— If someone is building pure online persona, it isn’t appropriate to dox them because of their online activities. There essentially is no added value for society in doing this. The person is using pseudonym to freely communicate their views and opinions while protecting their day-to-day life.
— Once anyone starts to bring real physical life into the conversation (such as your example) they are becoming a fair game. It’s them who linked their online presence to real life, they doxxed themselves.
I would say, if you want to stay anonymous, you should show at least some effort in trying to protect your identity.
My guess is how much the person has brought real life into their pseudonymous identity is pretty grey? For example, if someone pseudonymously mentions living in New Haven, have they now lost protection against doxing because most people don’t live in New Haven?
But perhaps that doesn’t come up in any of the cases I’m worried about here, because by the time you start making detailed accusations like this you will have narrowed the range of people you might be down to one or a handful.
Making any accusation whatsoever regarding a real, physical, human being, with a known identity, means that they are bringing ‘real physical life into the conversation’. Or at least that’s how I read the parent.
In which case they can’t credibly expect to be protected from getting counter-accused by someone else.
So pseudonymous accounts can accuse each other, pseudonymously, all day long, with an expectation of privacy. But the moment they link a real world identity means that the counter-party(s) can do so too.
I would say that the norm should be:
— If someone is building pure online persona, it isn’t appropriate to dox them because of their online activities. There essentially is no added value for society in doing this. The person is using pseudonym to freely communicate their views and opinions while protecting their day-to-day life.
— Once anyone starts to bring real physical life into the conversation (such as your example) they are becoming a fair game. It’s them who linked their online presence to real life, they doxxed themselves.
I would say, if you want to stay anonymous, you should show at least some effort in trying to protect your identity.
My guess is how much the person has brought real life into their pseudonymous identity is pretty grey? For example, if someone pseudonymously mentions living in New Haven, have they now lost protection against doxing because most people don’t live in New Haven?
But perhaps that doesn’t come up in any of the cases I’m worried about here, because by the time you start making detailed accusations like this you will have narrowed the range of people you might be down to one or a handful.
Making any accusation whatsoever regarding a real, physical, human being, with a known identity, means that they are bringing ‘real physical life into the conversation’. Or at least that’s how I read the parent.
In which case they can’t credibly expect to be protected from getting counter-accused by someone else.
So pseudonymous accounts can accuse each other, pseudonymously, all day long, with an expectation of privacy. But the moment they link a real world identity means that the counter-party(s) can do so too.
I don’t think it’s much grey. It’s not the question of whether you are doing perfect job protecting your identity, but are you even trying?