose names end in “.onion.” (People who want to peek at onion sites without all of the network’s anonymity protections can visit <a href="https://tor2web.org">Tor2web</a>, which acts as a bridge between the open web and the Tor network.)</p>
<p>Originally, a new onion service was supposed to be known only to its creator, who could choose whether and how to tell others of its existence. Of course, some, like Facebook, want to spread the word as widely as possible. But not everyone wants to open their Tor site or service to the public, the way search and social media sites do.</p>
<p>However, a design flaw made it possible for an adversary to learn about the creation of a new onion service. This happened because each day, onion services announce their existence to several Tor relays. As happened in 2014, an <a href="https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/carnegie-mellon-university-attacked-tor-was-subpoenaed-by-feds">attacker could potentially control enough relays</a> to keep track of new service registrations and slowly build up a list of onion sites – both secret and public – over time.</p>
<p>The same design flaw also made it possible for an attacker to predict what relays a particular service would contact the following day, allowing the adversary to become these very relays, and render the onion service unreachable. Not only could someone wanting to operate a private, secret onion service be unmasked under certain circumstances, but their site could effectively be taken offline.</p>
<p>The updates to the system <a href="https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/tree/proposals/250-commit-reveal-consensus.txt">fix both of these problems</a>. First, the relays each service contacts for its daily check-in will be randomly assigned. And second, the check-in message itself will be encrypted, so a relay can follow its instructions, but the human operator won’t be able to read it.</p>
<h2>Naming domains more securely</h2>
<p>Another form of security causes the names of onion services to be harder to remember. Onion domains are not named like regular websites are: <a href="http://www.facebook.com">facebook.com</a>, <a href="http://www.theconversation.com">theconversation.com</a> and so on. Instead, their names are derived from randomly generated cryptographic data, and often appear like <a href="http://expyuzz4wqqyqhjn.onion">expyuzz4wqqyqhjn.onion</a>, which is the website of The Tor Project. (It is possible to repeatedly generate onion domains until a user arrives at one that’s a bit easier to recognize. Facebook did that and – with a combination of luck and raw computational power – managed to create <a href="http://facebookcorewwwi.onion">facebookcorewwwi.onion</a>.)</p>
<p>Older onion services had names made up of 16 random characters. The new ones will use 56 characters, making their domain names look like this: l5satjgud6gucryazcyvyvhuxhr74u6ygigiuyixe3a6ysis67ororad.onion.</p>
<p>While the exact effects on users’ ability to enter onion services’ addresses haven’t been studied, lengthening their names shouldn’t affect things much. Because onion domain names have always been hard to remember, most users take advantage of the Tor Browser’s bookmarks, or copy and paste domain names into address fields.</p>
<h2>Protecting onion sites</h2>
<p>All this new design makes it significantly harder to discover an onion service whose operator wants it to remain hidden. But what if an adversary still manages to find out about it? The Tor Project has solved that problem by allowing onion services to challenge would-be users to enter a password before using it.</p>
<p>In addition, The Tor Project is updating the cryptography that onion services employ. Older versions of Tor used a <a href="https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/Rsapaper.pdf">cryptosystem called RSA</a>, which could be broken by calculating the two prime factors of very large numbers. While RSA is not considered insecure yet, researchers have devised <a href="http://www.ams.org/notices/199902/boneh.pdf">several attacks</a>, so The Tor Project is replacing it with what is called <a href="https://blog.cloudflare.com/a-relatively-easy-to-understand-primer-on-elliptic-curve-cryptography/">elliptic-curve cryptography</a>, which uses keys that are shorter, more efficient and understood to be at least as secure.</p>
<p>The developers are also updating other basic elements of the encryption standards used in Tor. The hash function, which Tor uses to derive short and constant-length text strings from arbitrarily long data, will change from the troubled – and <a href="https://shattered.io/">partially broken</a> – SHA-1 to the modern <a href="https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2015/08/nist-releases-sha-3-cryptographic-hash-standard">SHA-3</a>. In addition, secret keys for the <a href="https://doi.org/10.6028/NIST.FIPS.197">Advanced Encryption Standard</a> cryptosystem will be twice as long as before – and therefore significantly harder to break. These don’t address specific immediate threats, but protect against future improvements in attacking encryption.</p>
<p>With these improvements to the software that runs Tor, we’re expecting to be able to prevent future attacks and protect Tor users around the world. However, better anonymity is only one aspect in the bigger picture. More experimentation and research are necessary to make onion services easier to use.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/73641/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Philipp Winter is a member of The Tor Project.</span></em></p>The Tor Project is upgrading its protections for internet users’ privacy and anonymity. A scholar and volunteer member of the nonprofit effort explains what’s changing and why.Philipp Winter, Postdoctoral Research Associate in Computer Science, Princeton UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/715982017-01-26T00:46:21Z2017-01-26T00:46:21ZFar beyond crime-ridden depravity, darknets are key strongholds of freedom of expression online<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/154323/original/image-20170125-23875-go03tr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=753%2C509%2C2143%2C2003&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-vector/social-media-network-connection-concept-people-216055819">via shutterstock.com</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The internet is much more than just the publicly available, Google-able web services most online users frequent – and that’s good for free expression. Companies frequently create private networks to enable employees to use secure corporate servers, for example. And free software allows individuals to create what are called “peer-to-peer” networks, connecting directly from one machine to another.</p>
<p><a href="https://theconversation.com/searching-deep-and-dark-building-a-google-for-the-less-visible-parts-of-the-web-58472">Unable to be indexed</a> by current search engines, and therefore less visible to the general public, subnetworks like these are often called “darknets,” or collective as the singular “darknet.” These networks typically use software, such as <a href="https://www.torproject.org">Tor</a>, that <a href="https://theconversation.com/securing-web-browsing-protecting-the-tor-network-56840">anonymizes the machines connecting</a> to them, and <a href="https://gnunet.org">encrypts the data</a> traveling through their connections. </p>
<p>Some of what’s on the darknet is alarming. A 2015 story from <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2015/04/23/darknet-danger-organs-murder-credit-card-info-all-for-sale-on-internet.html">Fox News</a> reads:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Perusing the darknet offers a jarring jaunt through jaw-dropping depravity: Galleries of child pornography, videos of humans having sex with animals, offers for sale of illegal drugs, weapons, stolen credit card numbers and fake identifications for sale. Even human organs reportedly from Chinese execution victims are up for sale on the darknet.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But that’s not the whole story – nor the whole content and context of the darknet. Portraying the darknet as primarily, or even solely, for criminals ignores the societal forces that push people toward these anonymous networks. Our research into the content and activity of <a href="https://www.academia.edu/30683064/Diagram_of_a_Darknet_Exploring_the_Characteristics_of_an_Anonymous_Space_Online">one major darknet, called Freenet</a>, indicates that darknets should be understood not as a crime-ridden “<a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-battle-for-the-dark-net-20151022">Wild West</a>,” but rather as “wilderness,” spaces that by design are meant to remain unsullied by the civilizing institutions – law enforcement, governments and corporations – that have come to dominate the internet. </p>
<p>There is definitely illegal activity on the darknet, as there is on the open internet. However, many of the people using the darknet have a diverse range of motives and activities, linked by a common desire to reclaim what they see as major benefits of technology: privacy and free speech.</p>
<h2>Describing Freenet</h2>
<p>Our research explored <a href="https://freenetproject.org/">Freenet</a>, an anonymous peer-to-peer network accessed via a freely downloadable application. In this type of network, there are no centralized servers storing information or transferring data. Rather, each computer that joins the network takes on some of the tasks of sharing information. </p>
<p>When a user installs Freenet, her computer establishes a connection to a small group of existing Freenet users. Each of these is connected in turn to other Freenet users’ computers. Through these connections, the entire contents of the network are available to any user. This design allows Freenet to be decentralized, anonymous and resistant to surveillance and censorship.</p>
<p>Freenet’s software requires users to donate a portion of their local hard drive space to store Freenet material. That information is automatically encrypted, so the computer’s owner does not know what files are stored or the contents of those files. Files shared on the network are stored on numerous computers, ensuring they will be accessible even if some people turn off their machines.</p>
<h2>Joining the network</h2>
<p>As researchers, we played the role of a novice Freenet user. The network allows many different types of interaction, including social networking sites and even the ability to build direct relationships with other users. But our goal was to understand what the network had to offer to a new user just beginning to explore the system.</p>
<p>There are several Freenet sites that have used web crawlers to index the network, offering a sort of directory of what is available. We visited one of these sites to download their list. From the 4,286 total sites in the index we chose, we selected a random sample of 427 sites to visit and study more closely. The sites with these indexes are a part of the Freenet network, and therefore can be accessed only by users who have downloaded the software. Standard search engines cannot be used to find sites on Freenet. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/153685/original/image-20170120-5238-jk9zsa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/153685/original/image-20170120-5238-jk9zsa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/153685/original/image-20170120-5238-jk9zsa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=268&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153685/original/image-20170120-5238-jk9zsa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=268&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153685/original/image-20170120-5238-jk9zsa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=268&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153685/original/image-20170120-5238-jk9zsa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153685/original/image-20170120-5238-jk9zsa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153685/original/image-20170120-5238-jk9zsa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">An introductory page on Freenet.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Roderick Graham and Brian Pitman</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Finding a ‘hacker ethic’</h2>
<p>What we found indicated that Freenet is dominated by what scholars call a “<a href="http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/80240/the-hacker-ethic-by-pekka-himanen/9780375758782/">hacker ethic</a>.” This term encompasses a group of progressive and libertarian beliefs often espoused by hackers, which are primarily concerned with <a href="https://www.academia.edu/4469457/Computer_Hacking_Just_Another_Case_of_Juvenile_Delinquency">these ideals</a>:</p>
<ul>
<li>Access to information should be free;</li>
<li>Technology can, and should, improve people’s lives;</li>
<li>Bureaucracy and authority are not to be trusted;</li>
<li>A resistance to conventional and mainstream lifestyles</li>
</ul>
<p>Some of that may be because using darknet technology often requires <a href="http://www.techrepublic.com/article/why-email-encryption-is-failing-and-how-to-fix-it/">additional technical understanding</a>. In addition, <a href="http://www.stevenlevy.com/index.php/books/hackers">people with technical skills</a> may be more likely to want to find, use and even create services that have technological protections against surveillance.</p>
<p>Our reading of hacking literature suggests to us that the philosophical and ideological beliefs driving darknet users are not well-known. But without this context, what we observed on Freenet would be hard to make sense of.</p>
<p>There were Freenet sites for sharing music, e-books and video. Many sites were focused around personal self-expression, like regular internet blogs. Others were dedicated to promoting a particular ideology. For example, socialist and libertarian content was common. Still other sites shared information from whistle-blowers or government documents, including a copy of the Wikileaks website’s data, complete with its “Afghan War Diary” of classified documents about the United States military invasion of Afghanistan following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.</p>
<p>With the hacker ethic as a guide, we can understand that most of this content is from individuals who have a deep mistrust of authority, reject gross materialism and conformity, and wish to live their digital lives free of surveillance. </p>
<h2>What about crime?</h2>
<p>There is criminal activity on Freenet. About a quarter of the sites we observed either delivered or linked to child pornography. This is alarming, but must be seen in the proper context. Legal and ethical limits on researchers make it very hard to <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB114485422875624000">measure the magnitude of pornographic activity online</a>, and specifically child pornography.</p>
<p>Once we came upon a site that purported to have child pornography, we left the site immediately without investigating further. For example, we did not seek to determine whether there was just one image or an entire library or marketplace selling pornographic content. This was a good idea from the perspectives of both law and ethics, but did not allow us to gather any real data about how much pornography was actually present.</p>
<p>Other research suggests that the presence of child pornography is not a darknet or Freenet problem, but an internet problem. Work from the <a href="http://www.asacp.org/index.php?content=statistics">the Association for Sites Advocating Child Protection</a> points to <a href="http://www.sumall.org/child-pornography-data">pervasive sharing of child pornography</a> well beyond just Freenet or even the wider set of darknets. Evaluating the darknet should not stop just at the presence of illegal material, but should extend to its full content and context.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/153687/original/image-20170120-5238-16sz0j1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/153687/original/image-20170120-5238-16sz0j1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/153687/original/image-20170120-5238-16sz0j1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=431&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153687/original/image-20170120-5238-16sz0j1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=431&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153687/original/image-20170120-5238-16sz0j1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=431&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153687/original/image-20170120-5238-16sz0j1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=542&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153687/original/image-20170120-5238-16sz0j1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=542&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153687/original/image-20170120-5238-16sz0j1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=542&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A pie chart shows the share of Freenet sites devoted to particular types of content.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Roderick Graham and Brian Pitman</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>With this new information, we can look more accurately at the darknet. It contains many distinct spaces catering to a wide range of activities, from meritorious to abhorrent. In this sense, the darknet is no more dangerous than the rest of the internet. And darknet services do provide anonymity, privacy, freedom of expression and security, even in the face of a growing surveillance state.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/71598/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The darknet, like the open internet, is not immune from illegal activity. But many darknet users are there in search of ‘hacker ethics’ values such as privacy and free speech.Roderick S. Graham, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Old Dominion UniversityBrian Pitman, Instructor in Criminology and Sociology, Old Dominion UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/701702016-12-15T04:09:03Z2016-12-15T04:09:03ZHow news sites’ online comments helped build our hateful electorate<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/149311/original/image-20161208-31379-1xmzbte.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Whom do we become in online comments?</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/pic-525954922/">Troll via shutterstock.com</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Critics may accuse President-elect Donald J. Trump and his supporters of dragging down public discourse in America, but civility took leave of open discussions years ago – online. Beneath digital news stories and social media posts are unmoderated, often anonymous comment streams showing in plain view the anger, condescension, misogyny, xenophobia, racism and nativism simmering within the citizenry.</p>
<p>In the early days of the World Wide Web, digital conversation areas were small, disparate, anonymous petri dishes, growing their own online cultures of human <a href="http://www.jucs.org/jucs_10_3/etiquette_empathy_and_trust/Preece_J.pdf">goodness</a> as well as <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2014/09/25/absolutely-everything-you-need-to-know-to-understand-4chan-the-internets-own-bogeyman/">darkness</a>. But when virtual forums expanded onto mainstream news sites more than a decade ago, incivility became the dominant force. <a href="http://archive.pressthink.org/2006/06/27/ppl_frmr.html">The people formerly known as the audience</a> used below-the-line public squares to sound off with the same <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/01/28/upshot/donald-trump-twitter-insults.html">coarse “straight talk” as our current president-elect</a>.</p>
<p>Yes, the mass media supplied the public with incendiary rhetoric and insult commentary from pundits and satirists before read-write internet access reached all Americans. The <a href="https://reaganlibrary.archives.gov/archives/speeches/1985/102985c.htm">shoutfest</a> of “The McLaughlin Group” and Rush Limbaugh’s popular polemic radio show began in the 1980s. But the torrent of hostile online comments freely exchanged by ordinary Americans at the bottom of news stories and on social media has had a pernicious influence, too.</p>
<p>As a scholar of journalism and digital discourse, the crucial point about online comment forums and social media exchanges is that they have allowed us to be not just consumers of news and information, but generators of it ourselves. This also gives us the unbridled ability to say offensive things to wide, general audiences, often without consequences. That’s helped blow the lid off society’s pressure cooker of political correctness. Doing so on news websites gave disgruntled commenters (and trolls) both a wider audience and a fig leaf of legitimacy. This has contributed to a new, and more toxic, set of norms for online behavior. People don’t even need professional news articles to comment on at this point. They can spew at will.</p>
<h2>The ease of online ranting</h2>
<p>I have a caustic online commenter in my own family. For the past four years, this family member has displayed a bumper sticker on his vehicle that reads “OBAMA: One Big Ass Mistake America.” On Facebook, he calls our liberal-leaning relatives “libtards.”</p>
<p>This relative of mine is angry. The norms of the America he’s known have been upended. He didn’t particularly like the idea of Trump as president, but he despised “Crooked” “Killary” Clinton. His daily information intake comes from Facebook, Fox News and The Drudge Report, and he’s convinced of “liberal media bias,” especially from newspapers with left-leaning editorial boards.</p>
<p>To alleviate his frustration with politics, society and the “lamestream” media, this family member relieves himself by posting acrimonious opinions online.</p>
<p>Never has my relative written a letter to the editor. He doesn’t consider himself eloquent enough, nor does he think his local newspapers would “have the guts” to print what he has to say. Online, though, he doesn’t need to be eloquent. He doesn’t need to be civil. He doesn’t even need to sign his name to his comments. Trump isn’t the only American who feels vindicated when <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/01/us/politics/donald-trump-alicia-machado.html">sharing bitter criticism</a> to a massive audience with the click of a button. </p>
<p>According to Pew Research, 25 percent of internet users say they have <a href="http://www.pewinternet.org/2013/09/05/part-1-the-quest-for-anonymity-online/">posted material online without revealing who they are</a>. A 2014 survey by YouGov found 28 percent of Americans admitted to <a href="https://today.yougov.com/news/2014/10/20/over-quarter-americans-admit-malicious-online-comm/">engaging in malicious online activity</a> directed at somebody they didn’t know. And a March 2016 Engaging News Project survey showed <a href="http://engagingnewsproject.org/research/survey-of-commenters-and-comment-readers/">55 percent of Americans</a> have posted comments online; 78 percent have read comments online.</p>
<h2>Offense and indignation become norms</h2>
<p>Unmoderated online comment forums are magnets for noxious speech. For years they have carried people’s discontent out into the world, while the writers sit safely behind screens. It’s almost bittersweet to think back on the time we once blamed internet flaming on the <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1089/1094931041291295">online disinhibition</a> of middle school pranksters. It is the <a href="https://engagingnewsproject.org/enp_prod/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/ENP-News-Commenters-and-Comment-Readers1.pdf#page=5">many unhappy adults in the electorate</a> who are posting the things they are really thinking in comment boxes.</p>
<p>Nearly three-quarters of internet users – <a href="http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/10/22/part-5-witnessing-harassment-online/">73 percent</a> – have witnessed online harassment. News website comment sections host antagonistic conversations between contributors. <a href="http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/10/22/part-2-the-online-environment/">Nine out of 10 respondents of a Pew Research study</a> said the online environment was more enabling of criticism. The squabbling can be overwhelming: As many as <a href="http://engagingnewsproject.org/research/survey-of-commenters-and-comment-readers/">34 percent of news commenters</a> and 41 percent of news comment readers identified argumentative comments as the reason they avoid reading or joining the discourse.</p>
<p>Multiple studies show <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2006.00313.x">online communities develop sophisticated norms that guide participants</a>. Anger begets more anger. Unshackled digital vitriol is now volleyed back and forth online from <a href="https://newrepublic.com/minutes/128747/sanders-campaign-knows-bernie-bros-problem">all sides</a>. Some commenters don’t even care if they are anonymous anymore. Researchers have found real-name comments on social media are <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0155923">actually nastier than unsigned commentary</a>.</p>
<p>Historically, American democracy <a href="https://thebluereview.org/anger-and-division-in-american-politics/">always had some rudeness baked into it</a>. For example, during the presidential election of 1800, incumbent President John Adams’ campaign proclaimed “murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest will all be openly taught and practiced” if his opponent, Thomas Jefferson, won the presidency. Jefferson, meanwhile, described Adams as “a hideous hermaphroditical character,” with “neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.”</p>
<p>Civility in public discourse is often what people in power expect of their citizens. Demands for civility can be <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2011/jan/21/civility-weapon-liberation-oppression">used by those with authority</a> to deny power to those with none. People who feel marginalized or alienated use incivility and civil disobedience to fight the power. By causing offense and indignation, as we saw during Campaign 2016, outsiders gained massive attention for their cause.</p>
<p>Yet “democracy only functions when its participants abide by certain conventions, certain codes of conduct and a respect for the process,” <a href="http://billmoyers.com/story/farewell-america/">wrote cultural journalist Neal Gabler</a> in an eloquent essay about how a hateful electorate threatens democracy. Gabler noted that the 2016 presidential campaign was referred to as the “<a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/131504/republicans-already-lost-florida">hate election</a>” because everyone professed to hate both candidates. It turned out to be the hate election, Gabler mused, “<a href="http://billmoyers.com/story/farewell-america/">because of the hatefulness of the electorate</a>.” He went on:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“We all knew these hatreds lurked under the thinnest veneer of civility. That civility finally is gone. In its absence, we may realize just how imperative that politesse was. It is the way we managed to coexist.”</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Promoting free civil expression</h2>
<p>Facebook, Twitter and mainstream news media organizations all have responsibility for egging on the hateful electorate. Unabated toxic discourse and misinformation in online comment sections have distorted the populace’s <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/jcc4.12009">understanding of information</a> and facilitated its en vogue <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/jcc4.12164">rejection of facts</a>. News outlets that <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/12/the-dark-side-of-guardian-comments">allowed falsities and hate speech to fester</a> in their comment spaces <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08838151.2014.966365">contributed to our deepening political dysfunction</a>.</p>
<p>And news sites that <a href="http://www.poynter.org/2013/more-news-organizations-try-civilizing-online-comments-with-the-help-of-social-media/218284/">shuttered on-site comments</a> in favor of public dialogue on Facebook and Twitter – such as <a href="http://www.npr.org/sections/ombudsman/2016/08/17/489516952/npr-website-to-get-rid-of-comments">NPR</a>, <a href="http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2014/11/07/editors-note-reader-comments-in-the-age-of-social-media/">Reuters</a> and <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/08/19/a-note-to-our-readers.html">The Daily Beast</a> – have simply passed the buck. The algorithmic structure of Facebook shrouds users in <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/15/opinion/mark-zuckerberg-is-in-denial.html">personal echo chambers</a> and enables <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/for-the-new-yellow-journalists-opportunity-comes-in-clicks-and-bucks/2016/11/20/d58d036c-adbf-11e6-8b45-f8e493f06fcd_story.html">profiteering fake news purveyors</a> to prey on people’s ideological gullibility. Twitter, in addition to its online harassment problem, now has an emerging <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602817/how-the-bot-y-politic-influenced-this-election/">“bot-y politic” problem</a>. A study found <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-twitter-bots-affected-the-us-presidential-campaign-68406">20 percent of all election-related tweets</a> this year were generated by computer algorithms – “bots” designed to propagandize digital conversations.</p>
<p>The National Institute for Civil Discourse, a nonpartisan research center based at the University of Arizona, recently <a href="https://uanews.arizona.edu/story/ua-institute-issues-postelection-call-civility">issued a post-election call for civility, respect and bipartisanship</a>. The call, imploring Trump and Congress to lead with civility and seek consensus, and for the American people to not let incivility linger, should be heeded. The same demand should be made of our news media institutions. One of journalism’s democratic responsibilities is to <a href="https://www.americanpressinstitute.org/journalism-essentials/what-is-journalism/elements-journalism/">provide reliable forums for public criticism and compromise</a>.</p>
<p>Journalists, as a rule, champion free speech. But we need our news organizations, large and small, to work to <a href="http://civichall.org/civicist/vtaiwan-democracy-frontier/">elevate debate</a> above the <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2014.981560">polarized social layer</a>. At news organizations, academic institutions and even governments, early efforts are under way to infuse <a href="http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/06/the-washington-post-is-using-slack-to-create-a-reader-community-focused-on-the-gender-pay-gap/">more civility</a> and veracity into our <a href="http://cci.mit.edu/deliberatoriumresearchpage.html">digital deliberations</a>. In a “post-truth” reality, our <a href="http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/facebook-group-pbs-newshour-democratic-debate-021116/634186">modern electorate</a> needs <a href="https://engagingnewsproject.org/research/restructuring-comment-sections/">online discourse</a> that’s less about toxic venting and more about <a href="http://www.poynter.org/2016/how-news-organizations-are-trying-to-get-people-to-talk-and-listen-to-each-other-after-the-election/440607/">identifying common ground</a>.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/70170/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Marie K. Shanahan has received funding from the Public Discourse Project at the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute and is working on an academic book about journalism and digital discourse, slated to be published by Routledge in 2017.</span></em></p>The ability to say offensive things online on a daily basis without consequences led to new, and more toxic, norms for civic behavior.Marie K. Shanahan, Assistant Professor of Journalism, University of ConnecticutLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/534192016-01-26T14:49:36Z2016-01-26T14:49:36ZCould encryption ‘backdoors’ safeguard privacy and fight terror online?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/109159/original/image-20160125-19660-4m44dj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Hack attack</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/31/Hacker_-_Hacking_-_Symbol.jpg/1280px-Hacker_-_Hacking_-_Symbol.jpg">Wikipedia</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Since so much of life has moved online, a clash has emerged between the opposing values of internet freedom, and internet control. Should the internet be a public arena free of all interference and influence from the authorities? Or does too much freedom result in anarchy, turning the internet into a safe haven for criminals and terrorists?</p>
<p>The tension between these two opposing extremes, the “crypto wars”, is a battle that has been raging for 30 years – an approach that would reconcile these two attitudes would offer a way forward. Long-term privacy advocate and cryptographer David Chaum <a href="http://www.wired.com/2016/01/david-chaum-father-of-online-anonymity-plan-to-end-the-crypto-wars/">recently put forward one such idea</a> that involves building a special “backdoor” that could only be accessed on agreement by multiple parties across different countries and cultures – an idea that combines the protections of encryption while meeting the need for transparency that law enforcement wants. But will it work?</p>
<h2>Freedom vs control</h2>
<p>The internet is built as an open system, with unique IP addresses that identify computers online and logs of connections from one to another. So for supporters of a free internet the big challenge is maintaining anonymity, so that the web can be used and sites visited without leaving behind a digital trace that could identify users. </p>
<p>Anonymising software such as Tor has been developed in response, and hides the link between a browser and the website it visits. But while Tor makes it harder to determine who has been visiting websites, <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-tors-privacy-was-momentarily-broken-and-the-questions-it-raises-52048">it is not infallible</a>. The fact remains that guaranteeing absolute anonymity on the internet is very difficult.</p>
<p>Opponents of a free internet face a different conundrum. Internet users have a genuine need for cyber-security controls that are strong enough to protect their data from cyber-criminals. This is provided by cryptography, mathematically-based encryption tools that prevent unauthorised eyes from seeing data, whether en route through the internet or at rest on a hard disk or phone. Cryptography protects our banking systems, our mobile phone calls, and is the core of anonymity technologies such as Tor.</p>
<p>The problem with cryptography is that it works too well. In the light of terrorist attacks some voices from law enforcement and government security agencies have criticised <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-35251429">cryptography’s power</a> to prevent them from accessing communications others would rather they didn’t. They claim that encryption and Tor hide information that they need. Some officials have even suggested that <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/13/cameron-ban-encryption-digital-britain-online-shopping-banking-messaging-terror">cryptography should be outlawed</a>.</p>
<h2>Bringing the two together</h2>
<p>The history of the crypto wars includes several attempts at compromise, all unfit for today. In the 1980s governments used export controls to restrict movement of cryptographic hardware. In the 1990s the US and UK infamously attempted to impose “<a href="http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/mediapolicyproject/2014/11/12/we-actually-lost-the-crypto-wars/">key escrow</a>”, which handed the ability to reverse encryption to government agencies.</p>
<p>Supporters of cryptography subsequently believed that attempts to control cryptography had failed. But the documents revealed by Edward Snowden since 2013 have shown that governments have been developing a <a href="http://money.cnn.com/2015/12/22/technology/apple-parliament/">barrage of techniques to circumvent cryptography</a> behind a cloak of secrecy. In response companies such as Apple promised stronger cryptography on user devices.</p>
<p>The heart of the problem is simply this. How can we offer secure and, if required, anonymous communication technologies to “good” people, while allowing this protection to be removed if “bad” people also use them? One idea that keeps resurfacing is to deploy some sort of “backdoor” which, under exceptional circumstances, creates a hole in the encryption’s protection. This is Chaum’s suggestion, only with a twist.</p>
<p>The problem with backdoors is not how to build them, but how to govern them. Who do we trust with our keys? And if someone – the police, say – has the ability to use a backdoor then how can we prevent that knowledge from being discovered by someone undesirable – perhaps the very criminals the police are pursuing?</p>
<p>Chaum’s proposal is his new anonymity software, <a href="http://www.chaum.com/projects/privategrity/privategrity.html">PrivaTegrity</a>, whose cryptographic protections are built with a deliberate backdoor. PrivaTegrity’s backdoor can only be activated by co-operation between nine different server administrators located in nine different countries. By distributing the governance of the keys across countries, cultures and continents, the argument is that there would be less chance for misuse. Only if all of them agree can the anonymity protection be removed to allow investigators to access details of the communication.</p>
<p>It’s a nice idea, but hard to imagine it working in practice. In particular it’s unlikely national security agencies in the UK and US will be keen to rely on the judgement of others about what information can be accessed, and when.</p>
<p>However, we should welcome all ideas on balancing data privacy and control and the UK parliament is currently debating the draft <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-35263503">Investigatory Powers bill</a>, known as the snooper’s charter. Ultimately, it is likely to propose some sort of new trade-off between privacy and legal access. Whatever the final terms of this bill are, it’s inevitable that it won’t keep everyone happy. Despite Chaum’s interesting ideas, the fact remains that the two opposing views on internet freedom would seem to be fundamentally irreconcilable. In whichever state of compromise we proceed, the crypto wars will inevitably rage on.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/53419/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Keith Martin receives funding from the EPSRC and the European Commission. </span></em></p>The battle between personal privacy and national security online continues.Keith Martin, Professor, Information Security Group, Royal Holloway University of LondonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/521062015-12-18T10:15:04Z2015-12-18T10:15:04ZVuvuzela, a next-generation anonymity tool that protects users by adding NOISE<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/105303/original/image-20151210-7447-xvx237.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Communicating by Vuvuzela, for when anonymity could be a matter of life and death.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/e3000/4712469214">e3000</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Cryptography is the science of keeping secrets, with <a href="http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/definition/Advanced-Encryption-Standard">encryption algorithms</a> and methods such as public key encryption the gold standard. Despite widespread usage and heavy scrutiny, these ciphers remain unbroken. But while encryption can keep messages secret, it cannot protect the identities of the sender and receiver.</p>
<p>Details such as the IP addresses of computers communicating on the internet and other metadata can reveal more than just the identities of those communicating. Companies use metadata to infer sexual orientation, approximate age, gender and interests for targeted advertising, while intelligence and law enforcement agencies collect and analyse it for their own uses. As a former director of the NSA puts it pithily: “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdQiz0Vavmc">We kill people based on metadata</a>.”</p>
<p>So anonymity is required as well as secrecy, for which the most polished tool is Tor. Tor allows users to browse the web anonymously, but has come under sustained attack – and cracks <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-tors-privacy-was-momentarily-broken-and-the-questions-it-raises-52048">have begun to show</a>. Is it time for a replacement? Vuvuzela, a <a href="https://people.csail.mit.edu/nickolai/papers/vandenhooff-vuvuzela.pdf">prototype anonymising software</a> designed by MIT researchers, is one attempt.</p>
<p>Tor achieves anonymity by partially encrypting as much metadata as possible, revealing only small amounts and only as late on in the communication as possible. It sends messages via the encrypted Tor network, where it’s difficult for attackers that snoop on network traffic to detect where <a href="https://theconversation.com/tor-the-last-bastion-of-online-anonymity-but-is-it-still-secure-after-silk-road-35395">a message comes from and where it is going</a>. That an NSA presentation leaked by Edward Snowden included the statement “<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/oct/04/tor-stinks-nsa-presentation-document">Tor Stinks</a>” suggests that even the NSA found it difficult to crack. </p>
<p>Yet when the FBI shut down the Silk Road and Silk Road 2.0 illegal online marketplaces, their prosecutions seemingly relied on <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-tors-privacy-was-momentarily-broken-and-the-questions-it-raises-52048">evidence collected despite Tor’s privacy measures</a>. Tor has well-known security weaknesses which are <a href="https://blog.torproject.org/blog/one-cell-enough">explicitly stated</a> by the developers. One is that Tor cannot withstand traffic analysis by an attacker who can monitor global internet traffic in real time: whenever user A sends a message to Tor and almost immediately afterwards Tor sends a message to website B, then it is likely that A uses Tor to browse B. This attack is out of reach for individuals, but some nation states have the capacity to do so.</p>
<p>As MIT associate professor Nickolai Zeldovich, whose group created Vuvuzela, said: “Tor operates under the assumption that there’s not a global adversary that’s paying attention to every single link in the world. Maybe these days this is not a good assumption.”</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/106473/original/image-20151217-8073-1ih7a2h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/106473/original/image-20151217-8073-1ih7a2h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=410&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/106473/original/image-20151217-8073-1ih7a2h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=410&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/106473/original/image-20151217-8073-1ih7a2h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=410&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/106473/original/image-20151217-8073-1ih7a2h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=515&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/106473/original/image-20151217-8073-1ih7a2h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=515&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/106473/original/image-20151217-8073-1ih7a2h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=515&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Anonymity through obscurity.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/10422334@N08/6619734997/">Guy Mayer</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Hiding activity as well as metadata</h2>
<p>To overcome Tor’s shortcomings, other anonymising software approaches have been proposed, such as <a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/1503.06115">Riposte</a> from Stanford University and <a href="http://dedis.cs.yale.edu/dissent">Dissent</a> from Yale. While they fix Tor’s flaws, they are not able to support the sort of usage and number of concurrent users that Tor can, which limits their usefulness.</p>
<p>Vuvuzela is both immune to traffic analysis and other forms of attack, and can support a large number of simultaneous active users. Like Tor, Vuvuzela works by encrypting as much metadata as possible, but (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpXN8BvGp_o">like its namesake)</a> it also adds a lot of noise – fake messages with which to confuse attackers. As they are indistinguishable from genuine messages, this drowns out patterns of genuine communication that might otherwise compromise a user’s anonymity. </p>
<p>Unlike Tor, Vuvuzela sends its communication in fixed rounds. Clients cannot send and receive messages at any time, instead on each round a user can only send and receive one message. This obscures the precise timing of messages between sender and receiver, keeping this detail from attackers.</p>
<p>Another difference is how the messages travel. Tor messages pass from sender to receiver in a sequence of hops, while Vuvuzela uses a dead-drop system, where the sender leaves the message at a randomly chosen memory location on one of the Vuvuzela servers, and during a later round the recipient picks up the message.</p>
<p>All messages sent by Vuvuzela messages are the same size, achieved by splitting messages that are too large and padding messages that are too small. This prevents attackers from using message size to compromise anonymity by giving away clues as to what sort of communication is being sent.</p>
<p>As a result, Vuvuzela is the first anonymising privacy system that is resistant to large-scale network traffic analysis attacks, and which can also sustain millions of active users sending tens of thousands of messages per second.</p>
<p>MIT’s software is brand new and still experimental, and cannot yet be considered as a replacement for Tor. It hasn’t yet undergone extensive testing through attacks aimed at its theoretical design, and implementation. Crucially, unlike Tor Vuvuzela cannot yet be used for convenient web browsing, nor is it suitable for real-time chat as it is currently quite slow. However, it holds a lot of promise, and may evolve into a viable Tor successor in the future.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/52106/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Martin Berger receives funding from EPSRC and the European Union.</span></em></p>With attacks against Tor increasing, prototype anonymising software Vuvuzela takes a different approach.Martin Berger, Lecturer in Foundations Of Computation (Informatics), University of SussexLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/426592015-06-02T15:02:31Z2015-06-02T15:02:31ZThe fall of Silk Road isn’t the end for anonymous marketplaces, Tor or bitcoin<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/83700/original/image-20150602-19232-ilns3w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Silk Road, gone but not forgotten.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Silk_Road_Seized.jpg">FBI</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Ross Ulbricht, aka the “Dread Pirate Roberts”, has been sentenced to life in prison without parole by a Manhattan Federal Court for masterminding the Silk Road anonymous online illegal marketplace. Ulbricht was labelled a <a href="http://www.fbi.gov/newyork/press-releases/2015/ross-ulbricht-aka-dread-pirate-roberts-sentenced-in-manhattan-federal-court-to-life-in-prison">drug dealer and criminal profiteer</a>, and Judge Forrest was unequivocal in stating that “a message must be sent out that no one is above the law”.</p>
<p>The Silk Road was an online marketplace designed to allow users to conduct illegal business anonymously beyond the reach of law enforcement. It operated like an eBay for illegal goods, complete with the opportunity for buyers to provide feedback scores to sellers so others could gauge their trustworthiness and quality of product.</p>
<p>The site used a mix of sophisticated privacy technologies to try to hide the identities of its users. Run as a <a href="https://www.torproject.org/about/overview.html.en">Tor</a> hidden service within the Dark Web, Silk Road’s servers were only accessible through Tor software in order to mask their IP addresses and physical location. Transactions were carried out using <a href="https://bitcoin.org/en/faq">bitcoin</a> due to the pseudonymity it affords. Buyers and sellers guides were available on the website to assist in using the technology without detection.</p>
<p>Officially the FBI insists that Ulbricht made mistakes which allowed <a href="http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/2363958/fbi-used-leaky-captcha-to-catch-silk-roads-hidden-web-servers">detectives to uncover his identity and location</a>. The subsequent sites that attempted to follow in its wake were brought down through <a href="http://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/usao-sdny/legacy/2015/03/25/Benthall%2C%20Blake%20Complaint.pdf">similar mistakes</a>. But the evidence and explanations given by the FBI in court were not convincing, leading to rumours that the FBI <a href="http://phys.org/news/2015-02-tor-silk-road.html">used malware or enlisted the NSA</a> to help track down Silk Road and its users within Tor. </p>
<h2>Technological fall-out</h2>
<p>It is already known that Tor <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/04/tor-attacks-nsa-users-online-anonymity">users are vulnerable</a> at the point that traffic enters and exits the Tor network. Generally though it is thought that <a href="https://theconversation.com/tor-the-last-bastion-of-online-anonymity-but-is-it-still-secure-after-silk-road-35395">users cannot be tracked within the network</a> – but if there is some basis to the speculation that the FBI used malware or enlisted the help of the NSA to bring down the Silk Road then it may be possible that to identify the real internet IP addresses associated with Tor traffic. Certainly this would put an end to any chances of a new Silk Road, and it would also inevitably lead to prosecution of much of the other illegal activity that goes on within the Deep Web. On the other hand, the lack of moves by law enforcement suggests this may not be the case.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/83703/original/image-20150602-19249-185dqzb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/83703/original/image-20150602-19249-185dqzb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/83703/original/image-20150602-19249-185dqzb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/83703/original/image-20150602-19249-185dqzb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/83703/original/image-20150602-19249-185dqzb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/83703/original/image-20150602-19249-185dqzb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/83703/original/image-20150602-19249-185dqzb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">You have to go far to find somewhere that accepts bitcoin.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:De_Waag_Bitcoin.jpg">Targaryen</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The limits to the anonymity afforded by bitcoin has also been highlighted. While the value of bitcoins remains within the blockchain, the anonymity persists. But for the owner of bitcoins to realise their value, they must be spent or transferred through exchanges into real-world currency – at which point the owner is liable to be traced. Once a <a href="https://bitcoin.org/en/choose-your-wallet">wallet ID</a> has been linked to an individual bitcoin, transactions become highly traceable, as all transactions involving that ID are viewable on the public ledger. This is why governments are choosing to <a href="https://theconversation.com/governments-want-to-regulate-bitcoin-is-that-even-possible-39266">regulate to bitcoin through digital exchanges</a>.</p>
<p>Unless bitcoin becomes more readily accepted then it will be hard for criminals to avoid the temptation to cash out at digital exchanges, linking them to their ill-gotten gains. However, there may be other cryptocurrencies with the means to get around these weaknesses in the future.</p>
<p>So while the Silk Road and several of its immediate successors are gone, the suggestion that the technology behind these marketplaces is flawed is based on speculation that the FBI or NSA have cracked them. If the FBI’s claims that Ulbricht and <a href="http://www.fbi.gov/newyork/press-releases/2014/operator-of-silk-road-2.0-website-charged-in-manhattan-federal-court">Blake Benthall</a> of “Silk Road 2.0” were caught due to their own mistakes are true, then it’s still possible for similar anonymous marketplaces to escape prosecution in the future. </p>
<p>Of course, in light of the severe sentence handed to Ulbricht it will depend on whether those would-be entrepreneurs with plans to found other online marketplaces have sufficient belief in the technology’s security to try their luck. So perhaps the judge’s aim in sentencing to deter others could still play a part.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/42659/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Matthew Shillito does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The technology behind Silk Road is still sound, but with the potential for a life sentence it would take faith to deploy them.Matthew Shillito, PhD student, University of LiverpoolLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/353952015-02-05T16:58:55Z2015-02-05T16:58:55ZTor: the last bastion of online anonymity, but is it still secure after Silk Road?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/71223/original/image-20150205-28608-mlau0q.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Tor, your online an-onionising software.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tor_project_logo_hq.png">Tor Project</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The Silk Road trial has concluded, with Ross Ulbricht <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/silk-road-creator-found-guilty-of-cybercrimes-1423083107">found guilty</a> of running the anonymous online marketplace for illegal goods. But questions remain over how the FBI found its way through Tor, the software that allows anonymous, untraceable use of the web, to gather the evidence against him.</p>
<p>The development of anonymising software such as Tor and Bitcoin has forced law enforcement to develop the expertise needed to identify those using them. But if anything, <a href="http://www.dailydot.com/crime/silk-road-ross-ulbricht-evidence-list/">what we know about the FBI’s case</a> suggests it was tip-offs, <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahjeong/2015/01/14/the-dhs-agent-who-infiltrated-silk-road-to-take-down-its-kingpin/">inside men</a>, <a href="http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/01/friend-who-helped-ulbricht-build-silk-road-testifies-against-him/">confessions</a>, and Ulbricht’s own errors that were responsible for his conviction.</p>
<p>This is the main problem with these systems: breaking or circumventing anonymity software is hard, but it’s easy to build up evidence against an individual once you can target surveillance, and wait for them to slip up. </p>
<h2>The problem</h2>
<p>A design decision in the early days of the internet led to a problem: every message sent is tagged with the numerical Internet Protocol (IP) addresses that identify the source and destination computers. The network address indicates how and where to route the message, but there is no equivalent indicating the identity of the sender or intended recipient. </p>
<p>This conflation of addressing and identity is bad for privacy. Any internet traffic you send or receive will have your IP address attached to it. Typically a computer will only have one public IP address at a time, which means your online activity can be linked together using that address. Whether you like it or not, marketers, criminals or investigators use this sort of profiling without consent all the time. The way IP addresses are allocated is geographically and on a per-organisation basis, so it’s even possible to pinpoint a surprisingly accurate location.</p>
<p>This conflation of addressing and identity is also bad for security. The routing protocols which establish the best route between two points on the internet are not secure, and have been <a href="http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/11/repeated-attacks-hijack-huge-chunks-of-internet-traffic-researchers-warn/">exploited by attackers</a> to take control of (hijack) IP addresses they don’t legitimately own. Such attackers then have access to network traffic destined for the hijacked IP addresses, and also to anything the legitimate owner of the IP addresses should have access to.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/IzLPKuAOe50?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>This is why those looking for cat videos on YouTube on February 24, 2008 <a href="http://www.wired.com/2008/02/pakistans-accid/">found themselves at Pakistan Telecom instead</a>, why hackers made off with US$83,000 worth of bitcoin between February and May 2014 by impersonating the legitimate owners, and why hundreds of organisations found their communications <a href="http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/11/repeated-attacks-hijack-huge-chunks-of-internet-traffic-researchers-warn/">mysteriously routed via computers in Belarus and Iceland</a> in 2013.</p>
<h2>Redesigning with security in mind</h2>
<p>Onion routing was developed to correct these mistakes, separating identity and address so that it’s possible to communicate through the internet without revealing the IP address used. Originally a <a href="http://www.onion-router.net/">US Navy Research Laboratory project</a>, the latest implementation of onion routing is known as <a href="https://www.torproject.org/">Tor</a> and is independently developed by the non-profit Tor Project.</p>
<p>Tor routes internet traffic through three or more intermediate computers called nodes, which prevents anyone listening in – and any website the traffic connects to – from knowing the source of the traffic or working out who is communicating with whom. Even Tor nodes aren’t individually aware of the details of which user, where, is connecting to what. The first node sees the user’s IP address, the last knows which site is being accessed, but unless both the first and last nodes are controlled maliciously these two facts won’t be linked.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/71202/original/image-20150205-28618-1pf3ee.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/71202/original/image-20150205-28618-1pf3ee.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=384&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/71202/original/image-20150205-28618-1pf3ee.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=384&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/71202/original/image-20150205-28618-1pf3ee.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=384&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/71202/original/image-20150205-28618-1pf3ee.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=482&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/71202/original/image-20150205-28618-1pf3ee.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=482&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/71202/original/image-20150205-28618-1pf3ee.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=482&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">How Tor works.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://privacycanada.net">Privacy Canada/EFF</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Who uses Tor?</h2>
<p>There are all sorts of reasons to use Tor to protect privacy: law enforcement monitoring criminals, firms studying potential takeover targets, those who don’t like advertisers profiling them, or political activists in authoritarian states. An increasing number use Tor to access websites that are blocked in their country, as Tor’s anonymisation prevents the censor’s software from detecting the traffic is destined for a banned website.</p>
<p>As well as websites on the everyday internet, Tor allows the creation of <a href="https://www.torproject.org/docs/hidden-services.html.en">hidden services</a>: websites accessed only through the Tor network, of which the Silk Road is an example. This ensures privacy and security by identifying sites not with an IP address and domain name but with a cryptographic key. Without this key, there’s no way for a would-be eavesdropper to impersonate the real website and intercept traffic directed to it. These are represented by a URL ending in .onion – accessed with a Tor-enabled browser, Facebook is at <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/oct/31/facebook-anonymous-tor-users-onion">facebookcorewwwi.onion</a>.</p>
<h2>An evolving architecture</h2>
<p>Tor isn’t perfect. It can’t protect traffic that has left the Tor network, for example, where traffic becomes vulnerable to all the usual attacks. The solution to this is end-to-end encryption – preventing monitoring or tampering not only for Tor users but for everyone else on the internet too. </p>
<p>Another potential weakness is flaws in other software used with Tor. The <a href="http://www.wired.com/2013/09/freedom-hosting-fbi/">FBI distributed malware</a> to every visitor to a group of hidden services, some of which claimed to distribute child abuse images. The malware exploited a vulnerability in the Firefox web browser in order to send the real IP address of the user and other identifying information back to the FBI.</p>
<p>It’s been suggested that a flaw in the software behind the Silk Road gave the FBI the breakthrough that let them discover the IP address and so the real location of the Silk Road’s servers. But the lack of detail on this from the FBI, compared to the other evidence gleaned from Ulbricht’s server and laptop computer, has <a href="http://www.wired.com/2014/09/fbi-silk-road-hacking-question/">led some to ask</a> whether the FBI used techniques it doesn’t want openly discussed – such as the involvement of the National Security Agency and its vast surveillance infrastructure.</p>
<p>It could also have been what’s called a <a href="https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-security-advisory-relay-early-traffic-confirmation-attack">traffic confirmation attack</a>, where the entry and exit Tor nodes <a href="http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/11/law-enforcement-seized-tor-nodes-and-may-have-run-some-of-its-own/">are compromised</a> or monitored. Our own research has shown that this can <a href="http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/s.murdoch/papers/pet07ixanalysis.pdf">allow communications to be de-anonymised</a>, and researchers including myself are working on how to address this – by making it difficult or unlikely for any one person to control the entry and exit nodes, and by reducing the potential damage if this occurs.</p>
<p>The internet has come a long way since its beginnings, and simplifications and rationalisations made for good reasons at the time need to be re-visited in light of what’s been learned in the 40 years since. </p>
<p>Conflating addressing and identity is one of these decisions. Tor – useful in its own right – also indicates how the internet’s architecture should provide strong assurance of identity when needed, and strong privacy when not. Given enough resources, attackers will be able to de-anonymise at least some of Tor’s users, some of the time, but it’s still the best web privacy solution we have today. The next generation of systems will be better still.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/35395/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Steven J. Murdoch is member of The Tor Project.</span></em></p>The Silk Road trial has concluded, with Ross Ulbricht found guilty of running the anonymous online marketplace for illegal goods. But questions remain over how the FBI found its way through Tor, the software…Steven J. Murdoch, Royal Society University Research Fellow, UCLLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/346032014-12-07T19:19:55Z2014-12-07T19:19:55Z‘Haters gonna hate’ is no consolation for online moderators<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/66045/original/image-20141202-20565-1vdjan1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">We should help protect those who protect us from abuse online.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock/hitmanphoto</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>When trolls strike in website comment sections and across social media, we tend to look to curtail the perpetrators and help their targets. But what of the moderators – the often nameless and invisible people caught in the middle trying to police the flow of abusive, and often very offensive, material? </p>
<p>Unlike for professions such as <a href="http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11896-010-9066-7#page-1">forensic investigators</a>, there does not currently appear to be any research into the impact of all this on moderators. It’s time there was.</p>
<p>As someone who once enjoyed <a href="http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2014/09/why-we-hate-read.html">hate reading</a> comments sections, I thought I was prepared when, in 2011, I started moderating comments on social media at the ABC.</p>
<p>I was so wrong. My expected post-outrage glow was instead replaced with a desire to shower in scalding water – a lot.</p>
<p>This is largely because of the following:</p>
<ol>
<li>you have to read <em>all</em> the comments – even the ones no-one else sees because they’re so bad you’ve removed them</li>
<li>you have to do that until it’s time to go home</li>
<li>you have to do that <em>every time</em> you go to work.</li>
</ol>
<p>As a moderator I’ve dealt with the following: rape threats, racial slurs, hate speech against people who identify as <a href="http://www.beyondblue.org.au/resources/for-me/lesbian-gay-bi-trans-and-intersex-lgbti-people">LGBTI</a> or are non-Christian or immigrants or refugees, and that old staple – misogyny that makes the Middle Ages look enlightened.</p>
<p>I’ve also been abused for not getting comments down fast enough, for deleting or hiding them, been called a left-wing ideologue, a right-wing apparatchik, a “f—ing moron” and told to (insert sexual act of choice here).</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/66147/original/image-20141203-15602-vi9wt3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/66147/original/image-20141203-15602-vi9wt3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/66147/original/image-20141203-15602-vi9wt3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/66147/original/image-20141203-15602-vi9wt3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/66147/original/image-20141203-15602-vi9wt3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/66147/original/image-20141203-15602-vi9wt3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/66147/original/image-20141203-15602-vi9wt3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/66147/original/image-20141203-15602-vi9wt3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Is it possible for moderators to simply ignore the abuse as the ‘Haters gonna hate’ meme advises?</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/vipez/6998126716">Flickr/v i p e z</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But it’s not like it was personal – “<a href="http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/haters-gonna-hate">haters gonna hate</a>” as the meme goes – and I should probably just get over it, right?</p>
<h2>The moderator toll</h2>
<p>It’s very easy to think that trolling is only a problem for those who are specifically targeted. We, rightly, question the impact on their victims’ mental health as in the case of <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-02-23/charlotte-dawson-death-puts-focus-on-cyber-bullying/5277904">Charlotte Dawson</a> earlier this year. We talk about the <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886914000324">personality traits of trolls</a> and offer advice on the <a href="https://theconversation.com/five-ways-to-fight-online-abuse-with-good-manners-32393">best ways</a> to deal with them. </p>
<p>As recent articles on sites such as <a href="http://www.salon.com/2014/11/04/the_police_of_the_internet_why_the_human_costs_of_social_media_are_greater_than_you_think/">Salon</a> and <a href="http://www.wired.com/2014/10/content-moderation/">Wired</a> note, there is a toll on moderators, and it’s often high.</p>
<p>In an <a href="http://jezebel.com/we-have-a-rape-gif-problem-and-gawker-media-wont-do-any-1619384265">open letter</a> to parent company Gawker Media after months of inaction on their “rape gif problem”, staffers from feminist site Jezebel explicitly noted:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In refusing to address the problem, Gawker’s leadership is prioritizing theoretical anonymous tipsters over a very real and immediate threat to the mental health of Jezebel’s staff […]</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The problem is getting worse as organised groups targeting specific content get involved. When that occurs the constant river of comments can become a flash-flood.</p>
<p>Earlier this year, for example, a post (now deleted) on the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/abcnews.au">ABC News Facebook</a> wall was targeted by an anti-Mosque group. Within minutes of their call to arms the comments were flooded with hate speech, much of it cut-and paste.</p>
<p>It was almost impossible to keep up with the flow of horribly racist, religiously intolerant rants in the comments. It was almost a week before things settled down. </p>
<p>For all the moderators involved it was exhausting and dispiriting. </p>
<p>Recently we’ve seen heavy trolling of <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com.au/an-anti-muslim-facebook-group-is-targeting-australian-companies-for-making-halal-food-2014-10">companies who make Halal food</a> by anti-Muslim groups. There’s been similar targeting of posts on <a href="https://theconversation.com/vitriolic-abuse-of-anita-sarkeesian-why-the-games-industry-needs-her-31826">Gamergate</a>, and it’s an expected feature of articles on feminist issues or <a href="https://theconversation.com/cleaning-up-climate-comments-25914">climate change</a> or asylum seekers.</p>
<h2>What’s to be done?</h2>
<p>Most of the suggested solutions are aimed at trying to end trolling and incivility. Admirable though this is, it’s doomed to failure. </p>
<p>Pandora’s Box is well and truly opened on this one and that means we need to think damage control. </p>
<p>Tweaking the algorithms that automatically block offensive content, where you can, is a potential solution – but algorithms can be gamed. In the end, as a recent article in <a href="http://mashable.com/2014/09/28/moderating-the-trolls/">Mashable points out</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[…] new rules don’t necessarily mean moderators will see less awful content.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Steering clear of posting troll-bait items, while tempting, is self-censorship and a very slippery slope indeed. We could <a href="http://theconversation.com/popular-science-is-wrong-to-get-rid-of-online-comments-18674">get rid of comments</a> on those articles, but the jury’s still out on that tactic. </p>
<p>I’m sceptical about how well <a href="https://theconversation.com/using-real-names-is-just-one-way-of-cleaning-up-online-comments-24796">ending anonymity</a> will work. That assumes people don’t do things like make fake Facebook profiles – I’m looking at you the United States’ <a href="http://venturebeat.com/2014/10/18/facebook-to-federal-agents-no-you-dont-get-to-create-fake-profiles-to-ensnare-suspects/">Drug Enforcement Agency</a>.</p>
<p>We need research into the potential psychological impacts of moderation on those who do it. It’s very difficult to come up with effective strategies without it.</p>
<p>Platforms such as Facebook and, particularly, <a href="https://theconversation.com/abuse-of-women-on-twitter-no-quick-fix-but-thats-no-excuse-33943">Twitter</a> need to be better about responding to and acting on concerns when raised.</p>
<p>Employers can take a proactive approach – have regular and open conversations with moderators and take their concerns seriously. Offer support and properly resource them. Track and appropriately address the volume of comments – when and on what sites and posts they occur and how they are enabled.</p>
<p>Still, for all the bile, there are the diamonds – comments that reaffirm your belief in humankind and leave you floating on air. For those, on behalf of moderators past and present, thank you.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>Jennifer Beckett will be answering questions between 10am to 11am AEDT today, December 8. Ask your question in our comments (below) and please take note of our <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/community-standards">Community standards</a> on comments.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/34603/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jennifer Beckett does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>When trolls strike in website comment sections and across social media, we tend to look to curtail the perpetrators and help their targets. But what of the moderators – the often nameless and invisible…Jennifer Beckett, Lecturer in Media and Communications, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/333902014-10-24T05:40:04Z2014-10-24T05:40:04ZOnline anonymity isn’t as easy as the firms offering privacy apps want you to think<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/62662/original/gj9dvctt-1414083275.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C37%2C768%2C605&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">You can Whisper it, but don't expect it or you to stay secret forever.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.geograph.org.uk/more.php?id=2752764">Malcolm Campbell</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In a <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/the-nsa-files">post-Snowden</a> world, anonymity is what people want online. Smartphone apps offering anonymous messaging are popping up everywhere – <a href="https://www.secret.ly/">Secret</a>, <a href="http://whisper.sh/">Whisper</a> and now <a href="http://www.yikyakapp.com/">Yik Yak</a>. The latest additions to privacy-protecting technology, they claim to provide anonymous, location-based confession, expression, and discussion platforms. </p>
<p>But there are two major issues with these apps: the false sense of anonymity security they provide, and their potential as platforms for bullying. </p>
<h2>Coming back to bite you</h2>
<p>Anonymising social media apps such as these are run from a platform that is immediately identifying: your personal smartphone. Significant amounts of data about your identity and location are often used by these apps, not only to geo-locate you for things that are location-sensitive, such as locally restricted posts, but to track you as a unique user by associating your posts and data with unique identifiers such as your device’s internet <a href="http://whatismyipaddress.com/">IP address</a>, phone <a href="http://www.imei.info/">IMEI number</a>, and usage patterns. These can be used to block abusive users, send push notifications, track software errors, show personalised adverts, or enable other features. </p>
<p>Not only does this mean that users are not actually anonymous, but that the company can be asked to hand over this data by law enforcement or government officials. In fact, each of these three “anonymous” apps include statements in their privacy policies to this effect. </p>
<p>This is dangerous when, for example, Whisper claims to be able to protect whistleblowers through the anonymity it provides – <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/16/-sp-whisper-privacy-policy-terms-of-service">this is simply not true</a>. Fortunately the other apps don’t make such strong claims, but can still lure you into a false sense of security that what you say won’t come back to bite you later.</p>
<p>If you wish to be anonymous online, apps like this won’t give it to you. In fact, no apps on smartphones really can. True anonymity consists in technical and identity anonymity. This means finding a way to prevent tracking through geo-location, IP address, phone identification or usage patterns. This requires more robust but more difficult to use technologies <a href="https://theconversation.com/silk-road-bust-unmasks-our-misconceptions-on-anonymity-18974">such as Tor</a>, and the skill to use them properly. Until then, all you have is “pseudonymity”, and app-makers’ promises that they will “make it hard” for others to access your data. </p>
<p>Of course, anonymous apps’ actual lack of anonymity can help with the second problem, that of their potential use for bullying. These apps are aimed at young people who are particularly vulnerable to online bullying. Yik Yak has attempted to address this, after much criticism for allowing bullying to take place <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/13/amid-vicious-bullying-threats-of-violence-anonymous-social-app-yik-yak-shuts-off-access-to-u-s-middle-high-school-students/">by geofencing schools</a>, prohibiting use of the app within a school area.</p>
<p>However, this doesn’t stop bullying away from schools. Yik Yak has tried to counter this by removing negatively rated posts, blocking users that frequently post negative content, introducing rules prohibiting bullying, and relying on peer review of posts to ensure problems are flagged up. But there’s still been significant problems with abuse.</p>
<p>Whisper also has moderators that respond to negative content, tracking problem users and banning them. Secret, which uses similar methods, including algorithmic detection of bullying, user flagging, and moderation, is reported to have problems countering bullies. So is it so bad that these apps aren’t truly anonymous? At least then bullies, which can cause so much grief, can be dissuaded from their activities or brought to justice. But there are situations where, as a society, anonymity is needed or desired for good reasons – in oppressive areas, to reach out to people for advice, to blow the whistle. </p>
<h2>Society won’t allow anonymity</h2>
<p>This illustrates the problems with anonymous smartphone apps to begin with – they can never be fully anonymous partly because society won’t let them. Society will want safeguards against bullies or threatening behaviour to be built into any easy-to-access social media technology that is used by children and young adults. Inevitably that requires removing much of any anonymising aspects. This sort of technology also never works well with the requirements of start-up companies, because at some point the start-up needs to make money, and that is often based on knowledge about their user base. </p>
<p>It is also a reminder that the technology we develop is never value-neutral. Society shapes technology, which in turn shapes society. Sometimes these values conflict, and it’s hard to know how to prioritise. Anonymity is a very difficult problem in itself: app developers shouldn’t muddy the waters offering anonymity when they can’t deliver, and they should also be very clear as to the reasons for not offering that anonymity. </p>
<p>Users who wish to remain anonymous should beware of “too easy to be true” offerings and stick to tried and tested methods, else what they say under the guise of “anonymity” might just come back to bite them.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/33390/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Catherine Flick does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>In a post-Snowden world, anonymity is what people want online. Smartphone apps offering anonymous messaging are popping up everywhere – Secret, Whisper and now Yik Yak. The latest additions to privacy-protecting…Catherine Flick, Senior Lecturer in Computing & Social Responsibility, De Montfort UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/293342014-07-22T19:56:47Z2014-07-22T19:56:47ZAny name will do from now on says Google – why the change?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/54499/original/y6n3ws74-1405991132.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C366%2C4368%2C2445&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Google changes its policy on usernames.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/bump/3806115100">Flickr/Robert Occhialini </a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/">CC BY-NC</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Google has announced a surprising end to its controversial “Real Name” policy with a contrite post on Google+, telling users that there are “<a href="https://plus.google.com/+googleplus/posts/V5XkYQYYJqy">no more restrictions</a>” on the names people can use.</p>
<p>This is a dramatic change in policy for the company which suspended users <a href="http://www.zdnet.com/blog/violetblue/google-plus-deleting-accounts-en-masse-no-clear-answers/567">en masse in 2011</a> for using pseudonyms – an event that users have since described as <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/technology/pda/2011/aug/04/google-plus-pseudonym-wars">The Nymwars</a>. </p>
<p>The policy had been criticised since for being capriciously enforced, allowing celebrities such as American musician <a href="https://plus.google.com/+SouljaBoy/posts">Soulja Boy</a> (real name <a href="http://www.sodmg.com/bio">DeAndre Cortez Way</a>) to use a pseudonym on the network, but ignoring users who wanted to do the same.</p>
<p>Some users who used their real name on the social network even ran afoul of Google because their names did not fit the <a href="http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/">assumptions</a> that Google employees made about about what counts as a <em>real</em> name.</p>
<p>Technology writer <a href="http://www.crikey.com.au/2011/08/17/google-plus-real-names-policy/">Stilgherrian</a> and reporter <a href="http://www.zdnet.com/blog/violetblue/google-plus-too-much-unnecessary-drama/652">Violet Blue</a> have both documented their problems with Google’s name policing wrongly affecting them, even though they used their real names. </p>
<p>The policy became even more vexed in recent months, as Google integrated Google+ with <a href="http://thenextweb.com/google/2013/11/05/kitkat-shows-caller-ids-from-google-places-apps-customers-adding-personal-accounts-in-early-2014/">Android</a>, <a href="http://gmailblog.blogspot.com.au/2014/01/reach-people-you-know-more-easily.html">Gmail</a> and <a href="http://youtube-global.blogspot.com.au/2013/11/youtube-new-comments.html">YouTube</a>, where users expected support for pseudonyms.</p>
<p>Although some users hoped that <a href="http://www.wired.com/2012/06/youtube-commenters/">Google+‘s real names</a> would fix YouTube’s nasty comment ecosystem, it became a <a href="http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/11/youtube-tries-to-stem-the-flow-of-a-new-kind-of-terrible-comments/">controversial change</a> for many YouTube users. </p>
<h2>Why does this change matter?</h2>
<p>The change to Google’s policy is important because it shows a change in attitude towards rights of users online.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/54514/original/dyh6cyjq-1405996740.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/54514/original/dyh6cyjq-1405996740.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/54514/original/dyh6cyjq-1405996740.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=404&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/54514/original/dyh6cyjq-1405996740.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=404&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/54514/original/dyh6cyjq-1405996740.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=404&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/54514/original/dyh6cyjq-1405996740.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=508&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/54514/original/dyh6cyjq-1405996740.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=508&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/54514/original/dyh6cyjq-1405996740.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=508&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Protecting your identity online - do others need to know who you are?</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/161547780">Flickr/Thomas Hawk</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/">CC BY-NC</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/05/us-google-names-idUSBRE9240HS20130305">Vint Cerf</a>, a senior executive at Google, had argued that “anonymity and pseudonymity are perfectly reasonable under some situations”, especially where using a <em>real</em> name could endanger a user. </p>
<p>The new policy should bring Google into line with the <a href="http://www.oaic.gov.au/privacy/applying-privacy-law/app-guidelines/chapter-2-app-2-anonymity-and-pseudonymity">Australian Privacy Principles for Anonymity and Pseudonymity</a> announced by the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (<a href="http://www.oaic.gov.au">OAIC</a>) this year.</p>
<p>While we might normally consider names and pseudonyms purely as markers of our identity, the OAIC argues that anonymity and pseudonymity are important privacy concepts that allow people to have greater control over their personal information.</p>
<h2>Why are pseudonyms so contentious?</h2>
<p>Letting people adopt a pseudonym or participate anonymously gives users a freedom to participate without fear of retribution. Academics call this <em>disinhibition</em>. </p>
<p>The freedom from restraint that anonymity brings isn’t a particularly new concern. In the 1970s Johnny Carson told The New Yorker that <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1978/02/20/1978_02_20_047_TNY_CARDS_000326477?currentPage=all">he couldn’t bear</a> citizen’s band (CB) radio:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[..] all those sick anonymous maniacs shooting off their mouths.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Similarly, writers have told stories of morality and anonymity since Plato’s Republic and the <a href="http://www.enotes.com/homework-help/why-does-glycon-tell-plato-story-ring-gyges-364968">Ring of Gyges</a> which grants its wearer the power to become invisible, similar to the ring in Tolkien’s <a href="http://www.enotes.com/topics/lord-rings/themes">The Lord of the Rings</a>.</p>
<p>This freedom can be valuable for people at <a href="http://infotrope.net/2011/07/25/preliminary-results-of-my-survey-of-suspended-google-accounts/">risk of harm</a>, as it can allow them to seek support or to participate in online communities without fear of being stalked or persecuted.</p>
<p>Similarly, lesbian, gay and transgender users at risk of discrimination can participate online without being publicly outed. It can also allow people the freedom to express themselves without endangering their relationships with friends and colleagues.</p>
<p>Employees even risk retribution when their employers perceive that their online behaviour reflects on their workplace. US Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens argued that <a href="https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/07/case-pseudonyms">anonymity is protected</a> as part of their right to free speech as it can “protect unpopular individuals from retaliation — and their ideas from suppression”.</p>
<h2>The problem with anonymity</h2>
<p>The catch is that this freedom also empowers people who wish to hurt and harass others. “<a href="https://theconversation.com/stop-the-trolls-how-to-prevent-cyber-stalking-happening-to-you-5460">Trolls</a>” can operate anonymously because it can free them from responsibility for their actions.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/54520/original/npkxhvn8-1406004924.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/54520/original/npkxhvn8-1406004924.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/54520/original/npkxhvn8-1406004924.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/54520/original/npkxhvn8-1406004924.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/54520/original/npkxhvn8-1406004924.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/54520/original/npkxhvn8-1406004924.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/54520/original/npkxhvn8-1406004924.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/54520/original/npkxhvn8-1406004924.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Some people may benefit from not using their real name.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/sheila_blige/3875157925">Flickr/sheila blige</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This becomes particularly problematic when anonymous or pseudonymous users threaten people with harm. A number of women have written about the <a href="http://www.feministfrequency.com/2012/06/harassment-misogyny-and-silencing-on-youtube/">bullying</a> and <a href="http://www.psmag.com/navigation/health-and-behavior/women-arent-welcome-internet-72170/">violent threats</a> they regularly experience at the hands of anonymous trolls.</p>
<p>In some moderated online environments, users are protected from these kinds of speech by the thankless work of <a href="http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/hate-sinks/">comment moderators</a> who help to manage online communities. </p>
<p>Ultimately, Google+’s new policy will empower people by letting them participate on the network with greater control over the identity they use. This will help trolls and new participants alike. It falls to Google and its team of moderators to make sure that the network remains a safe place for users.</p>
<p>Google’s policy change shows that the company has become responsive to user concerns. We should consider that for many websites, creating an environment where users are free to participate, and free from harm is a difficult affair.</p>
<p>As for The Conversation, it still favours people <a href="https://theconversation.com/real-names-on-the-conversation-24978">registering with their real name</a> as part of its aim for transparency in any debate.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/29334/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Andrew Quodling does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Google has announced a surprising end to its controversial “Real Name” policy with a contrite post on Google+, telling users that there are “no more restrictions” on the names people can use. This is a…Andrew Quodling, PhD Candidate, Queensland University of TechnologyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/261732014-05-05T20:35:22Z2014-05-05T20:35:22ZIs Facebook finally taking anonymity seriously?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/47751/original/znbcrf5g-1399254001.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Facebook experimenting with a level of anonymity for users on the social media platform.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/smileham/3387867021">Flickr/Steven Mileham</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/">CC BY-NC</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Having some form of anonymity online offers many people a kind of freedom. Whether it’s used for exposing corruption or just experimenting socially online it provides a way for the content (but not its author) to be seen. </p>
<p>But this freedom can also easily be abused by those who use anonymity to troll, abuse or harass others, which is why Facebook has previously been opposed to “<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/27/randi-zuckerberg-anonymity-online_n_910892.html">anonymity on the internet</a>”.</p>
<p>So in announcing that it will allow users to <a href="http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2014/04/f8-introducing-anonymous-login-and-an-updated-facebook-login/">log in to apps anonymously</a>, is Facebook taking anonymity seriously?</p>
<h2>Real identities on Facebook</h2>
<p>CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been committed to Facebook as a site for users to have <a href="https://www.facebook.com/help/206559146047897?sr=6&sid=0Wnix42wV4mxjVEXL">a single real identity</a> since its beginning a decade ago as a platform to connect college students. Today, Facebook’s core business is still about connecting people with those they already know.</p>
<p>But there have been <a href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304772804575558484075236968">concerns</a> about what personal information is revealed when people use any <a href="https://www.facebook.com/appcenter/">third-party apps</a> on Facebook. </p>
<p>So this latest announcement aims to address any reluctance some users may have to sign in to third-party apps. Users will soon be able to log in to them without revealing any of their wealth of personal information.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/47786/original/22vsjbdw-1399263148.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/47786/original/22vsjbdw-1399263148.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/47786/original/22vsjbdw-1399263148.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=460&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47786/original/22vsjbdw-1399263148.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=460&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47786/original/22vsjbdw-1399263148.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=460&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47786/original/22vsjbdw-1399263148.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=578&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47786/original/22vsjbdw-1399263148.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=578&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47786/original/22vsjbdw-1399263148.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=578&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Keeping things hidden third-party apps on Facebook.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/christophaigner/5853275494">Flickr/Christoph Aigner</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>That does not mean they will be anonymous to Facebook – the social media site will still track user activity.</p>
<p>It might seem like the beginning of a shift away from singular, fixed identities, but tweaking privacy settings hardly indicates that Facebook is <a href="http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/233551">embracing anonymity</a>. It’s a long way from changing how third-party apps are approached to changing Facebook’s entire real-name culture.</p>
<p>Facebook still insists that “<a href="https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms">users provide their real names and information</a>”, which it describes as an ongoing “commitment” users make to the platform.</p>
<h2>Changing the Facebook experience?</h2>
<p>Having the option to log in to third-party apps anonymously does not necessarily mean Facebook users will actually use it. Effective use of Facebook’s privacy settings depends on user knowledge and motivation, and not all users opt in.</p>
<p>A recent <a href="http://www.pewinternet.org/2013/09/05/anonymity-privacy-and-security-online/">Pew Research Center report</a> reveals that the most common strategy people use to be less visible online is to clear their cookies and browser history.</p>
<p>Only 14% of those interviewed said they had used a service to browse the internet anonymously. So, for most Facebook users, their experience won’t change.</p>
<h2>Facebook login on other apps and websites</h2>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/47788/original/b4ftqdfw-1399264194.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/47788/original/b4ftqdfw-1399264194.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/47788/original/b4ftqdfw-1399264194.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47788/original/b4ftqdfw-1399264194.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47788/original/b4ftqdfw-1399264194.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47788/original/b4ftqdfw-1399264194.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1154&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47788/original/b4ftqdfw-1399264194.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1154&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47788/original/b4ftqdfw-1399264194.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1154&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Spotify uses Facebook login.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.spotify.com/au/">Spotify</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Facebook offers users the ability to use their authenticated Facebook identity to log in to third-party web services and mobile apps. At its simplest and most appealing level, this alleviates the need for users to fill in all their details when signing up for a new app. Instead they can just click the “Log in with Facebook” button.</p>
<p>For online corporations whose businesses depend on building detailed user profiles to attract advertisers, authentication is a real boon. It means they know exactly what apps people are using and when they log in to them.</p>
<p>Automated data flows can often push information back into the authenticating service (such as the music someone is playing on Spotify turning up in their Facebook newsfeed).</p>
<p>While having one account to log in to a range of apps and services is certainly handy, this convenience means it’s almost impossible to tell what information is being shared.</p>
<p>Is Facebook just sharing your email address and full name, or is it providing your date of birth, most recent location, hometown, a full list of friends and so forth? Understandably, this again raises privacy concerns for many people.</p>
<h2>How anonymous login works</h2>
<p>To address these concerns, Facebook is testing anonymous login as well as a more granular approach to authentication. (It’s worth noting, neither of these changes have been made available to users yet.)</p>
<p>Given the long history of <a href="http://www.danah.org/papers/FacebookPrivacyTrainwreck.pdf">privacy missteps by Facebook</a>, the new login appears to be a step forward. Users will be told what information an app is requesting, and have the option of selectively deciding which of those items Facebook should actually provide.</p>
<p>Facebook will also ask users whether they want to allow the app to post information to Facebook on their behalf. Significantly, this now places the onus on users to manage the way Facebook shares their information on their behalf.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/j79AUHN8CwU?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">The New Facebook Login.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In <a href="http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2014/04/f8-introducing-anonymous-login-and-an-updated-facebook-login/">describing anonymous login</a>, Facebook explains that:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Sometimes people want to try out apps, but they’re not ready to share any information about themselves.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It’s certainly useful to try out apps without having to fill in and establish a full profile, but very few apps can actually operate without some sort of persistent user identity.</p>
<p>The implication is once a user has tested an app, to use its full functionality they’ll have to set up a profile, probably by allowing Facebook to share some of their data with the app or service.</p>
<h2>Taking on the competition</h2>
<p>The value of identity and anonymity are both central to the current social media war to gain user attention and loyalty.</p>
<p>Facebook’s anonymous login might cynically be seen as an attempt to court users who have flocked to <a href="http://www.snapchat.com/">Snapchat</a>, an app which has anonymity built into its design from the outset.</p>
<p>Snapchat’s creators famously turned down a <a href="http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/13/5100446/snapchat-turned-down-3-billion-facebook-acquisition-offer">US$3 billion</a> buyout bid from Facebook. Last week it also revealed part of its <a href="http://blog.snapchat.com/post/84407744185/putting-the-chat-into-snapchat">competitive plan</a>, an updated version of Snapchat that offers seamless real-time video and text chat.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/UvhiRIT5DvU?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Introducing chat for Snapchat.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>By default, these conversations disappear as soon as they’ve happened, but users can select important items to hold on to.</p>
<p>Whether competing with Snapchat, or any number of other social media services, Facebook will have to continue to consider the way identity and anonymity are valued by users. At the moment its flirting with anonymity is tokenistic at best.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/26173/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Tama Leaver receives funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC).</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Emily van der Nagel does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Having some form of anonymity online offers many people a kind of freedom. Whether it’s used for exposing corruption or just experimenting socially online it provides a way for the content (but not its…Tama Leaver, Senior Lecturer in Internet Studies, Curtin UniversityEmily van der Nagel, PhD candidate, Faculty of Health, Arts and Design and The Swinburne Institute for Social Research, Swinburne University of TechnologyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/230922014-02-13T06:01:52Z2014-02-13T06:01:52ZIf you really want to help a troubled teen, don’t like their YouTube video<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/41270/original/kzgmdg4w-1392131078.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Are you doing more harm than good when you comment online?</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">darthdowney</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Amanda Todd was a 15-year-old Canadian girl who took her own life in <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/b-c-girl-s-suicide-foreshadowed-by-video-1.1217831">October 2012</a>. Prior to her death, she had been the victim of extensive and prolonged cyber-bullying on Facebook, YouTube and other social media platforms and allegedly subject to cyber-extortion.</p>
<p>Her last name has now occasioned the coining of a new, and quite morbid, expression on the web – “<a href="http://knowyourmeme.com/photos/419324-amanda-todds-death">todding</a>”. The story is an example of how the lack of consequences for some behaviour online can lead to serious and distressing consequences for others. </p>
<p>“Todding” apparently refers to campaigns of abuse against selected individuals on the web. After being exposed to such campaigns victims (who are often teenagers) may experience stress, depression and anxiety attacks to substance abuse problems. Todd, said she experienced all of these.</p>
<h2>Likes won’t save a life</h2>
<p>Around a month before she died at her home in British Columbia, Todd posted a video on YouTube entitled <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOHXGNx-E7E">My Story: struggling, bullying, suicide, self harm</a> in which she uses cue cards to describe the cyber-bullying she has experienced and her descent into self harm. It ends with an appeal for help.</p>
<p>The video went viral almost immediately and has been viewed more than 8m times. What is important here is that a large number of views – reportedly as many as <a href="http://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/tormenters-target-amanda-todd-s-online-memorials-amid-police-probe-1.994594">1.6m</a> – took place before Todd’s death. By Saturday, October 13, 2012, the day after Todd’s death, the video had more than <a href="http://metro.co.uk/2012/10/13/bullied-teen-amanda-todd-made-youtube-video-before-suicide-599773/">9,000 comments</a>. Today there are more than 170,000 comments.</p>
<p>Before Todd’s death, the media had picked up the video, reposted it and attracted a vast number of “likes” as a result. But despite all this coverage, all the “likes”, comments and words of support online, if there was any intervention to help Todd in real life, it appears to have been insufficient to prevent her from taking her own life.</p>
<p>The sheer number of views and comments show our depth of feeling when something as tragic as a teenager’s suicide comes to our attention. Amanda Todd’s attempt to reach the public succeeded in the sense that a great many people apparently witnessed her cry for help. So why did none of our concern translate into offline action?</p>
<h2>A neutral act</h2>
<p>Views, comments and <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-facebook-changed-what-it-means-to-like-22365">“likes”</a> often feel like a powerful online currency to the recipient but they are cost neutral in the sense that virtual disapproval doesn’t commit the individual to real intervention.</p>
<p>Since the individual, private user, as well as public media, observe that everybody else is disapproving without committing to intervention, then it becomes legitimate, indeed the norm, to disapprove and sympathise with Amanda Todd in this very way without feeling any pressure to do anything more about it. This is the case even if every individual privately thinks that more should be done.</p>
<p>As a result, we come to subscribe publicly to a norm we might privately find questionable because, as psychologists <a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Theory_and_problems_of_social_psychology.html?id=dLshAAAAMAAJ&redir_esc=y">Krech and Crutchfield</a> suggest, “no one believes, but everyone believes that everyone else believes”.</p>
<p>This is a state of collective belief referred to as <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/meta.12028/abstract">pluralistic ignorance</a> in social psychology and it doesn’t get any better while everybody stands on the sidelines watching while the ignorance goes uncontrollably viral. In doing so we aggravate the problem. We personally contribute to the bystander apathy with every supporting “like”.</p>
<p>The same group behaviour could be seen among Todd’s bullies, both before and after her death. Within a day, “R.I.P. Amanda Todd” became a worldwide trend on Twitter and thousands of Facebook users liked a memorial page that was quickly set up. But comments such as “I’m so happy she is dead” and pictures making light of her suffering continued to appear. </p>
<p>The cyber-bullying continued even after Amanda Todd’s death because it is as cost neutral to bully online as it is to sympathise. The cascade mechanisms are the same when based on <a href="https://theconversation.com/all-those-likes-and-upvotes-are-bad-news-for-democracy-21547">social proof</a>. New social media can’t block human propensities to do either good or bad deeds but they have an unfortunate ability to reinforce already existing tendencies.</p>
<p>We have long been prone to making irrational choices when acting in a crowd but now that crowd is a faceless, nameless group of millions and we are more removed from the consequences of our behaviour than ever before.</p>
<p>Next time you feel moved to share a video or show your online approval, it’s worth considering if there is something more you could or should do. Otherwise you may just be making things worse.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/23092/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Vincent F Hendricks does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Amanda Todd was a 15-year-old Canadian girl who took her own life in October 2012. Prior to her death, she had been the victim of extensive and prolonged cyber-bullying on Facebook, YouTube and other social…Vincent F Hendricks, Professor of Formal Philosophy, University of CopenhagenLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/213502013-12-11T06:25:12Z2013-12-11T06:25:12ZA digital rights bill means nothing without basic state compliance<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/37364/original/qrrr9y32-1386704624.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=9%2C64%2C2038%2C1272&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The backlash against state surveillance is growing stronger by the day.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">ubiquit</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>More than 500 high-profile names, including authors, musicians and five Nobel laureates, have signed a <a href="http://www.change.org/petitions/a-stand-for-democracy-in-the-digital-age-3">petition</a> to the United Nations calling for a bill of digital rights to be developed in the wake of this year’s revelations about state surveillance. </p>
<p>The petition, signed by Margaret Atwood, Tom Stoppard and Günter Grass, among others, condemns the mass surveillance that has been revealed over the last few months, starting with the NSA secrets <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/the-nsa-files">revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden</a>. Titled A Stand for Democracy in a Digital Age, the petition says mass surveillance is an affront on human rights and treats every citizen as a suspect.</p>
<p>Down the road, it seems likely that Snowden’s revelations will be seen as the tipping point in the digital human rights debate.</p>
<h2>A question of rights</h2>
<p>This is about so much more than privacy. The petition implicitly recognises privacy as a necessary component to the exercise of the right to freedom of expression and assembly. “A person under surveillance is no longer free; a society under surveillance is no longer a democracy,” it states, alluding to what I would argue are the core objectives of all human rights (and on this, I admit, there is no consensus): human dignity and autonomy.</p>
<p>While surveillance is receiving a significant amount of attention at the moment, many of us who work in this area know that discussions about digital rights have been going on for some time.</p>
<p>The <a href="http://internetrightsandprinciples.org/site/">Internet Rights and Principles Charter</a> in particular has been an important step. This concludes that the current human rights framework is sound but that we need to articulate what we mean by human rights in the internet environment. Drawing from the UN International Bill of Human Rights, the IRP Charter explains, amongst other things, that states must enact laws to protect the privacy and data of their citizens, which should include the protection of personal data, the right to anonymity and freedom from surveillance.</p>
<p>A lot of the questions remain unanswered and they are both fundamental and legal in nature. We need to think about whether a binding charter is needed or whether we simply need to clarify the meaning of rights in the digital age.</p>
<h2>The private sector in your private life</h2>
<p>The petition also calls for respect of human rights by both states and corporations. This challenges the legal model of human rights, which historically has focused on the relationship between citizens and the state.</p>
<p>The role of businesses in respecting human rights has been articulated in the <a href="http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Publications/GuidingPrinciplesBusinessHR_EN.pdf">UN Guiding Principles</a> but the responsibilities they describe are still largely extra-legal in nature. One of the problems revealed in the wake of the Snowden affair has been the pressure put on businesses to <a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/01/bt_vodafone_verizon_gchq_undersea_fiber/">facilitate the surveillance of citizens</a>. It has not been clear if companies have been complicit in the spying or if they were pressured into supplying information to governments but it is clear that saying businesses should respect human rights is far from a straightforward proposition in this day and age.</p>
<p>In this respect, a formal charter would have its advantages. It would bind states to ensure these rights are protected in their countries, which would include infringements by businesses. It might be argued that this already exists in our current human rights system, but that states are simply failing in their obligations to protect our rights. And quite frankly, when states are at once the protector of our rights and the very ones abusing them, the limitations of the legal system as it currently exists become alarmingly clear.</p>
<p>Perhaps the problem here is not a lack of law, but the failure of states to comply with what the right to privacy already entails. This means the role of the public in the human rights system cannot be underestimated. Groups such as the one that has emerged behind this petition are vital if we are to continue to push governments into respecting our existing freedoms. </p>
<h2>Our right to be forgotten</h2>
<p>There are other sticking points in the vision set out in the petition, though. What these campaigners seek is not only freedom from surveillance, but necessarily a right to be forgotten once our data has been collected.</p>
<p>The right to be forgotten, at its most basic level, means a right to control the information that is available about you on the internet, usually through a process of deletion. This is harder than it seems. There are unanswered questions about what happens to data that relates to more than one citizen, what actually qualifies as personal data and who owns data about you. The issue is currently subject to a <a href="http://www.change.org/petitions/a-stand-for-democracy-in-the-digital-age-3">turbulent debate</a> in Europe and the thought of scaling any resulting policy up to a global level poses an even greater challenge.</p>
<p>It will be equally difficult to reach an international consensus on the right to anonymity or pseudonymity. Rights of anonymity are more entrenched in American consciousness than in Europe and there is a very fine line between using anonymity to enable free speech and using it to facilitate hate. Anonymity allows us to be part of online groups that can support self-exploration or help us to circumvent oppressive state censorship in a way that would be impossible if you were forced to reveal your identity. But at the same time, to say that we have a right to anonymous speech ignores the devastating impact of hate speech and bullying endured by the victims of such speech. Nevertheless, we need to have this debate if we are to have a bill of digital rights.</p>
<p>The petition is a welcome formalisation of the public’s anger and feelings of violation upon learning of the programme of mass surveillance carried out by states. The call for scrutiny by the UN is also welcome. A proposal for a bill of digital rights, however, is not necessarily a realistic cause.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/21350/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Emilly Laidlaw is a member of the Management Committee for and a researcher for the Centre for Creativity, Regulation, Enterprise and Technology (CREATe).</span></em></p>More than 500 high-profile names, including authors, musicians and five Nobel laureates, have signed a petition to the United Nations calling for a bill of digital rights to be developed in the wake of…Emily Laidlaw, Lecturer in information technology, intellectual property and media law, University of East AngliaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/201772013-12-04T06:31:21Z2013-12-04T06:31:21ZHard evidence: how much is your data worth to you?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/36810/original/vfktftrv-1386075670.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Data protection may soon come at a price.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Randomskk</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Data privacy is on our minds like never before. In a relatively small amount of time many of us have gone from carrying out our daily transactions in person to conducting them digitally. We pay energy bills online, conduct banking online and interact with friends online. All these transactions leave a trail of data as we go. While it is often promised that this data is secure, it can often also be used by undisclosed third parties.</p>
<p>The data can be used to improve the service we get but we also know that sometimes it is used to sell us more things. While almost all of us carry out digital transactions, few of us have got to grips with what it actually means to let our data out of our sight.</p>
<p>Companies usually won’t share our identifiable data without telling us but many of them profit by either using it themselves or selling it off to others, whether aggregating it with other people’s data or after performing some analysis on it. By combining different types of data, such as spending and GPS location, these companies gain valuable insight into our habits.</p>
<p>We are moving towards a world in which companies could spring up with offers to manage our data on our behalf. But how much would you be willing to pay to keep that data under lock and key? </p>
<p>In our research <a href="http://www.horizon.ac.uk/Current-Projects/becoming-dataware">project</a>, we asked a group of participants to think about different types of data, including physical location GPS, electricity bills, broadband usage, mobile phone bills, loyalty cards, internet browsing, demographics, social networking and bank statements. We wanted to find out whether people see these different types of data differently and how concerned they were about their information being protected.</p>
<h2>Fear and function</h2>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/36811/original/mzqhpp5v-1386076673.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/36811/original/mzqhpp5v-1386076673.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/36811/original/mzqhpp5v-1386076673.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=215&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/36811/original/mzqhpp5v-1386076673.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=215&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/36811/original/mzqhpp5v-1386076673.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=215&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/36811/original/mzqhpp5v-1386076673.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=271&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/36811/original/mzqhpp5v-1386076673.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=271&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/36811/original/mzqhpp5v-1386076673.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=271&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">How do security concerns weigh up against benefit?</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">University of Nottingham</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>62 participants commented on what they thought about different pieces of personal data and whether each was associated more with security concerns or potential benefits. Security is an important theme when people talk about their physical location, mobile phone bills, social networking or bank statement data. Participants were recorded as saying that data like this was personal and should only be shared when it is necessary to do so. </p>
<p>But it appears the benefits far outweigh security concerns when it comes to loyalty card data. Participants said there are benefits in sharing this type of information and even that the information contained on loyalty cards “can’t harm me or anyone”. When participants said they wouldn’t share personal information on social networks, their motivation appeared to be related to security.</p>
<p>Participants also said that some of their data was connected to other types of information. The types of data considered to be linked to others included physical location, broadband usage, internet browsing history and social networking data. Bank statement data was not considered to be particularly linked to other types of data, which might mean that people don’t see bank statement information as reflecting any other aspects of their life other than spending money. But that is not necessarily true. Our bank statement data can be used in conjunction with other types of data such as electricity bill information to better understand our habits and even predict our future behaviours, such as the likelihood that we will pay off a credit card bill. </p>
<h2>How much are they willing to pay?</h2>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/36831/original/7mm3cgpw-1386092812.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/36831/original/7mm3cgpw-1386092812.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/36831/original/7mm3cgpw-1386092812.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/36831/original/7mm3cgpw-1386092812.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/36831/original/7mm3cgpw-1386092812.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/36831/original/7mm3cgpw-1386092812.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/36831/original/7mm3cgpw-1386092812.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/36831/original/7mm3cgpw-1386092812.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Coughing up for data protection.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">University of Notthingham</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Next we asked another group of 60 participants to imagine they had a new smartphone app that would collect their personal data from transaction such as those described above. They were given the choice of either paying a fee to stop their data being shared anonymously with the company that provided the service in the first place or to use the “free” version of the app, which would allow their data to be shared. They could decide to pay either £20 or between 50p and £15 in cases where they would agree to a fee. </p>
<p>Nearly 70% said they would pay up to £20 to protect their bank statements and digital communication history data but only 20% of participants were prepared to pay the same amount to protect data from household bills, online purchasing history, internet browsing and search history, and demographic information.</p>
<p>Again, the lack of security concerns about loyalty card data shows through, with 70% of participants saying they would not be willing to pay anything to protect this kind of data. There was also limited interest in paying to prevent web browser search history or demographic information being shared. Again, protecting social networking info is a priority, with 80% of participants willing to pay to have it kept private and 50% agreeing to pay the £20 premium.</p>
<h2>Which data is most important?</h2>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/36832/original/4pvzfns9-1386092988.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/36832/original/4pvzfns9-1386092988.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/36832/original/4pvzfns9-1386092988.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/36832/original/4pvzfns9-1386092988.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/36832/original/4pvzfns9-1386092988.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/36832/original/4pvzfns9-1386092988.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=533&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/36832/original/4pvzfns9-1386092988.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=533&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/36832/original/4pvzfns9-1386092988.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=533&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Different values for different data.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">University of Nottingham</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>A third study involving a questionnaire filled out by 853 participants reinforced the findings of the first two. People were found to be willing to pay the highest amount to protect bank statement data, which was shown to carry a value of up to £30. The second most important type of information seems to be social network profiles and history and physical location data. People care a little bit less about broadband bills, mobile phone bills, loyalty cards, internet browsing history, demographic information, but they will still pay something to protect it.</p>
<p>The least important data for our participants was electricity bill data – which is surprising, given how much value energy companies are leveraging from this kind of data about individual behaviours at home.</p>
<p>All in all, the figures show that participants were well aware of the security risks associated with their bank details. However, loyalty card information or household energy data does not seem to be a particularly significant concern for most, even though this type of information is used by shops and energy companies on a very granular level to make decisions that affect our purchasing on a daily basis. It’s a sign of the changing times we live in that many appear to see this as a benefit.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/20177/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Anya Skatova does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Data privacy is on our minds like never before. In a relatively small amount of time many of us have gone from carrying out our daily transactions in person to conducting them digitally. We pay energy…Anya Skatova, Research Fellow, Horizon Digital Economy Research Institute, University of NottinghamLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/204572013-11-20T06:18:41Z2013-11-20T06:18:41ZThe linguistic clues that reveal your true Twitter identity<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/35603/original/v786mxvd-1384865616.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">I can haz online anonymous? Probs not, depending on your lingo.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">striatic</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Twitter is awash with trolls, spammers and misanthropes, all keen to ruin your day with a mean-spirited message or even a threat that can cause you genuine fear. It seems all too easy to set up an account and cause trouble anonymously, but an emerging field of research is making it easier to track perpetrators by looking at the way they use language when they chat. </p>
<h2>The first Twitter criminal?</h2>
<p>The <a href="https://twitter.com/search?src=typd&q=%23twitterjoketrial">#TwitterJokeTrial</a> was an early, if unfortunate, example of an apparent Twitter crime. Paul Chambers, frustrated at being prevented from visiting his girlfriend when snow disrupted transport, tweeted:</p>
<p>“Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!”</p>
<p>Chambers was at first prosecuted for sending a message of “menacing character”, but he later raised a successful appeal against his conviction. The message was nevertheless clear: be careful what you write, either be nice or be anonymous.</p>
<h2>Anonymous virtue?</h2>
<p>We’ve learned from these incidents that if you want to say something controversial or aggressive on Twitter, you’d probably better do it from an account not tied to your real name.</p>
<p>The perceived anonymity of Twitter trolls seemed to facilitate the trolling attacks experienced by <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/global/2013/oct/29/trolling-abuse-mp-stella-creasy-police-online">Caroline Criado-Perez and Stella Creasy MP</a> this summer. Criado-Perez and Creasy had been running a campaign to have a woman represented on UK bank notes, and so became subject to a vitriolic misogynist attack, all via the medium of Twitter. In this case, policing has led to arrests, despite the fact that trolls opened multiple accounts to hide their identities when conducting their attacks.</p>
<p>There are however many examples of others who have managed to remain anonymous, escaping prosecution for abusive threatening tweets. Technological anonymity is all too easy to achieve. On the 22nd of October <a href="https://twitter.com/PennyRed">Laurie Penny</a> reported on Twitter that she had “just been informed UK police cannot track down those who sent bomb threats to female journalists this summer, because of Tor.”</p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.torproject.org/">Tor Project</a> is a free online network which facilitates anonymity by creating a complex relay of the message through potentially thousands of servers. It thus makes any attempt to identify the origin of a message near impossible.</p>
<h2>Linguistic clues</h2>
<p>Luckily, such attempts at anonymity are not always successful. All the technology in the world can’t stop you from leaving a trail behind you when you broadcast your thoughts online or via text message. We all have individual writing styles and habits that build to create a linguistic identity.</p>
<p>Forensic linguistic experts can penetrate technological anonymity by interrogating the linguistic clues that you leave as you write. Everything from the way someone uses capitalisation or personal pronouns, to the words someone typically omits or includes, to a breakdown of average word or sentence length, can help identify the writer of even a short text like a Tweet or text message.</p>
<p>Forensic linguistics is a growing field, partially because the increasing importance of online communications in our daily lives demands it.</p>
<p>The technique was used, for example, in a <a href="http://eprints.aston.ac.uk/20005/">2009 murder trial</a> in Stoke on Trent, to build a case against a man who had murdered his wife and attempted to cover his tracks by sending text messages from her phone. He sent messages to himself and others to make it look like his wife was still alive on the day he had killed her but the way they were written gave him away. </p>
<p>Forensic linguists have also contributed expertise in cases of rape, blackmail, mistaken identity, extortion, and the multiple identities of online paedophiles.</p>
<h2>Moral grey area</h2>
<p>In criminal investigations forensic linguists are seen to be on the side of justice, but the field clearly contains a moral peril. Just as we can develop techniques that target online paedophiles or use methods to discover those who attacked Criado-Perez and Creasy, so these same techniques can be used against those whom we might ethically want to protect.</p>
<p>For instance, forensic linguistic techniques could identify an anonymous blogger campaigning against an oppressive regime, or an environmental activist who is being inconvenient to government plans. Individual forensic linguists might take a principled stand in one case or another but others might not agree with their moral choices.</p>
<p>This is of particular concern as these techniques become automated. Authorship analysis technologies can of course be sold to anyone who can afford them and can be used for whatever purpose they like.</p>
<p>In the future, we may even see a technological arms race between those attacking and those defending anonymity.</p>
<h2>New ways to hide</h2>
<p>If online anonymity can be compromised by textual analysis it may seem that your only option is to play nice online. But now there is an alternative and it’s increasingly popular.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2013/11/13/facebook-wouldve-bought-snapchat-for-3-billion-in-cash-heres-why/">Facebook numbers amongst teenagers are falling</a> and Twitter numbers may follow. The kids today are turning to SnapChat and other similar services, which allow content to be shared but not stored. Apparently aware of the appeal, Facebook reportedly tried to buy SnapChat for US$3 billion recently.</p>
<p>However, these ephemeral messaging services won’t only be attractive to teenagers. Networks of online criminals are already using them. It’s a return to the old days: like a whispered conversation in a dark corner of a pub, eavesdropping is more difficult and the message expires without a trace. Or so SnapChat claims. Either way, as with the creation of Twitter, this new development will no doubt create new criminal, legal and ethical challenges for forensic linguists and the wider public to grapple with.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/20457/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Tim Grant does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Twitter is awash with trolls, spammers and misanthropes, all keen to ruin your day with a mean-spirited message or even a threat that can cause you genuine fear. It seems all too easy to set up an account…Tim Grant, Director, Centre for Forensic Linguistics, Senior Lecturer in Forensic Linguistics, Aston UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.