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Damien Mason's avatar

Online privacy used to be my jam, working for a company literally called ProPrivacy before moving back into the tech and gaming space. I'd love to say I'm an advocate for anonymity, and in an ideal world, I probably would be.

Sadly, online privacy doesn't really exist with the amount of data already floating around out there. Surfshark has a new product called Incogni that attempts to track who has what and sends takedown requests to remove it, but it's expensive and can't guarantee compliance.

Your privacy is already well and truly breached. I'm not opposed to safe and verified, so long as it's handled in a tame and transparent way. After all, there's already so much abuse that comes part and parcel with anonymity. All of the '-isms' you can think of, cheating in video games, and it's only getting worse with technology like deepfakes and generative AI readily available to the public. There's no sense of ownership, and I'm a little sick of people being so emboldened by the lack of repercussions.

My partner is a teacher, and I fear what children can do with such technology involving her if it's left unchecked. Especially considering many don't have a full concept of repercussions at the early stages of their life. It can be weaponised very easily and, much like governments right now, employers also aren't equipped to deal with the fallout.

Alternatively, I don't trust any governments to act as swiftly and rationally as needed when there's a great level of nuance, so we're in a no-win situation.

Boomer's avatar

Definitely the right person to ask about this then!

I've not heard of Incogni before, so I'll have to have a look. I've got a friend working in a similar field, and they're always telling me to lock down my profiles.

In your opinion, what would a tame and transparent approach to member verification look like? (Again, just a discussion rather than actual plans!) This is something I'm looking at in my uni research, but more from a cultural perspective rather than a technical/platform affordance-based approach.

Damien Mason's avatar

That's quite difficult to answer. I don't have faith that any government could do it in a way that'll please everyone. If there was a government-verified profile program that tied to your national insurance / social security number, and then you used that profile to sign up to platforms like Just About, then you could only strictly have one profile per platform. It's a bit like how certain platforms require you to use your phone number, but it's a lot harder to get another government-sanction ID number than it is to buy a new SIM.

Platforms could then give users the ability to hide as much information as they want or even be anonymous, publicly speaking, but everything would be traceable and punishable if they're caught doing something wrong. That level of accountability would act as a deterrent in itself. Post AI content without the consent of the involved on-screen parties? Punishable by law and you're accountable. I just worry that a centralised solution leaves room for abuse from the public somehow.

Lanah Tyra's avatar

I see so many fake account on social media, people trying to impersonate others either for monetary gain or jealousy or whatever reasons people with too much free time on their hands have. So it would be definitely a good idea to somehow verify users. I think connecting your social accounts helps in a way, to make sure people are who they claim to be.

What I don't like on other platform is that you have to pay for being verified instead of it being a security feature. On Xitter you used to know someone was truly a celebrity if they had the blue tick, now anyone can have it who pays money...

A

Connecting social accounts without some form of out of band verification doesn't really hamper an impersonator: say I want to impersonate Elon Musk, what stops me from linking his real X/Twitter account to prove I'm really Elon Musk when I'm not?

Then, it has other problems:

  • It excludes people without social media accounts, which does exists.

  • It is a matter of privacy/choice in regard to who sees what. Example: I only have a RL/work media account and I want to keep RL/work and gaming separated. Why? Many reasons, going from simple "work stays in the office" to "I'm presenting differently and I don't want to get in trouble with family/work/ect."

  • Given how the world goes, do I trust to connect my social media account to something that could, if connection permission are mishandled and the system is breached, end me up in a bad situation and, in a worst case scenario, end me up into a jail/court?

Otherwise, I fully agree with you that verification should be natively included into a service and not a feature locked behind a paywall.

greybill's avatar

Well said and to the point. 👍

Lanah Tyra's avatar

Oh, I thought you had to own the account to link it? Maybe I remember wrong but I think it asks you to verify the link from the account you wish to link?

I agree with the bullet points, I also have personal accounts and content creator accounts. And indeed there are people without social media accounts or simply not wanting to link their accounts together, not sure what would be a good solution for that.

Philip's avatar

What do we need a verified identity for on Just About?

Is it just to say that I am the same person on other socials?

In that case do we simply login to the other account when JA sends some sort of linking request.

If this is all it means, then that makes sense to me.

If we are talking about people impersonating celebrities or other random people for whatever reason, then I'd just hope the community rules, moderation and filters are good enough to catch people trying to use fake identities to help them scam others .

I don't believe it's JA's job to catch fakers. People need to use their own common sense when interacting l others online.

greybill's avatar

I've been traversing the web since the early 2000nds.

Having a self-chosen nickname to identify me with added a huge bit of safety to it back then. I have always been rather careful about what I share online. Because the safest information - in this context - is the information that is not connected to the internet, or not even stored digitally.

By now, it would feel rather wrong to use my IRL name for my online activities openly. I have built an identity that the people I interacted with can remember. As a content creator, the nickname also functions as a brand. There is no need for me to use my IRL name if I don't have to. And I probably would never have signed up for Just About if I had to post here without a nickname. The same goes for Twitter/X.

IMO: On a surface level, an 'anonymous' identity can add a good bunch of personal safety. It puts off the less tech-savvy actors in bad faith. But if you go down to the tech levels, how could there be privacy? The data needs to know the places it needs to go. It's very much like post-codes and addresses IRL. You won't receive a letter if you don't tell the sender where your postbox is. My solution to this problem is stated above: Limit information as much as possible.

Verification is another topic I don't feel like I can currently contribute something, so I'll keep silent on that.

Lanah Tyra's avatar

Nicknames are important and lots of people use them to either keep safe online or to build up a brand for their activities, and I think apart from LinkedIn people don't really use their real name anywhere. Even of Facebook I see more and more people making at least a slight change to their name maybe either due to the possibility of linking it with Instagram and they want to link the accounts but without linking it to their real name, or because potentially employers trying to peak around people's social media accounts.

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