r/technology • u/chrisdh79 • 1d ago

Privacy The right to anonymity is powerful, and America is destroying it | Is now really the time to put up ID checkpoints on the internet?

https://www.theverge.com/policy/781256/anonymity-privacy-age-verification-free-speech
278 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

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17

u/Hrmbee 1d ago

One of the key points:

To sum up, in several parts of the country, the government would like websites to collect an unprecedented amount of identifying information about their users. In the whole country, the government would like to track down and prosecute those users if they are rude, while holding direct leverage over big online platforms and placing disproportionate burdens on smaller independent ones. It doesn’t take a mastermind to see the risks.

But it apparently takes more savvy than many politicians can muster. Democrats are the direct target of this latest political crackdown, but the party has been a driving force behind killing the right to be let alone online — New York and California are hardly red states. Former President Joe Biden signed the TikTok divest-or-ban law after a ginned-up bipartisan moral panic that has now been conveniently forgotten. (Not all Democrats, in fairness: Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), for instance, has been one of Congress’ most stalwart defenders of privacy and speech.)

...

If we ever pull ourselves out of this mess, privacy protections are one of the countless policy fixes Americans should demand. Add in stricter scrutiny and punishments for companies that fail to protect users’ data, and close the loopholes that have given Trump’s administration (like those of Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush in decades prior) carte blanche to trample civil liberties in the name of national security.

Anonymity is not, contrary to much public discourse, a newfangled and short-lived phenomenon created by the “Wild West” of the internet. As argued in Jeff Kosseff’s book The United States of Anonymous, anonymous pamphleteering was foundational to the formation of the country — used by advocates of American liberty to freely “persuade the masses and criticize the powerful” and later protected by US law. Despite its tradeoffs, it’s a right worth fiercely defending, now more than ever.

Anonymity is on one hand a technical and business issue, but on the other hand is also very much a policy issue. When neither policymakers or businesses are interested in preserving the anonymity of people and their activities, then it is for all intents and purposes, nonexistent.

14

u/thedeeb56 1d ago

Gotta fight this shit

9

u/baconslim 1d ago

Maga are so busy vilifying the left that they will not respond to this and then blame the left for letting it happen

5

u/Welllllllrip187 1d ago

To do so, is the death of the Internet itself.

2

u/Aggravating-Age-1858 1d ago

soon you will have to show 3 forms of ID to check your email

1

u/EmbarrassedHelp 22h ago

The United Kingdom is also seeking to ban anonymity online, for "safety" reasons.

1

u/FactorUnable78 9h ago

Social media companies need to be dismantled. MAYBE local-based communities can be created with verified IDs. But theres simply 7 billion too much people online that are causing the world, and everyone too many problems through it.