As far as I can tell most people’s fear s in relation to privacy are motivated by an intuitive ‘ick’ feeling not by any projection of future harms. But as we know reversed stupidity isn’t intelligence, so the question of how much one should care about privacy, especially online, is still open.
What do you do in terms of preserving privacy and why? E.g. Do you keep your real world and online (or different online) personalities distinct, if so why?
It’s hard to judge. When I started seriously participating in stuff online, I kept heavily pseudonymous so I could disavow it later (I was still growing up) and out of interest in crypto & security issues. This came in handy when I earned some enemies on Wikipedia who sought to ‘out’ me; one group went so far as to call up universities looking for info on me in order to harass me and in the best-case scenario, get me fired from a job. Naturally, they failed. More recently, I learned of death threats; I believe the threat to be very minimal, but it’s still not a particularly happy thought.
The point being that when I started, I didn’t seriously expect stalkers and threats, but if I had started ‘public’, I didn’t have the option to retract all the relevant privacy info.
I earned some enemies on Wikipedia [...] death threats.
Seriously? What the hell? I forget how many crazy people there are on the internet.
This isn’t uncommon at all. A lot of bloggers who discuss anything controversial receive death threats, rape threats, or other threats of violence. Fortunately, the threateners are almost always Internet Tough Guys, all keyboard and no fists.
I’ve been targeted by an online stalker once over stuff on Wikipedia — fortunately he was incompetent and the personal information he posted about me was obsolete. (Ironically enough, he thought of himself as a privacy activist. Self-righteousness is strong in that one.) An ex-girlfriend of mine who blogs about mental health issues has been repeatedly harassed, had private email messages leaked and posted online, and has been threatened repeatedly. And some organizations (e.g. Scientology) have quite a reputation for attacking people who criticize them online (or in print) ….
I was aware of this for specific things, (e.g. blogging about gender and sexuality issues, or the weirder parts of reddit or 4chan). But I’d always thought of wikipedia as a nice friendly place. Basically I thought it was a risk you took on in certain areas not a general background thing.
The vast majority of activity on Wikipedia is nice and friendly. But some of that minority, well…
(More in high-conflict areas than elsewhere, yes, but crazy people are everywhere. Articles get written on obscure subjects because no matter what the topic is, someone is obsessive about it. But people go crazy about unexpected topics, because no matter what the topic is, someone is obsessive about it...)
I’d be comfortable with an estimate like <1/1,000.
and does it link to any particular topics?
Well, there’s always something which caused them to do it. But the topic isn’t always useful. In one area, I was entirely unsurprised; in another area, I was completely blindsided and still find it hard to believe; in a third, I was moderately surprised.
I’d be comfortable with an estimate like <1/1,000.
On a scale of ‘attempted privacy invasions/total posts on the internet’?
Can I ask what the unexpected ones were?
What did they intend to do with personal information? Just contact real life people and be rude about you? I’d guess if you have a good real life reputation already that would be ineffective.
On a scale of ‘attempted privacy invasions/total posts on the internet’?
No, that the death threat would result in any harms to me.
Can I ask what the unexpected ones were?
No.
What did they intend to do with personal information? Just contact real life people and be rude about you? I’d guess if you have a good real life reputation already that would be ineffective.
You’d be surprised. One Wikipedia admin, Kate IIRC, quit Wikipedia entirely because she thought her stalkers like Daniel Brandt could get her fired. Another, PhilWelch IIRC (who’s a LWer now), had some unfortunate encounters with the police, courtesy of his stalkers, demonstrating that even if they can’t get you fired they can do a distressing amount remotely.
“Privacy” is a single word that people use to mean many, many different things. In “A Taxonomy of Privacy”.pdf), Daniel Solove identifies sixteen distinct sorts of harms that people group under the notion of harms to “privacy”:
Surveillance — someone spying on you, tapping your calls, etc.;
Interrogation — someone making you answer questions, testify against yourself, etc.;
Aggregation — someone assembling dossiers or profiles about you;
Identification — someone tracking you from here to there, or making you do so yourself by carrying papers;
Insecurity — someone gaining illicit access to records legitimately kept about or for you;
Secondary use — someone taking records that were made for one purpose, and turning them to another purpose;
Exclusion — someone refusing to tell you what records are kept about you, or to correct mistakes;
Breach of confidentiality — someone leaking something that you told them in confidence;
Disclosure — someone leaking something that damages your reputation or your safety;
Exposure — someone intruding on you in activities that are conventionally private, such as defecation or grieving;
Increased accessibility — someone making it easier for others to get records about you that were hard to obtain before;
Blackmail — someone threatening to expose something about you in order to gain power over you;
Appropriation — someone using your image or name to promote a product or other goals;
Distortion — someone saying false or misleading things that hurt your reputation;
Intrusion — someone entering your home or private places without your consent;
Decisional interference — someone denying you information, or manipulating you, regarding personal matters such as sexuality and reproduction.
I was using it in the loose sense of “how much effort should I put into making it difficult to ascertain my real life identity.”
That is a very useful taxonomy, I may reference it in another project I’m working on analysing why people value privacy (and whether they should). The main motivation seems to be the ‘icky’ feeling people get at the thought of being observed, not any expected harms. Which means they are unwilling to accept small violations of privacy that would have massive social benefits (e.g. supplying police with all citizens fingerprints and DNA would massively reduce the number of unsolved crimes, with very minimal possibility for abuse).
supplying police with all citizens fingerprints and DNA would massively reduce the number of unsolved crimes
This might be overselling it. Only about a quarter of criminal offences are recorded by the police, and they already solve some crimes despite incomplete fingerprint & DNA databases. So even if expanding the databases meant the police solved every crime they recorded, the number of unsolved crimes would fall by at most 20% (unless there were a reason to expect reporting/recording of crimes to rise as well).
I act so that if someone linked my online persona to my real life, their estimation of my real life would improve (I only say cool or impressive things online, basically.)
It’s not possible to find the things that you say in meatspace via google. Let’s say someone you know in real life doesn’t know that you are the cool rationalists that you project on LessWrong. That person is like you. He is also on LessWrong. He also uses a nickname.
You both know each other but you don’t look like cool rationalists to each other.
If one of you starts to be identifiable then the other can say: “Hey, let’s meet up to have some cool conversation about rationality”. That real life relationship can then also improve your online relationship. Your new real life rational friend is now likely to give your posts on LessWrong more attention.
Both commenting on them and voting. Your online life also gets improved. There’s synergy.
Being willing to take real life responsibility for the actions of your online persona can increase the amount of trust that your online persona gets.
Sure, it isn’t. But I’ve been using the moniker shokwave for nearly ten years now, so there’s some cost to changing. I will, however, examine those costs more closely because you make a convincing argument.
If you don’t think you are seen as a cool person in real life, what’s the reason? Are you hiding yourself to avoid rejection from the people around you? Do you think that you can only express yourself online? Is there something that you could change in meatspace to communicate your personality more effectively?
If so, it would be worthwhile to investigate the costs of such a behavior change.
Many geeks spent way to much energy on hiding their personality.
Oh, I’m pretty cool in real life too! It’s not at all that I can only express myself online; it’s precisely the opposite, that I can choose to not express myself online. This lets me craft my responses much more—it’s like being given five minutes to come up with each line in a conversation.
The main practical reason I’ve found for caring about online privacy is to make it harder for people to obtain your passwords. For example, don’t put your mother’s maiden name on Facebook if it’s one of the security questions someone can use to get into your bank account, but there are less dumb versions of this.
The main difference between my meatspace and online personas is that I try not to say things online that I anticipate regretting in 20 years, and instead I try to say things that other people will think are cool so they will offer me jobs or something (one reason I use my real name). I’m less filtered in meatspace.
On LessWrong I use my surname and the first two letters of my lastname as nickname. That means, if someone Google’s my name he won’t find my LessWrong posts. If someone however knows me and reads LessWrong I think he can deduce my identity.
When possible I also use an avatar image of myself to make it easier to recognise me.
I’m doing Quantified Self community building and multiple people who are into Quantified Self participate on LessWrong. I might say things on LessWrong that offend somebody but I think that people here are generally able to accept people with different viewpoints and won’t hold something I write here against me outside of LessWrong.
My Quantified Self online identity is linked via speaking engagments and mainstream media interviews with my real life.
Other links between my online identity and offline identity are found in facebook. A bunch of my facebook friends come from online sources.
I was roommates for a few months with a guy where the first contact was online and where facebook was the medium that allowed me to know that he moved to my city and needed a place to live.
With another good friend of mine it was similar. We had minimal online contact. Then we became facebook friends. In physical space we meet the first time accidently in a toastmasters club and were surprised that we are facebook friends. Today he’s one of my best friends.
Especially if you have interests that aren’t shared by most people turning online relationships with people who share your interests into real world interactions is very worthwhile.
The less walls that you build around yourself with privacy protections, the more likely you are to interact with people you know online in real life.
So far I don’t know of a relationship that I lost because of something that I wrote online. If something I write online however offends someone I know offline to the extend that the person wants to end the relationship, we probably don’t have much shared interests anyway.
I want to interact in real life in a way with people that don’t involve hiding major parts of my personality. http://xkcd.com/137/
That said I don’t publish all information that I could publish. There’s information where I would it stupid to share it in a public fashion and I keep it private.
Till know I didn’t have any death threads or stalkers. The worst thing that happened to me was a journalist who didn’t spoke to me and who wrote an article that thrashed Quantified Self that included my real name and a quote from me.
I do think that I might have a future online presence that creates some threats and I did thought about the issue when I started using my real name online as I knew someone who went through it.
After someone DDoS his server and tried to spam other people with his email address (sometimes it possible to fake email addresses) he just said: “It comes with the territory of having strong online presence and saying controversial stuff.”
I think you have to see it a bit in perspective. 70 years ago people risked their life in war. They had a substantial chance of dying for their beliefs. Today the risk of dying for a controversial position is very low. You are probably more likely to be struck by an asteroid.
You don’t have to be as couragous as “Courage as contigous”-Julian Assange, but taking a few risks to be able to spread more opinions more effective is worthwhile.
How much should I care about online privacy?
As far as I can tell most people’s fear s in relation to privacy are motivated by an intuitive ‘ick’ feeling not by any projection of future harms. But as we know reversed stupidity isn’t intelligence, so the question of how much one should care about privacy, especially online, is still open.
What do you do in terms of preserving privacy and why? E.g. Do you keep your real world and online (or different online) personalities distinct, if so why?
Edited for typos and clarity
It’s hard to judge. When I started seriously participating in stuff online, I kept heavily pseudonymous so I could disavow it later (I was still growing up) and out of interest in crypto & security issues. This came in handy when I earned some enemies on Wikipedia who sought to ‘out’ me; one group went so far as to call up universities looking for info on me in order to harass me and in the best-case scenario, get me fired from a job. Naturally, they failed. More recently, I learned of death threats; I believe the threat to be very minimal, but it’s still not a particularly happy thought.
The point being that when I started, I didn’t seriously expect stalkers and threats, but if I had started ‘public’, I didn’t have the option to retract all the relevant privacy info.
Seriously? What the hell? I forget how many crazy people there are on the internet.
I’m feeling a little more paranoid now. How high do you estimate the risk is and does it link to any particular topics?
This isn’t uncommon at all. A lot of bloggers who discuss anything controversial receive death threats, rape threats, or other threats of violence. Fortunately, the threateners are almost always Internet Tough Guys, all keyboard and no fists.
I’ve been targeted by an online stalker once over stuff on Wikipedia — fortunately he was incompetent and the personal information he posted about me was obsolete. (Ironically enough, he thought of himself as a privacy activist. Self-righteousness is strong in that one.) An ex-girlfriend of mine who blogs about mental health issues has been repeatedly harassed, had private email messages leaked and posted online, and has been threatened repeatedly. And some organizations (e.g. Scientology) have quite a reputation for attacking people who criticize them online (or in print) ….
I was aware of this for specific things, (e.g. blogging about gender and sexuality issues, or the weirder parts of reddit or 4chan). But I’d always thought of wikipedia as a nice friendly place. Basically I thought it was a risk you took on in certain areas not a general background thing.
The vast majority of activity on Wikipedia is nice and friendly. But some of that minority, well…
(More in high-conflict areas than elsewhere, yes, but crazy people are everywhere. Articles get written on obscure subjects because no matter what the topic is, someone is obsessive about it. But people go crazy about unexpected topics, because no matter what the topic is, someone is obsessive about it...)
Wikipedia doesn’t have a culture that promotes being awful to people, the way that some sites do — but it’s a high-value target.
I’d be comfortable with an estimate like <1/1,000.
Well, there’s always something which caused them to do it. But the topic isn’t always useful. In one area, I was entirely unsurprised; in another area, I was completely blindsided and still find it hard to believe; in a third, I was moderately surprised.
On a scale of ‘attempted privacy invasions/total posts on the internet’?
Can I ask what the unexpected ones were?
What did they intend to do with personal information? Just contact real life people and be rude about you? I’d guess if you have a good real life reputation already that would be ineffective.
No, that the death threat would result in any harms to me.
No.
You’d be surprised. One Wikipedia admin, Kate IIRC, quit Wikipedia entirely because she thought her stalkers like Daniel Brandt could get her fired. Another, PhilWelch IIRC (who’s a LWer now), had some unfortunate encounters with the police, courtesy of his stalkers, demonstrating that even if they can’t get you fired they can do a distressing amount remotely.
“Privacy” is a single word that people use to mean many, many different things. In “A Taxonomy of Privacy”.pdf), Daniel Solove identifies sixteen distinct sorts of harms that people group under the notion of harms to “privacy”:
Surveillance — someone spying on you, tapping your calls, etc.;
Interrogation — someone making you answer questions, testify against yourself, etc.;
Aggregation — someone assembling dossiers or profiles about you;
Identification — someone tracking you from here to there, or making you do so yourself by carrying papers;
Insecurity — someone gaining illicit access to records legitimately kept about or for you;
Secondary use — someone taking records that were made for one purpose, and turning them to another purpose;
Exclusion — someone refusing to tell you what records are kept about you, or to correct mistakes;
Breach of confidentiality — someone leaking something that you told them in confidence;
Disclosure — someone leaking something that damages your reputation or your safety;
Exposure — someone intruding on you in activities that are conventionally private, such as defecation or grieving;
Increased accessibility — someone making it easier for others to get records about you that were hard to obtain before;
Blackmail — someone threatening to expose something about you in order to gain power over you;
Appropriation — someone using your image or name to promote a product or other goals;
Distortion — someone saying false or misleading things that hurt your reputation;
Intrusion — someone entering your home or private places without your consent;
Decisional interference — someone denying you information, or manipulating you, regarding personal matters such as sexuality and reproduction.
I was using it in the loose sense of “how much effort should I put into making it difficult to ascertain my real life identity.”
That is a very useful taxonomy, I may reference it in another project I’m working on analysing why people value privacy (and whether they should). The main motivation seems to be the ‘icky’ feeling people get at the thought of being observed, not any expected harms. Which means they are unwilling to accept small violations of privacy that would have massive social benefits (e.g. supplying police with all citizens fingerprints and DNA would massively reduce the number of unsolved crimes, with very minimal possibility for abuse).
This might be overselling it. Only about a quarter of criminal offences are recorded by the police, and they already solve some crimes despite incomplete fingerprint & DNA databases. So even if expanding the databases meant the police solved every crime they recorded, the number of unsolved crimes would fall by at most 20% (unless there were a reason to expect reporting/recording of crimes to rise as well).
I act so that if someone linked my online persona to my real life, their estimation of my real life would improve (I only say cool or impressive things online, basically.)
If that’s the case why aren’t you using your real name?
doesn’t want to taint his online persona with his boring real self
As drethelin pointed out, if my online persona would make my real life look better, then my real life would make my online persona look worse.
It’s not zero sum.
It’s not possible to find the things that you say in meatspace via google. Let’s say someone you know in real life doesn’t know that you are the cool rationalists that you project on LessWrong. That person is like you. He is also on LessWrong. He also uses a nickname. You both know each other but you don’t look like cool rationalists to each other.
If one of you starts to be identifiable then the other can say: “Hey, let’s meet up to have some cool conversation about rationality”. That real life relationship can then also improve your online relationship. Your new real life rational friend is now likely to give your posts on LessWrong more attention. Both commenting on them and voting. Your online life also gets improved. There’s synergy.
Being willing to take real life responsibility for the actions of your online persona can increase the amount of trust that your online persona gets.
Sure, it isn’t. But I’ve been using the moniker shokwave for nearly ten years now, so there’s some cost to changing. I will, however, examine those costs more closely because you make a convincing argument.
Once thing I forgot:
If you don’t think you are seen as a cool person in real life, what’s the reason? Are you hiding yourself to avoid rejection from the people around you? Do you think that you can only express yourself online? Is there something that you could change in meatspace to communicate your personality more effectively?
If so, it would be worthwhile to investigate the costs of such a behavior change.
Many geeks spent way to much energy on hiding their personality.
Oh, I’m pretty cool in real life too! It’s not at all that I can only express myself online; it’s precisely the opposite, that I can choose to not express myself online. This lets me craft my responses much more—it’s like being given five minutes to come up with each line in a conversation.
The main practical reason I’ve found for caring about online privacy is to make it harder for people to obtain your passwords. For example, don’t put your mother’s maiden name on Facebook if it’s one of the security questions someone can use to get into your bank account, but there are less dumb versions of this.
The main difference between my meatspace and online personas is that I try not to say things online that I anticipate regretting in 20 years, and instead I try to say things that other people will think are cool so they will offer me jobs or something (one reason I use my real name). I’m less filtered in meatspace.
On LessWrong I use my surname and the first two letters of my lastname as nickname. That means, if someone Google’s my name he won’t find my LessWrong posts. If someone however knows me and reads LessWrong I think he can deduce my identity. When possible I also use an avatar image of myself to make it easier to recognise me.
I’m doing Quantified Self community building and multiple people who are into Quantified Self participate on LessWrong. I might say things on LessWrong that offend somebody but I think that people here are generally able to accept people with different viewpoints and won’t hold something I write here against me outside of LessWrong.
My Quantified Self online identity is linked via speaking engagments and mainstream media interviews with my real life. Other links between my online identity and offline identity are found in facebook. A bunch of my facebook friends come from online sources.
I was roommates for a few months with a guy where the first contact was online and where facebook was the medium that allowed me to know that he moved to my city and needed a place to live. With another good friend of mine it was similar. We had minimal online contact. Then we became facebook friends. In physical space we meet the first time accidently in a toastmasters club and were surprised that we are facebook friends. Today he’s one of my best friends.
Especially if you have interests that aren’t shared by most people turning online relationships with people who share your interests into real world interactions is very worthwhile. The less walls that you build around yourself with privacy protections, the more likely you are to interact with people you know online in real life.
So far I don’t know of a relationship that I lost because of something that I wrote online. If something I write online however offends someone I know offline to the extend that the person wants to end the relationship, we probably don’t have much shared interests anyway.
I want to interact in real life in a way with people that don’t involve hiding major parts of my personality. http://xkcd.com/137/
That said I don’t publish all information that I could publish. There’s information where I would it stupid to share it in a public fashion and I keep it private.
Till know I didn’t have any death threads or stalkers. The worst thing that happened to me was a journalist who didn’t spoke to me and who wrote an article that thrashed Quantified Self that included my real name and a quote from me.
I do think that I might have a future online presence that creates some threats and I did thought about the issue when I started using my real name online as I knew someone who went through it. After someone DDoS his server and tried to spam other people with his email address (sometimes it possible to fake email addresses) he just said: “It comes with the territory of having strong online presence and saying controversial stuff.”
I think you have to see it a bit in perspective. 70 years ago people risked their life in war. They had a substantial chance of dying for their beliefs. Today the risk of dying for a controversial position is very low. You are probably more likely to be struck by an asteroid. You don’t have to be as couragous as “Courage as contigous”-Julian Assange, but taking a few risks to be able to spread more opinions more effective is worthwhile.