European blood
11-15-2011, 03:22 PM
Online anonymity may be a luxury we can no longer afford – and it's disappearing fast anyway. Are we ready to bare all on the internet?
IN JULY last year, Orlando Figes, one of the UK's most eminent historians, admitted posting savage critiques of rivals' books on the Amazon website under the pseudonym "Historian" - alongside praise of his own. His eventual confession came only after he had threatened to take legal action against anyone who accused him of the misdeed. Later he blamed his wife for the reviews.
Figes's online behaviour is an example of what's known as sock puppetry - pretending to be someone other than who you are for the sake of furthering your own interests. It made for a juicy academic scandal that in the end hurt him more than anyone else, but the consequences of the internet's ability to cloak users' identities aren't always so confined. Vicious cyberbullying has, in extreme cases, driven victims to suicide. Scammers and spammers can hijack email addresses to steal banking credentials and even state secrets. Earlier this year, for example, a convincing email fooled several senior US government officials into handing over their email passwords to hackers. For all the benefits that the internet has brought us, it often remains a deeply uncivilised place.
Illegal and just plain bad behaviour online has sparked discussions of new laws to combat cyberbullying and secure the internet from criminal activity. Such legislation may soon be irrelevant. Several companies are building tools that can identify internet users with unprecedented precision. Proponents claims the new tools will lead to a safer and less hostile internet. If the internet is to keep developing, they say, perhaps we can no longer afford to live in an anonymous environment where no one need ever be held accountable for their actions. Are we ready to abandon the option of shielding our online identity?
"The internet would be better if we had an accurate notion that you were a real person as opposed to a dog, or a fake person, or a spammer," Eric Schmidt, Google's executive chairman, told an audience in the UK at the Edinburgh Television Festival in August.
The ability to be a "fake person" is a large part of why comments on otherwise respectable publications often descend into outright abuse. Similarly, the ease with which it's possible for wrongdoers to cover their tracks online enables credit-card fraud, which costs retailers and the card companies hundreds of millions of dollars a year in the US alone. Retailers simply have no easy way of knowing whether the buyer is who they claim to be. So it remains fairly easy to purchase goods online using a stolen credit card. A more robust method for verifying identity would almost certainly reduce fraud.
Read More: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228361.800-the-real-you-say-goodbye-to-online-anonymity.html?page=1
IN JULY last year, Orlando Figes, one of the UK's most eminent historians, admitted posting savage critiques of rivals' books on the Amazon website under the pseudonym "Historian" - alongside praise of his own. His eventual confession came only after he had threatened to take legal action against anyone who accused him of the misdeed. Later he blamed his wife for the reviews.
Figes's online behaviour is an example of what's known as sock puppetry - pretending to be someone other than who you are for the sake of furthering your own interests. It made for a juicy academic scandal that in the end hurt him more than anyone else, but the consequences of the internet's ability to cloak users' identities aren't always so confined. Vicious cyberbullying has, in extreme cases, driven victims to suicide. Scammers and spammers can hijack email addresses to steal banking credentials and even state secrets. Earlier this year, for example, a convincing email fooled several senior US government officials into handing over their email passwords to hackers. For all the benefits that the internet has brought us, it often remains a deeply uncivilised place.
Illegal and just plain bad behaviour online has sparked discussions of new laws to combat cyberbullying and secure the internet from criminal activity. Such legislation may soon be irrelevant. Several companies are building tools that can identify internet users with unprecedented precision. Proponents claims the new tools will lead to a safer and less hostile internet. If the internet is to keep developing, they say, perhaps we can no longer afford to live in an anonymous environment where no one need ever be held accountable for their actions. Are we ready to abandon the option of shielding our online identity?
"The internet would be better if we had an accurate notion that you were a real person as opposed to a dog, or a fake person, or a spammer," Eric Schmidt, Google's executive chairman, told an audience in the UK at the Edinburgh Television Festival in August.
The ability to be a "fake person" is a large part of why comments on otherwise respectable publications often descend into outright abuse. Similarly, the ease with which it's possible for wrongdoers to cover their tracks online enables credit-card fraud, which costs retailers and the card companies hundreds of millions of dollars a year in the US alone. Retailers simply have no easy way of knowing whether the buyer is who they claim to be. So it remains fairly easy to purchase goods online using a stolen credit card. A more robust method for verifying identity would almost certainly reduce fraud.
Read More: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228361.800-the-real-you-say-goodbye-to-online-anonymity.html?page=1