Ah yes... I'm Skimmington Harborough, Esq., I come from a family that made its fortune in philanthropy generations ago.
This seems like a pretty straightforward mechanism for covert operatives, to generate a believable (and memorizable) cover that pulls attention away and maintains coherence.
That said, as someone who prizes ethical behavior, it's not possible to practice this and remain wholly honest without some sort of ethical loophole like "character work for entertainment only". A persona requires misrepresentation, which is not the same as de facto anonymity.
So, while I love the write-up, I don't think it's saying what they think it's saying.
> That said, as someone who prizes ethical behavior, it's not possible to practice this and remain wholly honest without some sort of ethical loophole
The primary "ethical loophole" here is that there is no viable ethical alternative. Something can not be immoral if it is the best of a series of bad options, and if you want to exsist in the world and protect your privacy, the only real option is to create a persona.
There is literally no other option that I have been able to find that both protects your privacy and also does not require you to sequester yourself from humanity entirely.
Pure anonymity bars you from the following activities: joining a social group, signing up for some longish term business relationship (hiring a contracter, signing up for a service), engaging in the political process, holding a job, and probably more that I cant think of. You simply wont be able to do any of those things if you tried to give your name as "chaboud" or "rt4mn".
The best option if you care about your privacy, in those scenarios, is to use a nickname/alias/persona, and be honest and say "no its not" in the vanishingly rare case where you are asked directly whether or not that's the same name you have your birth certificate.
> The primary "ethical loophole" here is that there is no viable ethical alternative. Something can not be immoral if it is the best of a series of bad options, and if you want to exsist in the world and protect your privacy, the only real option is to create a persona.
There are simple ethical alternatives, just not disclose that information, or just avoid that questions. Lying in this case is clearly unacceptable.
It is also a signalling issue. There is a universal social contract not to lie. If someone is willing to lie in such minor issues, then such person is totally untrustworthy, because there is no reason to assume they would not lie or hold other social contracts in more serious cases when it does not suit them.
> There are simple ethical alternatives, just not disclose that information, or just avoid that questions.
That's not always possible.
> Lying in this case is clearly unacceptable.
In what case?
If you're really taking the stance that anonymity is never ethically more important than honesty, that's a pretty extreme stance. Are women being stalked by an ex who is a cop required to be honest about their identities? Are reporters investigating sex trafficking required to be honest about their identities?
In a more broad sense, there are many corporations and governments out there who follow no ethical rules whatsoever and are sucking up as much information on everyone as they can. These people don't have any sort of right to that information, and don't have a right to my honesty. If anything, I think the moral thing to do, if any, is to hamper these people's efforts by feeding them as much incorrect information as much as possible.
> It is also a signalling issue.
Everything is a signaling issue. Your post, for example, signals you as a person who has not-very-nuanced opinions about nuanced topics, and therefore can't be trusted in nuanced situations. If you wouldn't lie to the police to protect a pot smoker, or lie to an advertiser to protect my privacy, you aren't an ethical person by my standards. I do believe you have good intentions, but intentions that don't translate into the correct actions don't mean much.
> There is a universal social contract not to lie.
This is what I mean about not-very-nuanced opinions.
> If someone is willing to lie in such minor issues, then such person is totally untrustworthy, because there is no reason to assume they would not lie or hold other social contracts in more serious cases when it does not suit them.
1. What issues are you considering minor? You seem extraordinarily willing to generalize some specific-but-not-described situation you're imagining to all of reality.
2. There are lots of reasons to assume that someone who lies to cops won't lie to me, for example.
> If you're really taking the stance that anonymity is never ethically more important than honesty, that's a pretty extreme stance. Are women being stalked by [...]
You are building a strawman argument right in front of our eyes. GP literally writes _in this case_ and you insinuate they argue for _always_ and then you are going on and on why that's extreme. Of course it is, but that's not what they wrote nor what this topic is about.
I'm quite enjoying the good faith portions of this discussion tree as I'm intruiged by the ethical dilemma of what can be considered lying in such cases.
But when strawmen are built then that's arguing in bad faith. Then the goal is not to reach new insights and understanding, but only to be right. That's pretty sad.
Please don't do this, it makes the discussion less interesting for everybody.
> You are building a strawman argument right in front of our eyes. GP literally writes _in this case_ and you insinuate they argue for _always_ and then you are going on and on why that's extreme. Of course it is, but that's not what they wrote nor what this topic is about.
I'm insinuating that they argue for _always_ because they are being extremely vague about what "this case" is. If they aren't arguing for _always_, they can answer the question.
Notably, they responded to my post with an explanation of what they think "this case" is, and it's... a straw man that the original article wasn't talking about.
> I'm quite enjoying the good faith portions of this discussion tree as I'm intruiged by the ethical dilemma of what can be considered lying in such cases.
I'd be happy to have such a discussion with you if you can illuminate what "such cases" are.
To be clear, the original article wasn't discussing lying "just to avoid awkward social interactions". That's a straw man.
> But when strawmen are built then that's arguing in bad faith. Then the goal is not to reach new insights and understanding, but only to be right. That's pretty sad.
In most cases it is. And the article suggested preemptive approach, which implies lying in all cases while being in persona.
> In what case?
In situations described in the discussed article: "If you defiantly refuse to say who you are, it can make people angry that you’re upsetting social reciprocity". I.e. to lie just to avoid awkward social interactions instead of explicitly or implicitly refuse. People being too agreeable in their social interactions so that they would rather lie than cause discomfort. This kind of casual lying.
> Everything is a signaling issue. Your post, for example, signals you as a person who has not-very-nuanced opinions about nuanced topics
Or perhaps you just ignore the context of the article to strawman my position.
> What issues are you considering minor?
Where the cost of not telling a lie is just some social cost unrelated to personal security, employment or other similarly important needs.
If you protect your anonymity in 999,999 cases out of 1,000,000, your anonymity is blown. "Most cases" isn't enough.
> And the article suggested preemptive approach, which implies lying in all cases while being in persona.
Yes. Because lying ex-post-facto after people have already started trying to figure out who you are doesn't work.
> In situations described in the discussed article: "If you defiantly refuse to say who you are, it can make people angry that you’re upsetting social reciprocity". I.e. to lie just to avoid awkward social interactions instead of explicitly or implicitly refuse. People being too agreeable in their social interactions so that they would rather lie than cause discomfort. This kind of casual lying.
The article doesn't say anything about it being "to avoid awkward social interactions". On the contrary, the reason given for doing so is as a further protection of one's anonymity.
And to be clear, there are many cases where any reasonable person would agree it's ethical to lie to protect one's anonymity, some of which I've described in my previous post.
> If someone is willing to lie in such minor issues, then such person is totally untrustworthy
What’s the backing for this? If a stranger asks me what my favorite color is, I don’t feel any particular obligation to give them a truthful answer. But at least in my experience, that hasn’t manifested as a willingness to lie or deceive in cases where it matters. I think it’s possible that your personal social contract is not as universal as you think.
I guess that for truthful people, lying is something that they do not even consider as an option. They could be pressed to it if situation is dire. But if someone consider lying as an option in a banal case, then they could consider it in any case. There are obviously other reasons why not to lie or deceive in particular issues, so 'totally untrustworthy' is likely too strong.
> If a stranger asks me what my favorite color is, I don’t feel any particular obligation to give them a truthful answer.
I do not feel particular obligation to give them answer altogether, but if i decide to do, i would feel obligation it to be truthful.
I think you may want to revisit whether your guess is actually accurate. As others have pointed out, "little white lies" are a relatively prevalent part of society.
To pick a mundane example: if somebody asks me "how's it going", I'm almost certainly going to say "good", even if it's not.
I lied the last time in September 2014. I exaggerated a man’s height. And yes, I tell everybody if it’s not going well. I don’t need to be awkward like in “The Big Bang Theory” or something either. I can be nice in every single situation without lying. Empathy and trust help a lot.
Just because something is prevalent, it doesn’t make it good, or necessary.
Situation 1: Daughter of 5 years was drawing a house and a dog. Looks terrible. Asks me how I find it. It reply "good job! what a nice house and dog!" It's a blatent lie. But obviously she'd been crushed had I replied otherwise and never drawn anything else.
Situation 2: Random acquaintance got a new hair cut. Looks terrible, asks how she looks. I reply "fits your face!" Not true, but any real criticism would have been inappropriate. We are not that close.
Situation 3: Colleague asks me casually in a team lunch setting about my favorite color. It's brown, but I don't want to say since 10 min ago the topic of nazis came up, turns out they are jewish and lost all their grandparents in concentration camps. So I reply "depends on the day". Clear lie about "something as mundane as their favourite color".
Which of these situations was an unacceptable lie and which was a "phrase / exchange with established meaning, both sided knows the protocol."
Nonchalantly redefining lying just because everyone is vaguely aware the lie exists is silly.
You do realize you can just adjust your original absolutist position on lying = indicator of future trustworthiness by just recognizing the nuance of human communication, correct?
It's not a redefinition. Lying requires the purpose of deception. When you ask me how I'm doing as part of a greeting ritual and I say "good" as a response neither of us actually believes we're communicating anything meaningful about our states. In that circumstance it's understood and even expected that the response will be superficial. Indeed, malicious honesty could be entirely impolite. For example if you say "how are you?" and I say "well I was doing really poorly, but then I took a giant crap in the office restroom and now I feel better" and then continue with full and excruciating honesty to describe all the gory details you might not appreciate that oversharing.
The fact that the first person you mention is "your best friend" is an indication of the importance you're placing on it. Nobody is using a nom de plume for their electric bill, you're being deliberately obtuse.
A best friend, by definition, is one of the people you choose to trust the most. If you want to replace it with someone else significant in your life, by all means, it doesn’t change the point in any way shape or form.
A random company is the other end of the extreme, it’s an example of a very limited relationship.
The point is that the bigger your relationship, the more you’d entrust them with secrets. Secrets like your real identity. It’s a pretty basic and obvious concept.
I'm not sure that there is a universal social contract in place. There are many situations where a lie is acceptable or even expected.
In business dealings it's acceptable to lie about the price you are willing to pay (or receive) for a service. It is however completely unacceptable to lie about business finances when communicating with investors or the tax office.
Even in personal matters, if someone told you information to keep in confidence, and then someone else asked if you know anything about it, it is acceptable (even honorable) to lie to maintain the trust with the first person. However, there are also situations where revealing the information to the second person is the more honorable action.
My preference is simply down to he act of lying increasing my cognitive load to engage with others. If I choose not to tell someone something, that's relatively easy. If I tell them something artificial, I have to maintain and harmonize that falsehood for the duration of the interaction.
Yes, I have a Blind account. In that context, I have a handle, but I resolutely refuse to knowingly say anything untrue. It's just too much work to be bothered.
There is emphatically no "universal social contract not to lie," nor should there be, because what this leads to is "invisible obligations to parties more powerful than you, since you're expected to tell the truth to whoever asks it." -- but right to truth ought to be earned.
It is true that it most cases it's not favorable, but the way you're putting it is the stuff of repression.
Self defense, it's good to misinform bad actors, Santa Claus, surprise parties,etc.
> There is emphatically no "universal social contract not to lie," nor should there be, because what this leads to is "invisible obligations to parties more powerful than you, since you're expected to tell the truth to whoever asks it."
That implication does not hold. Even if i accept 'universal social contract not to lie' for voluntary conversations, then i am not expected tell the truth, just not to lie, therefore there is no implicit obligation to answer such questions. One could avoid the question, reject the question explicitly, or leave the conversation.
> Something can not be immoral if it is the best of a series of bad options
You’re presenting this as if it’s a fact, but it doesn’t seem like it is. If for no other reason that it relies on a shared understanding of what’s “best” and what makes options “bad”.
You could justify some pretty horrible decisions if you’re holding that as an axiom.
I tend to just not invent "rules" out of thin air.
In absence of this supposed "rule", where "Something can not be immoral if it is the best of a series of bad options", you'd need to actually consider whether a decision is immoral. The rule shortcuts that and lets you say "well, there's no other option, so I must be in the clear morally here", which would be laughable if it wasn't so dangerous.
That's not a quote that appears anywhere prior to this in the thread, from what I can see. You seem to have made it up from scratch here.
The rule given above is "Something can not be immoral if it is the best of a series of bad options". In the context of the thread, it's being used to justify creating a fake persona and providing false details about yourself as part of a strategy of maintaining anonymity. And already the cracks start to show: the other option, "just don't respond" is classified as bad, and thus doesn't count as a viable option. So what you're left with is "lie about yourself", which the rule holds up as being definitely moral because it's the "best" option. But "just don't respond" is only described as bad because it doesn't give you maximum anonymity.
If I'm broke, and I need some money for lunch, "steal from my richest friend" could be reasonably argued to be the "best" of "bad options". I need to eat, it'll hurt them the least, so lets crack open their wallet. Because I get to arbitrate the option pool and the definition of "bad" and "best", I've got a neat package that lets me absolve myself of all tricky moral quandries.
I don’t think you can argue that steal from friend is the best in that situation. If truly the options are steal from friend or starve to death right now, then perhaps but that’s not realistic.
I’m not sure what you think someone should do rather than make the best decision given all options.
There are many ways to absolve yourself of tricky moral quandaries. But I don’t think using a fake name on a web form is a mora quandary.
If we’re in a world where the only options are that one can’t lie about themself online or not participate then that’s a bad world.
I think it depends on the intent of the lie in that lying to get out of advertising seems ok, but lying to trick someone into a date seems bad.
Of course it’s hard to truly know, so people have to fall back do what they think is best and rely on the guidance of trusted friends.
This is how morality in general works, I think. And we just have societal morals that are widely accepted. I think advertising is immoral and unethical, but that’s not a belief commonly held by enough to make it into culture and laws.
> Pure anonymity bars you from the following activities: joining a social group, signing up for some longish term business relationship (hiring a contracter, signing up for a service), engaging in the political process, holding a job, and probably more that I cant think of.
Why do you believe that’s your right? You have the right to be left alone, but in all the examples you offer you are explicitly not minding your own business.
Rather there should be an expectation of reciprocity with respect to identity.
> hiring a contracter, ..., engaging in the political process, holding a job
These are all situations where the desire for anonymity is outweighed by the requirement for accountability.
You're aware that 'hiring a contractor' requires entering into a contract right? And so does being employed.
Entering into a contract without establishing your identity implies a desire not to be bound by the terms of that contract. Is that your intent?
As for 'engaging in the political process', I have never heard anyone argue that the problem with politics is that people are too honest and open. Do we need more anonymous political party donors?
> Something can not be immoral if it is the best of a series of bad options
Woo, big claim. You're basically saying "best" can be determined entirely in terms of utility with no consideration for morality. A utilitarian world view, which not everybody shares.
I don’t think OP made that claim. “Bad” can be determined holistically with morals and utility and other factors.
For example, I think it’s moral to portray a false persona to avoid invasion of privacy.
Not to mention that most people project some level of falseness just in day to day operations. For example replying “I’m fine, how are you?” Whenever asked.
> A utilitarian world view, which not everybody shares.
you make it sound like it's not a complete or consistent system, but it's just a worldview where only some people have the attribute of being in the right, unfortunately an attribute not everybody shares.
I don't think its not complete, it just doesn't always apply to every situation. Thats why there are other belief systems like Deontology[1] which I tend to gravitate towards the most. Utilitarianism has plenty of issues. Doing whats right for everyone, doesn't always yield the best results for society. Sometimes you need to do whats right for the few because the masses doesn't always understand the long ranging ramifications of decisions based off this belief.
> Something can not be immoral if it is the best of a series of bad options, and if you want to exsist in the world and protect your privacy, the only real option is to create a persona.
Let's substitute some of the bits with variables...
"Something can not be immoral if it is the best of a series of bad options, and if you want to exist in the world and X, the only real option is to Y."
...and see how this holds up...
X="be rich"; Y="kill your neighbor"
Now, you might object "that's absurdly extreme!". True, I have chosen an extreme example, but only because it makes the fallacy conspicuous. Ethical principles don't have loopholes or dispensations. It's not as if big lies are bad because they're big and small lies are okay because they're small. They're both bad because they're both lies. An evil effect of one's actions may be tolerable under specific circumstances, but a means that is inherently evil doesn't cease to be evil because you have no other option to attain the desired good. Ends don't justify means.
In this case, a pseudonym is not a lie when a) the intent is not to deceive but to conceal, and b) there is no normative expectation that the name given is real and thus when you do not owe others your real name. On social media, while we know many might conclude that a pseudonym is real, generally speaking, I would say that error is a tolerable side effect (it depends on the particular social medium; LinkedIn is different than Twitter, for example). However, IMO, things start to become more dicey with active fabrication. There is a fine but definite line between lying and mental reservation. There is a difference between speaking ambiguously or evasively on the one hand and lying on the other. This places rather severe limits on what you can licitly say or express. Constructing a persona means you must actively engage in creating a fictional character that you intend people to believe is real as a means of concealing you identity. This is by definition a lie and different from allowing people to falsely infer a persona based on what is ambiguous information that is intended to conceal truths others have no right to.
"Create and post a back-story to answer (instead of avoid) the frequently asked questions."
The article's author's advice is effectively precisely because it involves lying. Lying works exactly because the default expectation based on the essential function of speech is to communicate the truth.
My name is Matt Chaboud. My username is my last name, and I'm easy to find. I try to behave online in a way that doesn't rely on anonymity (though I recognize that that carries some risk).
But I think your point is understood. However, a handle, to me, by virtue of convention, leaves little room for confusion as to whether it is a real or artificial/partial identity (generally).
Thats fair enough. Googling for my username takes you pretty quickly to my name as well.
I don't think I did a good enough job in my initial reply emphasizing that from my perspective a nickname that you only used in certian social contexts is functionally a persona. If your wife calls you Jason but all your drinking buddies call you Jack because of a hilarious collage hijink (or something), a random passer by at the bar would have no clue that the name on your birth certificate (the one that can be used to impersonate you) is actually Jason.
Thats really what I am talking about. As long as you dont lie about the fact that "Jack" is a nickname when asked, your not being unethical, in my view.
> The primary "ethical loophole" here is that there is no viable ethical alternative. Something can not be immoral if it is the best of a series of bad options, and if you want to exsist in the world and protect your privacy, the only real option is to create a persona.
No, that's not how ethics works. Sometimes you're just in a no win situation and there is nothing moral other than self sacrifice.
Before it was de rigeur to use real names on the Internet, most of us used personas that were informed by our handles.
It's unusual—I might even say unethical, if moral realism were coherent—to insist on real names as a matter of honesty given that real names disproportionately benefit the powerful. The powerless cannot use their real names on the Internet because often there are real world consequences.
> That said, as someone who prizes ethical behavior, it's not possible to practice this and remain wholly honest without some sort of ethical loophole like "character work for entertainment only". A persona requires misrepresentation, which is not the same as de facto anonymity.
I don't think the persona needs to be completely falsified. Rather, you consider which topics you engage in on a given account. For example I consider "tsumnia" to be unofficial/official "professional" username - while I don't explicitly say my name, it'd take you looking at my profile to know exactly who I am.
On the other hand, I have my hobby/nerdy username on Reddit for when I want to talk about the latest Last of Us episodes. Same person, but different aspects of my personality are on display. Its not that the other one is a troll or anything, just one name to talk about deliberate practice in CS education in one thread and then another to make jokes about video games.
Do you try to keep them separate in the sense of not being connectable? That could be hard, as writing style is a pretty strong give-away (as recently demonstrated just here on HN where somebody wrote a very simple tool to detect alt accounts).
It's ok if you don't. I'm just wondering if it's even worth trying. The persona strategy could be worthwhile for simple tracking purposes, but for somebody actually trying, it shouldn't be hard to link all your personas, given enough data. Or maybe one should avoid posting with real name altogether, anywhere. That includes though carreer-building blog posts or public documentation, even written in a professional setting where it could be hard to avoid.
> Do you try to keep them separate in the sense of not being connectable?
I think part of the persona creates different writing styles - my other account(s) have never been rated close to each other. For Reddit, my other account is just my default. I only switch over to tsumnia for /r/professors, or other coding-related subreddits these days. Reddit Enhancement Suite helps out nicely for that. My other account(s) never really write enough to generate enough substance for comparison I think and never interact with each other (not replying to myself or something silly like that). Sure its possible, its just... not something I've had to worry about. tsumnia writes long winded responses and my other accounts... don't. If anything I'd be impressed and nerd out on the math if someone could connect the accounts.
> it shouldn't be hard to link all your personas, given enough data
I'm not some big name that I'd really need to worry about that. Even if I became one, like I mentioned I'm not trolling, flaming, or being obscene in the other accounts, just writing about my hobbies. Things I openly admit to in real life, just don't write about. It may be harder if an account is some super personal stuff like sexual orientation / gender identity, but I don't do any of that. Even if they did impact me, those fall into things I just don't bring up on the internet. Likewise, I imagine it may be harder for women that are dealing with online stalkers, but again, that hasn't been something I've had to deal with.
Plus, any organization that REALLY wanted to find me can simply reverse lookup the account IP addresses anyway. If I think an account that I want to remain private has gonna a bit too personal, I simply retire the account name. It can be annoying if account karma/points/whatever is "important", but... eh... I made plenty of DnD characters over the years, I can start using another character's name or something with a pun. Internet points only limit what I can and can't do on a site, nothing else.
> maybe one should avoid posting with real name altogether, anywhere.
That's always an option. Since I used tsumnia for so long, I sort of just DECIDED to let it be public. I had more or less doxxed myself (or narrowed down who tsumnia could be) before I openly said it was me. No different than a YouTuber doing a face reveal, except I don't have millions of fans. Instead of retiring tsumnia, I acknowledged it and created a new one that doesn't connect to me. I imagine that's how lots of usernames start - being anonymous but occasionally they drop a nugget of personal information. Those accrue over time and boom, its an alias. I'm a little more cautious to drop personal information on the other accounts, but I think its because I can always use tsumnia for those situations.
I'd be curious to probe a framework that thinks it is, while not holding that axiomatically. As someone who leans heavily into consequentialism, I can think of plenty of times lying can lead to a net positive for everyone. Likewise, there are harmful truths that should be suppressed.
That suggests to me that lying is, in-of-itself, amoral. The effect of the lie (or the intent, if you swing that way) determines whether it's ethical or not. Who is harmed by your assuming a fabricated identity? For the vast majority of people, who exactly you are matter little. So it's hard to suggest they are harmed by having an incorrect model of you. It may be manipulative to those trying to piece together your identity, but being doxxed can and often does lead to harm befalling your person, so your lies against them can be plainly justified under self-defense.
In deontology, lying-is-bad is practically the canonical example of a basic rule. Kant especially is famous for that -- leading directly to extensive arguments about whether "lying to the murderer at the door" is ethical.
It goes deeper than you might expect. There are good reasons to think that it might indeed be unethical to lie, even when the consequences are bad. I don't necessarily agree with the premises involved, but it's worth researching rather than dismissing out of hand. Especially since consequentialism has problems of its own, and it's a way to get an alternative take on the criticisms of consequentialism.
Personally, I'd like to see deontologists accept that lying isn't such a great example, and instead take up a different one. There can be good deontological approaches that accept that consequences can be part of rules.
The deontologist believes lying is against the universal maxim. If everybody lied all the time, we wouldn't have a functioning society.
The virtue ethicist believes it is bad to be in a habit to lie because being predisposed to lying is opposed to the virtue of the truth. We've all known people who lie by habit and they are unpleasant and vicious to be around. I don't know if most virtue ethicists (who don't also fall into the natural lawyer camp, below) would say it is per se bad to lie, but most would say it is vicious.
The natural lawyer believes that speech has as its natural end telling the truth and therefore it is contra naturam to lie. See the almost-impossibly-extended discussion here, for that: https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09469a.htm
For all of these groups, there has variously been admitted something like an "equivocal statement"---a statement which has some interpretation that is technically true, but not the interpretation that the speaker knows will be taken by the listener as a falsehood. For example, my friend invites me out on Friday and rather than saying I'd rather be at home, I say, "I have something going on that night." He takes it to mean that I have other plans, but I don't. But technically, breathing is "something going on" so I haven't lied. (Whether your social relationships will stand your doing this is another matter ;))
I'm personally fall in something like the virtue ethicist camp, but I do believe sometimes, in justice, a lie must be said, and not all of those situations can be covered by an equivocation.
If everybody used deceptive but ultimately truthful statements all the time society wouldn't function either. Allowing for deliberately deceptive truths is just a ridiculous contortion to solve the "murderer at the door" or "nazi at the door while hiding jews" problem. To me it just shows that they don't truly believe in their ethical framework since they will twist it into something ridiculous as soon as it gets difficult.
That phrasing has to do with how Kant thinks you come to discover moral truths: it’s an appeal to Kant’s idea of the categorical imperative which, for him, is the basis of all morals. So, essentially, the claim here is “since you cannot lie all the time and have a functioning society then, by my prior arguments about what morality is, you can never lie”
That interpretation falls on its own absurdity. "Since you cannot eat all the time without dying of obesity, you must never eat at all". The categorical imperative only generalizes across people. "Can you have a functioning society where people tell a white lie now and then?" And the answer is clearly yes. Is it superior to one where everyone is perfectly honest? Less obvious.
I think lying is not ethical, but is it a lying to have an online persona that has a different name that one's legal name? I think not. One can have a legal name and a common law name that are different. As long as one does not claim one's online persona/name is one's legal name and one is not harming other people, I see no issue. If the intent of having the legal name and online name be different is to obscure one's real identitity because one is doing something illegal online, then that is clearly not ethical. If one is not harming anybody, then there should be no issue with having an online persona/name that has a different name than one's legal name and should be considered ethical.
A tougher question might be whether one is doing something illegal and uses an online name that is not one's legal name. For example, say one is subject to seizures and cannabis greatly reduces the occurance from say 100 per month to less than 2 per month. Cannabis is still a schedule 1 drug and illegal at the national level. So, joining a dicussion on the net about seizures and cannabis with a persona whose name is different from one's legal name would be common. I also think this is ethical. One is not harming somebody else and is in fact making oneself more healthy (opposite of harm).
I agree with this line of thinking. Especially the focus on effect. If your persona is made with the pure intent of anonymity and you make an ordinary persona whose abilities aren't exaggerated and could easily be swapped with your own persona without much impact on the people you converse with, then I don't think any harm is being done and you're merely keeping your anonymity while still presenting your authentic abilities and personality to some online community.
There are frameworks that have lying as axiomatically evil.
But to be consistent - a painful truth must be preferable to a rewarding lie.
To live a lie free life is to invite pain, and to view that pain as both functional and necessary - it is not for the weak to try.
It would make little sense not to be confident in a subjective opinion. As the sole arbiter of truth concerning my subjective experience, it would be absurd to waffle about it.
I was an NOC Agent for Canada then I got married. There's so much data out there, nothing is easy with creating a false persona. Your eyes, walk, fingerprints, etc.
It's possible in the short run, but you're leaking a lot of data doing it. My MO when I really didn't want to end up Googleable was to just give my real first name and leave it at that even if people pressed.
Edit: The reason is simple. If someone gives a false name and you know their real one then you're much more certain that they're trying to conceal their identity. So the downside is real, even if it is practical in some circumstances.
Fascinating. How long were you a NOC for? I guess your spouse did not know of it while she was your GF. Did it impact your life negatively, having to maintain secrecy? You must have been for quite a while, I understand a long time passes before agents are fully functional.
Well, I'm allowed to talk about it publicly but I still would like to default to undersharing. It was a little over five years. Long enough.
My spouse and I got married very quickly after meeting and yes the impact on one's life is real, but so is the upside and I find few online that talk about it. The upside is real. You see the extremes of humanity and it clarifies the importance of ethics in life.
No problem at all. If we were at a bar I'd say more, but with online stuff the safety margins are tighter because every word is picked over by everyone. It's not just states. There are a lot of mentally ill people out there.
That said, I think others should consider working in this field. The impact is real and I think many HNers would make good agents and officers. So I'm starting to talk about it online and I'm reworking my website and other things. Think of it as continued public service. We (Nato and friends) need good people doing this work.
One thing I should have mentioned is that I'm still working in this area, just not directly for the Canadian government any longer.
I believe that is Non Official Cover Agent. Basically, a intelligence agent that, well, they do a lot of stuff, but from my understanding, not having worked in the system, they mostly handle informants and turn sources and handle intelligence gathering. A spy. It's non-official cover in the sense that they don't come as a diplomat attache or anything of the sorts but go there and present themselves as a private individual. Some countries, not sure of the case of Canada, you can't share your real job with your friends or family but have a cover story instead. They mostly present their real name as well, since it's hard to produce fake personas, hence... his original post.
Much less glamourous than James Bond, but I believe it's an.. interesting job.
This is a good summary. Most people I knew didn't know and if they knew anything it was only a hint here or there and most assumed I was doing sigint work.
It is not categorically imperative to never lie nor misrepresent. The opposite is true. There are some situations where "standard" ethical principles (don't lie, don't kill) are unethical. If left with no alternative, lethal self-defense is not just acceptable, but is morally necessary. An exception to the exception might exist if your attacker is acting justly, but that takes it to another level of analysis.
Maybe I'm from a different era, but I still think that the best default position is that anything somebody has listed about themselves online may be a work of fiction that we shouldn't be expected to take at face value in most contexts. If encryption is not immoral, encrypting your personal information is also not immoral, even if you also want plausible deniability. Privacy is not unethical. If a persona and pseudonym is the best route to that, you aren't hurting anybody.
As a person who prizes the idea that what we say and do are more important than who we are, I disagree that honesty and ethics always align. If some dishonesty maximizes peoples' actual wellbeing, then that dishonestly is probably actually more ethical than the honesty that compromises and hurts people for no gain other than ideological purity.
I’m not sure how you’re pulling encryption into this argument.
You can be honest or dishonest and it will be encrypted and decrypted all the same.
Your second argument to me doesn’t follow. You are saying what you say and do is more important than what you value, I think, but you are also saying that what you say and do are not important so you can be dishonest.
My conclusion is that you prize winning over being ethical.
Just think of all the other cases where honesty and ethics have been put on the back burner on the basis that you think your thing is more important; a lot of them legal.
You use an alias or a persona to mask your identity, just as you use encryption to mask information. Keeping something intentionally hidden, either via an alias or encryption, is not dishonest nor unethical.
I do not prize winning. I'm not sure who is "winning" or "losing" when I decide to not publish my name. I'll note that I use my real name and attach my real identity to lots of things. I just don't agree that people who choose to mask their identity through a plausible persona are somehow walking an ethical tightrope. They are entitled to use a fake name.
That's my point. Saying that there's an unethical dishonesty to using an alias or an entire persona is missing the point that it's actually unimportant, and behavior is the only thing that matters. I was responding to a comment that stated that "it's not possible to practice this and remain wholly honest without some sort of ethical loophole". I disagree that an online persona is inherently unethical or even dishonest, because the basic assumption should be that it's all unimportant and possibly fake.
>That said, as someone who prizes ethical behavior, it's not possible to practice this and remain wholly honest
Yes, I get it. When I go for job interviews, they ask me what my weaknesses are, I say that I fuck off every once in a while, that I will sometimes badmouth the company and my boss after I leave the company. That sometimes I go to the company bathroom and masterbate to relieve stress. That I don't really like my mother because she is a meth addict all her life even when she was pregnant with me so when I was in her womb, I was basically on meth, too, and it really fucked up my mental capacities and so sometimes I go off in an irrational manner and maybe will start yelling at people. I belch and fart a lot, too and that usually upsets co-workers.
I go on and on like this for about 20 minutes on all my weaknesses, because I want to make sure that I completely answer their question in an ethical manner, because I don't lie by ommission. They didn't ask me what my "strengths disguesed as a weakness" were, or how to "spin it by giving the best picture of myself" and "market myself" to them.
It's the same with women when they ask about me. I say that I fart and burp a lot as mentioned above. They are not regular farts but real stench bombs. I also pick my nose a lot in public and then eat it but not when people can see.
So far, I can't get a job for the last 15 years despite my interviewing 80-100 interviews per year. And no girlfriend.
But at least I can be internally happy because I'm ethical and honest and never lie, and give the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
Is it a lie to choose a name to go by at different times? Why should you always have to use the name your parents gave you. Some people are even better known by their nom de plume than their real name, from Mark Twain to Lenin.
To lie is to make an untrue statement with the intent to deceive.
In a play, actors make untrue[1] statements, but the audience is in on it, so there is no intent to deceive, and indeed no one ends up deceived.
Some professions like police officers, firefighters, doctors, military officers, etc might wear uniforms/special clothing and act in a certain way too. No one actually believes that you change into a different person when you put on a uniform, so again no deception takes place.
Back in the 90's it was simply assumed everyone used a pseudonymous persona [2], so again no intent and no deception. Many people still use pseudonymous personas to this day!
The Author of this article DOES take things a bit far. I'd definitely want to be a bit careful recommending their approach. If you want your persona to interact with the real world, then all the aspects relevant to the interaction do need to be true. For example: depending on context, it may or may not be fine to have a persona who claims to be university professor, but if you start falsely using that credential for real world gain, you may have crossed a line. [3]
So in the end I think it's ethically ok to use personas, provided there is no intent to deceive.
--
[1] Arguably: untrue in this world, but perhaps true in the world of the play?
[2] "on the internet, no one knows if you're a dog"
Wait how is this even controversial. We have decades, perhaps centuries, of precedent in liberal democracy of writing under pseudonyms. Since nearly your entire presence online is via your writing, I don’t see how it could possibly be ethically wrong to write online under a pseudonym. If having a fake image in addition to your name bothers you then just use a blank avatar or something.
The whole point of pseudonyms has been that a) your work should stand for itself and not be impacted by your identity and b) to protect individuals.
Can someone use pseudonyms to perform unethical or fraudulent activity, of course. But the pseudonym itself is not unethical.
Indeed. Despite your best efforts, they know that Sir Olivier Stubbingwicke lives at the same address as Bill Swerski, who pays for the Comcast internet.
Similarly, very few people are unaware that XFinity is the pseudonym for Comcast.
I know I'm running with the off-topic comment, but I like to point that out whenever possible. Companies know that if they just change their name, they lose any bad connotations they had with the previous name.
Comcast changed the name of its Internet service to "Comcast Xfinity" for a few years, then silently dropped the "Comcast" at one point.
Spectrum is also Charter, and Altria is Phillip Morris. It's crappy that it actually works most of the time, so I like to point it out to try to counteract that.
"A persona requires misrepresentation, which is not the same as de facto anonymity."
I don't this this is correct, as a persona can accurately represent you, its just a persona. If you want to continue to be anonymous with a persona that represents you, I think differential privacy could help in this situation.
There is no ethical issue here. The companies asking for your identity generally don’t need it and providing them with a persona could be argued is the more ethical route given the implications it has on privacy and mass surveillance.
>There is no ethical issue here. The companies asking for your identity generally don’t need it and providing them with a persona could be argued is the more ethical route given the implications it has on privacy and mass surveillance.
I'd say, to quote a bad movie[0] that "the only winning move is not to play."
Giving those entities even a fake persona will negatively impact your privacy over the medium to long term. The better solution is for folks to vote with their feet and refuse to use such entities.
Sadly, that doesn't seem to be a popular choice, but that doesn't mean it isn't the right one.
People practice personas everyday of their lives, the only difference in the post is the explicit labelling of them. The avatar I present here is different to how I behave in person, or how I engage at work, my friends, my family.
Am I being unethical when I tell the medicare supplemental insurance salesman from India that I am only 22 years old (while hoping to be taken off their list of potential customers) when he asks me my age?
The easy out is that you make it eminently clear that the persona is a fictitious character. At that point it becomes much like any other performer who wears a costume and uses a stage name.
As a counter example, I have been largely anonymous online and offline for awhile; yes, aware it is nearly impossible to be completely anonymous, that’s fine, largely a “hobby” for me.
Very direct about it, and yes, some people completely shut you out once you tell them, but vast majority don’t; while my opinion, those who do aren’t people I am interested in knowing. Very similar prior to me being largely anonymous, people would ask me what I did, I would respond saying I did nothing, which at the time was true and did not feel the need to make something up. Oddly, discovered their response almost immediately told me a lot about who they are as a person; they might think I am: cool, on-the-run, lying, nomad, spy, wealthy, homeless, etc.
As for making personas, long ago I tried that, though now it to me feels like lying, especially in context of establishing long term relationships. That said, with personas I created, other than generic names, I would keep them true to myself, though never complete representations of myself. In doing so discovered that the variety of personas rarely played a factor in people engaging me, but it did appear to make a difference if I just happened to contact them randomly in close proximity to them having free time.
All and all, being anonymous really is not that hard. Not even something at this point I spend lot of time thinking about.
I mean you'll have to trust me when I say I don't - since if I did I would obviously claim that I don't - but I have a strong match with 3 users where I'm in their top 20. But I don't have an alternate HN account as I don't see any need for separate identities for the ideas I hold on HN. Where as if I want nuanced discussion on Reddit without someone trolling my post history and discounting anything I say because 4 years ago I once posted on a subreddit they don't approve of - I do need an alternate Reddit account. So I will admit to having at least one alternate Reddit account.
Moreover - since Nadya is my "primary" pseudonym, I deliberately make it easy for people to find me across social platforms: https://nadyanay.me/identities
Based on this list you can assume I am Nyu, Nadya, NadyaNayme, or Yuno in a number of places. Three of those names are common and so are commonly already taken by the time I create an account somewhere - so it isn't an exact science. For example - the account "yuno" also exists on HN but isn't me. If it were I'd have capitalized the "Y" and this account wouldn't exist.
As far as I have been made aware - nobody has ever identified any of my other personas as belonging to me.
stylometry.net is hot garbage. Zero of the candidates that it identifies as being related to buildsjets are my actual alternate accounts. The DBCooper one is interesting, it sounds like a username I might use, but it's still not me.
Stylometry is probably mostly useful if you have a small number of suspects with a decent-sized public corpus that you want to match against a book/set of blog posts etc. Even then it's just going to be statistical.
Yep, like I said, I have very healthy expectations of how to maintain anonymity. Fortunately GPT will largely fix the issue of statistical analysis of variations in writing style between one writer and another. Stylometry been around a long time, as with all security, you have to know you threat model, and adjust accordingly. To my knowledge stylometry never made me less anonymous.
Not saying these are necessarily all yours but the cluster of accounts O__________O, billme, saycheese, wonderous, endlessly, nxzero, v2hle0thslzrav2 are all in each others top 5 or so which is usually a sign of a good match and unless you are saying that you never revealed any identifying info in any of the several hundred comments you have made there is likely some loss of anonymity. If you used a VPN consistently on one account but didn't on one of your earlier accounts then the whole point of the VPN goes right out the window if someone say gets a subpoena.
I just really didn’t understand why that list was posted and then why you responded to it the way you did. Is it because it identified a common writing style that is shared by some others?
They need to expand their dataset beyond HN, why would I have two HN accounts? Maybe if I had a public persona that mattered... but I mostly want to be anonymous once to avoid issues with my employer.
But if they expanded their dataset to other sites like reddit I would be concerned.
For me, it's that I generally default to public for professionally-related things. But every once in a great while I want to comment on something that is obviously about my present or a past employer if you know who I am. I could certainly just not do that but, given as I did, I didn't want it to be under my regular identity.
In what situations do people you don't know ask you what you do where they actually care what you respond? And why not just say that you don't want to say? Among the online friends I have anonymity is the norm.
In 99.9% of offline social situations, "what do you do" will be one of the first few questions asked. How much they actually care is an open question, but it is always more than zero in the very practical sense that if you refuse to respond the conversation will either end or shift to some combination of pressing for the answer and/or making fun of you.
On the other hand, I used to be in the habit of responding with some kind of bullshit, ideally at least a little suspicious but just barely plausible enough to prevent the other party from calling you on it right away. This always resulted in much more fun conversations than talking about my actual work with strangers.
Simply refusing to answer is just not socially acceptable outside of venues where anonymity is already the norm, e.g. online and IRL hacker cons.
While little odd, it’s honestly my position that I don’t have a name; happy to explain, but that’s my position. If people are dead set on having a name to call me, just suggest they pick a name and that’s name we use; for example, today guy I have known a few weeks decided I was a “Bob” and we joked about it.
It clearly limits options I have, for example, I don’t drive, but for whatever reason it’s hobby I enjoy, one of the few I have kept up with. One of reason currently I continue to remain anonymous is it is an easy way to engage people on a topic that I sincerely believe is important, that being the right to privacy.
Unfortunately "the guy who claims he doesn't have a name" is WAY more identifying than just giving a generic name. Doesn't sound to me like you're anonymous at all. This makes me think of the Nate Bargatze bit about the guy with two thumbs on one hand: https://youtu.be/Hd31dbJvGaU
Yes, you’re right that people remember me, but being rememberable to me does not make me identifiable; unlike the example you provided of having two thumbs on one hand, which clearly is an identifiable visible unique physical trait.
The CIA's retired head of disguise pointed out, in commenting on a movie, that you can't really have a drawer full of fake personas (the intel community calls them "legends") ready for use. Good personas are high-maintenance. They have to have some reality behind them - mail drops, email accounts, phone numbers, social media presences, even physical offices. Those take time, money, and ongoing attention. You can't just create them and box them up for future use.
Unlike most people that lie in a one off situation knowing it wouldn’t come up again, if you’re lying about who you are, it lives on forever. All those little things add up and if you’re living out multiple identities, it’s hard to keep them compartmentalized.
Even worse, much like actors that go too far with method acting, there is always risk you will buy into the lies and believe that’s really who you are.
The compartmentalized problem is serious, it's not easy and therefore personas should be sparingly used. You have to increase the points of trust to create any sort of sustainable persona handling system. These points themselves becoming stress inducers!
When it comes to believing your own lies, one way to prevent that is to take persona creation seriously as if you are really preparing for a role or writing this character. Method actors have a bunch of external factors encouraging them to stop that persona, but for the rest of us we really don't so we have to create those factors. Whether this is a dedicated device with dedicated software, or physical cues to remind us who we're being.
Youtubers are a great digital example of persona creation not being taken seriously. So many "jerk" characters wind up being really abusive people who just used that character as an excuse. Unfortunately, they're also a good example of how being haphazard with persona creation can wind up leading people to desperately link pieces of yourself to find the "real you" and reveal all that private information.
Common among: email spam networks, social media bot networks, propaganda networks, pretext social engineering, etc — average person has no interest in this. This based on briefly trying to launch an anonymity service that allowed people to freely create unlimited real phone numbers with voice, voicemail and SMS support — and persona management. Even being free and leveraging existing platform were common sense would say it was a good safety practice and it was easy to generate 1000s of free leads a day — no one was interested, even with it being completely free.
I had an idea a few years ago around anonymity, but now it seems even more possible with things like billion parameter LLMs. A service where you enter text that you want to post on Reddit/Twitter/etc. but you instead give it to your locally-running model, which is trained to output the text with the following transformations:
1. Writing style change
2. Degree of extra/reduced fluff
3. Degree of typos
4. Typing style change (e.g. using semicolons a lot, misusing commas consistently, conventions like S.O.S vs. SOS)
All in an effort to further anonymize your text. The idea is that people have different, consistent grammatical habits and mistakes, writing, concision, etc. You create a "profile" for each identity you want, usually one per account.
Another interesting concept to explore is platform style. Have you ever noticed that everyone on Reddit sort of sounds the same? People on HN sort of sound the same. I think there's an emergent platform-based profile that top comments hover around, because adhering to this style is more likely to get upvotes. The hive mind is real!
I just want to say that this is a really interesting comment and set of ideas. I'm a PhD student in the area of privacy and anonymity, so I think about this stuff a lot. To your point about the emergent style of Reddit and HN comments, developed through the timely feedback of upvotes, I've often wondered how tools like suggested or predictive text are changing writing styles; like when I'm tapping out a quick email or text message on my Android phone and the keyboard suggests the next word that I probably wouldn't have come up with on my own, but it sounds good enough or better so I accept it. I thought the analysis that people have done on the writing style of Satoshi Nakamoto was the most persuasive evidence of his real identity, and I think you're correct that someone could now mask or morph their writing style in a very convincing way with these tools.
Incidentally, I first learned about Stylometry when reading about people using it to decipher the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, so I'm happy you brought it up. I had my suspicions that bot farms for Reddit (even before 2019) were doing something similar to this to generate massive amounts of fake account activity to make subreddits appear popular. Now it seems like a piece of cake to do this with things like GPT-3.
My understanding is that a lot of the APT units use methods like these to make attribution harder and/or make it appear another entity is responsible.
I have done a startup related to anonymity and identity protection, and at least at the time, it was amazingly hard sell, rapidly killed it off. Generally speaking, people simply don’t care about anonymity, privacy, etc.
As for same style topic for cultural fit, yes, thought it would be funny to communicate with YC using same style as PG; one of the partners now even oddly talks very similar to him, but didn’t in the past.
Cool... this post reminds me of Fravia's "enemy tracking" essay from his pages of reverse engineering: https://www.darkridge.com/~jpr5/mirror/fravia.org/enemy.htm. If you've never browsed this site, prepare to enter the mother lode of rabbit holes...
Maybe it's because I'm the kind of guy who took the "On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog" comic to heart, but I don't assume truth about any type of online profile, and I usually don't go cyber stalking anyone just because their online handle sounds mysterious.
Picking a new identity might be a good branding decision (especially if you can get NewName dot com!), but I'm also the kind of guy who looks at the message, not the messenger, so whether I focus on what you're saying or not has nothing to do with the online persona you've created for yourself.
> If you defiantly refuse to say who you are, it can make people angry that you’re upsetting social reciprocity.
Citation needed.
This entire post/idea seems to be based on "you can't just make up an obviously anonymous avatar/username anymore (like BakedPotato138)" and I frankly don't see why not. It's been working fine for decades. The only people who are upset over this are authorities and corporations. And in those cases, making up a fake person is quite possibly criminal fraud.
Wait what, the entire post is literally "just go make up an avatar/username".
> If you don’t want any attention, just pick a very common name like Mary Kim or Adam Johnson.
> Use an AI face generator to create a completely believable face to match your new name. Download it once and use it everywhere. Run it through face aging software to use this same persona for the rest of your life.
> Pick a city and say it’s your location, to avoid that question too.
> For email, Mailbox.org is great, and doesn’t care who you are.
> Create social media profiles with your new name, email, city, and face.
> Nobody will wonder who you are if you answer that question. Instead of block and battle, deflect and settle. That’s better anonymity.
The entire post is about making up a deceptive human username and AI generated human photo. What I'm talking about is making a name like rco8786 and using the avatar of whatever... a delicious ham sandwich.
There is nothing novel about making up an avatar. The point of the article is "trick people by making it a believable one so they'll think that's you, and not just an avatar." Ie. there's an incredibly important social signal in having a name that's obviously not your actual name.
He isn’t saying you can’t do that, he’s saying if you do, people will wonder, which is risky. If you give them answers, even false ones, they’re less likely to wonder.
It’s just tapping into the natural human curiosity, and you want to avoid that kind of attention to maximize your chance of staying anonymous.
I have lost many potential friends because I chose not to give my real name. It gives me some anxiety thinking about whom I've lost, but it's a normal thing to respect other people's boundaries, and my boundary is that I don't feel comfortable with giving my real name to people I haven't met in person. And I have ethical reservations to go as far as lying to make up a real name just to keep a friendship founded entirely on something I'm not comfortable with.
It almost makes it seem like it's wrong to keep the social boundaries I have and that I'm doing harm to myself by withholding new human relationships just because of my discomfort. But I know that if those people are generally going to carry those standards then I can't change them, and it's my choice to disagree.
I tend to be super social, and agree, there’s frequently people that either clearly state not being identifiable is a deal breaker or just fade away. One’s that are the worst though are people that after you have set boundaries assume that they’re special and your boundaries don’t apply to them; frequently they share information that wasn’t requested, then demand because they did you must too. If someone’s not able to respect your boundaries, just politely communicate it’s not good for and wish them well.
There’s 8 billion people on Earth, wouldn’t worry about it, at least I don’t, but clearly limits population of people that are interested in having meaningful relationships.
> > If you defiantly refuse to say who you are, it can make people angry that you’re upsetting social reciprocity.
> Citation needed.
Look around. In this thread there are people who are upset.
> This entire post/idea seems to be based on "you can't just make up an obviously anonymous avatar/username anymore (like BakedPotato138)" and I frankly don't see why not. It's been working fine for decades.
I have had a few obviously anonymous avatars/usernames over the years (this isn't one of them--it's actually my real last name). There have been a few attempts to doxx me during that time.
> The only people who are upset over this are authorities and corporations.
Authorities and corporations aren't people (which is important because people have rights). But that's an aside really.
The bigger point is that authorities and corporations are made up of people, and those people, are often acting on behalf of their authority/corporation. In the worst case, they're true believers that what their authority/corporation is doing is right (i.e., all the people who defend invasions of privacy by corporations on hacker news).
> And in those cases, making up a fake person is quite possibly criminal fraud.
Not always. For example, with Facebook's shadow profiles, they won't even admit they exist most of the time, so they certainly aren't going to prove they exist by attempting to prosecute someone who feeds them fake data.
Authorities and corporations aren't people and don't have rights. In places where the law says that authorities and corporations are people with rights, the law is wrong.
I do understand that it's worth knowing the law because authorities have the power to enforce it. But I think it's important to be clear that corporations and governments are not people and do not have rights, no matter what the law says.
In context, this conversation is about ethics, and corporate personhood is a prime example of where laws and ethics diverge drastically.
But if you're following the advice in this article...nobody should ever know that you're not actually a real person. So you might "know" lots of folks online who are not who they say they are.
The identity and face of Daft Punk are very well known. Thomas Bangalter and Guillaume-Manuel de Homem-Christo have been djing without mask outside of that specific project.
that's just one theory. everything i've read lists both del naja and gunningham as possibilities at the least, and often tosses a couple of other names into the mix.
Law enforcement/intelligence services involvement raises the bar on maintaining anonymity a lot. They can access a lot of information that even an army of armchair sleuths probably can't.
Not "monetarily" as high value as some of the other examples here, but Icefrog, the lead developer/game balancer for Dota and Dota 2 is also mostly pseudonymous.
I think if it weren't for some stupid comments by a League developer (?), no normal people would know who he is. Now, if you try hard enough, you can find his identity leaked in an old blog/forum post (?) and have it proven/corroborated in other areas online I think.
I had an idea for a funny little startup once: “Adopt an alter ego”
Essentially a marketplace where you can buy and sell prebuilt identities - complete with associated, aged, and populated social media accounts, email accounts, pictures, websites, etc.
I just like the idea of being different people online.
Sounds like a side project idea: you enter a description of a persona, the bot buys some phone verified social media accounts, as well as gmail/msn/whatever (plenty of market places around) add uses GPT3 to periodically generate posts on said social media accounts, using the persona description.
Then you just need to fill the pipeline with persona ideas, and get nice account packages after a couple months.
The main roadblock here is the crime. You would need some safeguards to make sure these people aren't real enough to receive any government benefits, or open a bank account.
I disagree. The idea that we should nerf our security tools to prevent them from being used unethically just results in people using nerfed security tools for ethical purposes, while the people doing unethical things go elsewhere for their security tools.
Put another way, if your crypto isn't used by child molesters and terrorists, it's probably not very good crypto.
I've noticed the number of places that let you use ephemeral accounts has really dwindled. Spam, marketing, LE, and I am sure other reasons have it so persistent accounts are more common. So creating a persona is probably the easiest way to be somewhat anonymous online but it's getting harder to create unlinked accounts (using new phone numbers and unlinked to your other accounts) and when it crosses into the real world like with shipping products it gets weird. Your mailman might think a stranger is living with you.
A fun book about this stuff is Michael Bazell’s Extreme Privacy: What It Takes to Disappear in America. With extreme effort you can keep a surprising number of things unlinked from your government name if you really want to.
Thanks for the link. I went down a bit of a rabbit hole on this a few years back after seeing on of the hosts of the reality show Hunted (former White House CIO) give a talk. There was a long Wired article on this topic years ago too.
>when it crosses into the real world like with shipping products it gets weird. Your mailman might think a stranger is living with you.
Not really a problem. A friend of mine used my address (with permission) when they were doing a lot of international travel. Mail (and packages) were never an issue.
These days you'd probably be advised to have some sort of burner phone.
In general, the closer you get to the physical world, the harder it is to maintain anonymity.
> Use an AI face generator to create a completely believable face to match your new name. Download it once and use it everywhere. Run it through face aging software to use this same persona for the rest of your life.
This approach will need a plan for dealing with Zoom. It has normalized, in a very short time, the video component of what used to be strictly audio - the phone call. If you don't display your face, people get mad.
I am a real person. I have a birth certificate. My problem is that people, when they learn my name[1], don't believe I'm a real person, or they believe I'm a person hiding behind a pseudonym. I blame my parents.
Examples? A dozen years ago Facebook went on a purging mission to get rid of fake accounts. I had to prove to the people behind the algorithm that I was real, and had an online presence dating back to the turn of the century. The same thing happened with Google+ (remember that?): to overcome their objections I had to supply links to real-life documents that cited my name. It was annoying at the time, but I can smile about it now.
Same thing happens in real life. I've had people ask me if I changed my name by deed poll (answer: no). Some people have told me that when they heard my name they thought I must be some sort of wannabe rockstar (answer: no, but I do write poems). Sadly, a few people have confessed that they thought I was Black before they met me - I cannot even begin to understand the thought processes they used to reach that conclusion!
I don't believe my name has been a barrier to my advancement in life. It does offer me some anonymity (evidence: I'm not famous) while at the same time making it very easy for people to find me via Google.
[1] - Rik Roots[2]
[2] - Okay, it's Richard Roots[3], but I shortened it when I was at school because people kept shortening it for me to 'Rick' and then asking me if I spelt my name with a silent 'P'
[3] - Turns out that the Roots surname has a pedigree dating back to the Norman conquest of England[4]. The origins of the name come from the Old English word 'rot', which meant 'glad' or 'pleased'
Anonymity is impossible, especially online. About the best one can do is to engage in clever obfuscation though there's a benefit to creating multiple personas for online activity: it makes it easier to keep your silos of interest separated. It's not for everyone but it can be handy.
Absolute anonymity may be impossible (it's not, actually, but it is prohibitively difficult and you have to be highly motivated to have it), but useful anonymity is absolutely attainable.
The key thing is -- who do you want to be anonymous with?
I'm not convinced that a plausible pseudonym is more privacy preserving than something that's obviously just made up. But it's not bad advice in general to post personal stuff on social media and blogs under a pseudonym if you want to be controversial.
> I'm not convinced that a plausible pseudonym is more privacy preserving than something that's obviously just made up.
I think that's true, but vibe I got from this was more about wanting anonymity and to avoid certain social frictions (and maybe not incur a trust penalty). An obvious pseudonym comes with certain costs.
The thing is that a lot of what I post online is either directly or indirectly related to my day job. So I've always figured if I was going to have a moderately high profile public presence anyway, it wasn't worth maintaining a separate identity.
My case is different. When I've run my own companies, I'd post stuff online related to that. But even then, it's under a persona -- I feel it's even more important then, actually (I also use personas in real life in that circumstance. It's very useful to be able to identify as the secretary, the sales guy, whoever, in order to dodge time-wasters such as salesmen.)
But if I'm working for someone else, I'm not posting anything directly related to my work.
>But if I'm working for someone else, I'm not posting anything directly related to my work.
Obviously depends on the company and role. I was hired in part because I had a pretty big online presence on tech topics. (In part, I was writing for CNET at the time when they still had some enterprise computing coverage.)
As always with a security discussion, it's about threat model.
Preventing a random internet person from tying a particular nym to you is easy. Fooling a bunch of people is harder, but doable. Being a top-tier youtuber would probably be effectively impossible.
And if your concern is nation states, well... good luck with anything.
What about signing in to apps which often uses a phone # and email? Also, betting on Tor is like betting there there are no 0-day exploits in browsers or Tor's network. Not a bet I would make.
It all depends on your threat model at the end of the day. I could create a blog and social media accounts in a few hours and, unless I do something stupid, it's going to be pretty hard for Joe Random on the Internet to figure out who I am.
But if I start writing things that catch the attention of the FBI? They'll figure things out quick enough.
I am assuming you are talking about Tor. This is a sophisticated view of things and it's correct. Tor provides as good security and anonymity as a public VPN. But Onion Routers and therefore Tor were built with the intention of protecting against powerful adversaries that can perform MITM attacks. You could argue that the FBI is an even more powerful adversary I suppose but I think there is a mismatch in what Tor was intended to do in theory versus what it provides in practice and without knowing that you could be making a mistake. So I think it's unfortunate that people have to know how to do this analysis before making decisions.
Really more generally. If I create a blog on Blogger and a Twitter account--sure my identity is very discoverable by law enforcement, etc. But Joe Random isn't going to find it especially easily.
This. If you're trying to hide from governments, that's Next Level stuff. You have to be prepared to actually live underground, which involves sacrifices most people aren't willing to make.
yes, I am not saying it's impossible. This is what I do. It's just a nuisance and it took me a long time to find a VOIP provider I actually wanted to use. But that said, I've seen SMS verifiers reject VOIP provider networks.
It's not impossible if you don't attract attention of law enforcement/intelligence agencies. If you use different usernames everywhere and don't reveal private information then a random civilian is unlikely to find out who you really are in real life.
Maybe to some actor that has sufficient data to correlate identities.
But if I introduce myself to someone with an alias or claim false traits,
they will not immediately just know it’s fake unless they have additional contradicting information.
Most people do not casually wear ski masks, but they tend to not lie when asked for a name.
I think the whole subthread is more mixed in terms of fingerprinting and social interactions.
But if you only consider the the former then yes, one would probably only care about what I called "resourceful actors" to which you would end up standing out.
I was more referring to the social aspect,
were if you give someone a name they will (usually) not immediately assume it is false.
Thus giving a false name does not make you "stand out" unless there is already other information in play.
But I'm just clarifying what I meant, considering your point was meant for a different context.
I love Derek's writing. He's so casually eloquent, without being up his own ass like PG. I've learned a lot from reading what he's produced, and I can certainly attribute (in part) a few successful endeavors to being a "slow thinker" as he calls it.
We live in such an insane, reactionary world these days and I find it very refreshing to hear from people who've clearly thought hard about what they're about to say/write.
Sometimes, I even wish HN worked this way. I wish the front page was about 10x as slow, and that we could discuss things for a week or two instead of a day or two. It'd be messier, but I think the fruits, separated from the weeds, would be juicier.
I used to go by Satoshi Nakamoto and be in the group Anonymous. I put out a few of those videos, but people kept challenging whether I was the "real" Anonymous.
Interesting thing, I was in Barcelona last week, and just out of the blue I meet Bill Murray and he buys me ice cream. He said "no one will ever believe you!" Before he left, I told him my name was Satoshi Nakamoto.
I'm just carrying on the work of my grandfather, Nicolas Bourbaki. Just like David Belle was doing what his father, Raymond Belle, began in Viet Nam.
This is one of my favorite features of 1Password (no affiliation, but I've used them for 10+ years and am a fan). They have an identity section that you can use to store all kinds of personas securely and even use the information to autocomplete forms. With the ability to add custom fields, you can easily store more than just the standard metadata like name, dob, etc.
What they’re talking about is called “apparent cover.” That is, a cover story which you don’t have to tell anyone, they make it up in their head from the clues you provide.
For example, if you see someone at dawn on the docks with a tackle box, a fishing pole, and dressed for fishing, you don’t think “spy come to take photos of ships.”
Providing a plausible identity is a good practice for hiding your identity.
I wouldn’t suggest the AI face though. Firstly, it makes the face picture unique in that you can’t (currently) get other pictures of the same “person.” If you have a single picture of yourself it looks weird. Facebook without any pictures? Instagram with nothing? No other pictures of yourself, ever? Definitely weird. Better to just avoid it and use the plausible identity as a layer behind your online handle. Then use an avatar, but don’t hide your name. George Howell, aka “17forty” ‘from college, when I used to drink a lot of 40s, 17 was my personal best lol. Just dumb stuff.’
That is a good approach. My persona is going to turn five years old now, but it looks much older. In fact, my persona looks older by design, which reduces the need for profile maintenance but, in turn, is often targeted for age prejudice. I'm called "old fart" many times a week, and it kinda sucks.
This reminds me of Taleb’s story about how he says he’s a limo driver at cocktail parties.
He chose this to be boring but plausible and move the conversation on.
To me it seems like if you dodge the topic of employment some people will get curious and dig in. If you say what you do, they might be curious and nothing is more boring to me than talking about my job to “normies.”
I think there’s a concept of digitally hiding through being normal. Evading Google leaves a black hole around your activity. Making a digital “Bob” who just does boring, normal stuff creates an ad profile that no one cares about.
I feel so much more comfortable when someone cold calls me with a thick Indian accent and tells me his name is John (or Mike) before trying to sell me an extended car warranty or life insurance!
You look down, they know you're lying and up, they know you don't know the truth. Don't use seven words when four will do. Don't shift your weight, look always at your mark but don't stare, be specific but not memorable, be funny but don't make him laugh. He's got to like you then forget you the moment you've left his side. And for God's sake, whatever you do, don't, under any circumstances...
As someone who owns a popular website, I often receive guest writing inquiries (probably for links and SEO).
Most of the time it's either Indians or Eastern European guys. But for some reason they always use fake personas and names to sound/look more "western".
When I asked why do they do that, the answer was "it increases the conversion rates" among "western" publishers. Who also happen to be the most valuable prospects.
So, basically they exploit the conscious or subconscious xenophobic biases in people of western cultures towards people from other "foreign" cultures by creating fake personas. And it works! People are more likely to accept guest articles from someone who looks like them.
PS. You would be surprised to know how many contributors at Forbes, Inc, Entrepreneur, Tech Crunch, Mashable, etc are completely fake personas.
In one of his novels Cory Doctorow talks about his bad guys doing astroturfing with persona management software to help them track who said what to whom.
As the advertising and tracking arms race escalates, I wonder if there’s a burgeoning industry for personal persona management. So you can isolate your private life from your public life/lives.
Derek's father is a wealthy property developer from Portland, and I'm sure that wealth came in real handy when CDBaby was in its growth phase. But Derek doesn't document that in CDBaby's history because I guess it doesn't fit with his "persona".
> Am I talking with someone from Australia? Philippines? Brazil? Are they 20 or 60? Male or female
Well due to how easy it is to create a fake identity on social media, knowing who someone /really/ is, is the real quest. I've experimented with creating completely false identities on social media, and populated the profiles with plausible information.
I went the extra mile and created fake domain names, under my alias, fake AI created profile pictures, fake family members, even fake boyfriends. I avoided anything that could be unraveled like saying I work at such and such a company, when there is no employee records under my name at that company (Fake LinkedIN profiles are a hard problem).
One very important thing to keep in mind: If you generate a fake persona and present it as entirely real, you are being dishonest.
This may not matter for inconsequential things like the pen name for your SubStack or something. However, it definitely matters if you plan to engage in anything serious or do any business under that persona.
If you run into situations where you're forced to switch to your real identity (e.g. employment relationship, legal matters, or even an accidental leak) then you could lose a lot of credibility. People will naturally wonder if you were trying to hide something from them, regardless of your initial intentions.
The trouble is when you've been using your alternate persona, chatting with a stranger, and encounter someone who knows your real name that wants to say, "Hello."
Encountering someone who knows you is one of the big risks for people working undercover. Read "You're Stepping on my Cloak and Dagger", by Roger Hall.
While it’s been awhile, whenever I ran into that situation earlier on I first attempted to avoid them being aware I was nearby and would immediately leave the area. Once thought had no option, but to politely ask if we might talk for second and let them know not to say anything, which they were happy to do. Soon after for unrelated reasons ended up moving and have not run into issue again.
All and all, while whole informant, undercover agent, spy, witness protection, etc - type things are tiny bit similar, having know real people in all those situations and read about others, it’s not comparable to what I am doing. Since those situations might not only end in you being killed, but anyone close to you. For example, once met a fellow who went under cover in well known gang as a journalists, they found out and he was lucky to end up in hospital for months instead of dead.
For me, worst case is I lose being anonymous as a hobby.
Natural response would be to just say, “oh, I thought your name was [insert prior name]?” - this based on experience, not worth the risk. Beyond that, best to avoid situations if it’s predictably going to happen again, since only matter of time before they slip, decide to mention you prior name behind your back, etc.
Yeah, have a friend that opted to stop using their real name online. We were on a group call with random strangers and girl randomly yelled out his real name when she heard his voice.
> It’s human nature to want to know who’s speaking. If they don’t say, it creates a mystery.
Yes it's human nature to want things but, socially, one might learn to go without something if it's at odds with what someone else wants. If someone doesn't let me keep private things which I would prefer to keep private, unfortunately I will simply learn to avoid that person.
That's to say, "make a persona" is being offered as a panacea to when those around me don't allow for privacy but it is a panacea I would not choose.
been explaining this security policy of mine to people for years in different words. when people think they have answers, they stop looking.
this is why when you look up my dox or grep for my passwords, its not hard to find my fake social security number, address and password in the usual place.
in the future i want to build this into a server. What kind of server are you? Oh, I'm IIS running ASP (not rlly). send your ops down rabbit holes to nowhere instead of depriving them of the feedback they rely on. i love it.
That's pretty genius. I have no social media for socializing, it's purely a photo and idea box.
It's now possible to:
- Create a believable phony organization "Meet the leadership team" page using deep fake images and ChatGPT bios.
In the near future, it will be possible to:
- Generate significant history social media trail with random posts and shares of fake content of all kinds, joining groups, and participation to build up legends to be sold to customers in the future.
I like what this guy has to say and I like that he is centered on helping people. His writing reflects that. I have one of his blog posts on my wall "How to thrive in a unknowable future" and when this article came through Hacker News I immediately identified the name.
If the original poster wants to chime in how he found this writer that would be of interest to me. Thanks for this post. Posts like this make the world a better place to live in.
I have an alter-ego that I release music as. I like that nobody knows who that is, but weirdly I think my alter-ego is a much more likeable character than me.
I'm surprised to see commenters comparing use of made up personas to lying.
There're communities that create/change their personas to match how they perceive themselves, encourage their members to experiment with presented identities, and expect the society to respect and accept presented personas without questioning. I'm totally OK with that. How is this different from presenting oneself as an alter-ego though?
I guess it's useful to drive away curiosity from laymen but how does it stop corporate knowing me by crosschecking multiple docs? For example the banks for sure need my real name and id and phone number, all other services need those too.
This is good advice that does feel borderline unethical. I’ve found that people don’t have to be defined by their actual names though, they can be defined by activities or what they enjoy or want.
I personally have leaned into the latter framework.
Hmm. Makes me wonder if Derek Sivers really is his given name. Maybe it's a pseudonym? I guess I could email him and ask. And before you ask, yes, Dingosity is not the name I was born with.
Random opinion today that’s normal completely socially acceptable thing to say, might tomorrow be proof you’re criminal; for example, a country that’s had significant power shift and outlawed a something that before was legal.
Or you’re living in a country that’s you object to actions that have been taken, for example, invasion of another country, and publicly stating objections is a crime.
This is also a lot harder than it seems, once you start lying it's easy to slip up or provide details that are aren't self consistent. As long as you rely on people just accepting the answer and being immediately satisfied with that it'll work.
Inb4 "oh hey I'm also from <town suburb name you lied being from>, remember that one thing?".
The key is to avoid lying. Don't try to make up things that aren't true, just emphasize and deemphasize different aspects of your true self. That's plenty enough the majority of the time.
But, assuming I wanted a fake background that would pass casual scrutiny, I'd make something up that was close enough to the truth but not close enough that anyone would think anything was off if we got to casual chatting. I'd probably say I was from and/or lived in some city I knew extremely well but had never actually lived in. Maybe say I got an undergrad degree from somewhere I got a grad degree. Etc.
If one's town had a neighboring rival town/school growing up, using the rival town could provide a semblance of cohesiveness due to still being intimate with many of the details of said town as a rival.
Anyone who wishes me harm, can figure out who I am, fairly easily. I own a home, and I'm not sure if people know how much that exposes folks.
I want people to know who I am. I don't think that I have much bad about me (although a number of folks think I'm a stuffy old boomer -they're probably right).
It also helps me to behave better. I was not always a stuffy old boomer, and I behaved ... not like an adult ... on the Internet.
I'm big on Responsibility and Accountability. I'd like to see more of it in others (but am frequently disappointed). I find that it's best for me to act like I'd like others to act; whether or not they do, is not my business.
> I own a home, and I'm not sure if people know how much that exposes folks.
OT but even more maddeningly, only those of us not rich enough to own our homes outright are subject to this stupidity. If you don't need a mortgage, you can just buy your home under an LLC or other entity. If you do, this becomes difficult or maybe impossible.
Finding the name of the owner of a given address is one thing, but at least in my current and previous city, you can get the address (as well as other details) from just the first few letters of the owner's name. Anyone in the world can do this, anonymously, using the county records website.
makes me think of disinformation and differential privacy: too hard to hide the truth so fill the space with lies so it takes too many resources to find the truth.
My strategy for this is actually to use other people's names. You can try to dig in but if you try to look me up on any other website you're gonna be playing the wrong game.
Personally, I have no problem not being anonymous online. But I do prefer to have privacy online.
Some folks conflate them, but while they are related, they are not the same thing.
Sites like HN provide privacy through pseudonymity (which is, essentially, the "solution" prescribed by the author of the blog post), allowing those I interact with here to know that "I" am "Nobody9999".
Unsurprisingly, that's not the name on my passport. But on HN, you can be relatively sure (assuming I'm not also operating sock-puppet accounts as well) that my thoughts, ideas and expression are from the same person.
I preserve my privacy by not using my "legal" name here. The combination allows me to freely express myself without being tracked down, doxxed or otherwise abused by those who might disagree with me.
As for other places on the internet, I generally don't utilize sites that require verification of my personal details (an excellent example is ChatGPT, which requires not only an account, phone number verification as well), not because I'm engaged in evil/illegal/nasty behaviors, but because my business is my business and no one else's.
That's at least an attempt at preserving some semblance of privacy, but doesn't really provide anonymity.
While (as others have mentioned), my electricity provider, my landlord, my ISP, my mobile device service provider and my doctor all know who I am, where I live and an astonishing amount of information about my life, for the most part that's necessary to participating economically in society.
As such, especially given the lengths to which ISPs and mobile service providers go to to collect information about my activities, my privacy is significantly curtailed. That generally pisses me off, not because I really have anything to hide, but because (and I'll say it again), my business is my business and no one else's.
while I do understand the blog author's point of view, rather than creating an alternative persona online, I'm just me and mostly share my thoughts pseudonymously without trying to create an alternative backstory for those pseudonymous identities.
However, those who choose to use online resources that require verification of their identity, may need to take additional steps to preserve their privacy/pseudonymity. I choose not to engage in those forums and, as such, my privacy is improved a little.
Is that sufficient for me? No. Unfortunately, there's a limit to what I can do while still living "on the grid." And since I have no interest in squatting in a lean-to deep in the woods, I do have to give up some privacy.
I'd love to live in a world where collection of PII was the exception rather than the rule, but those my countrymen (with a very few exceptions) elect to legislate and execute such laws as are legislated don't seem to give a rat's ass about privacy, unless theirs is impacted.
This is so based. Now I don't know anything anymore is the author Derek Sivers from California who now lives in New Zealand even real. Is anything on his about page even true? How are we supposed to trust it? Then again, it doesn't matter.
This seems like a pretty straightforward mechanism for covert operatives, to generate a believable (and memorizable) cover that pulls attention away and maintains coherence.
That said, as someone who prizes ethical behavior, it's not possible to practice this and remain wholly honest without some sort of ethical loophole like "character work for entertainment only". A persona requires misrepresentation, which is not the same as de facto anonymity.
So, while I love the write-up, I don't think it's saying what they think it's saying.