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16.01.06

Anonymity or Accountability

In Bruce Schneier’s Crypto-Gram, Bruce reacts to an article from Kevin Kelly. He states:

’”In a recent essay, Kevin Kelly warns of the dangers of anonymity. It’s OK in small doses, he maintains, but too much of it is a problem: “(I)n every system that I have seen where anonymity becomes common, the system fails. The recent taint in the honor of Wikipedia stems from the extreme ease which anonymous declarations can be put into a very visible public record. Communities infected with anonymity will either collapse, or shift the anonymous to pseudo-anonymous, as in eBay, where you have a traceable identity behind an invented nickname.” Kelly has a point, but it comes out all wrong. Anonymous systems are inherently easier to abuse and harder to secure, as his eBay example illustrates. In an anonymous commerce system — where the buyer does not know who the seller is and vice versa — it’s easy for one to cheat the other. This cheating, even if only a minority engaged in it, would quickly erode confidence in the marketplace, and eBay would be out of business. The auction site’s solution was brilliant: a feedback system that attached an ongoing “reputation” to those anonymous user names, and made buyers and sellers accountable for their actions. And that’s precisely where Kelly makes his mistake. The problem isn’t anonymity; it’s accountability. If someone isn’t accountable, then knowing his name doesn’t help. If you have someone who is completely anonymous, yet just as completely accountable, then — heck, just call him Fred.’

I agree with Bruce that it is accountability that is building trust rather than non-anonymity, but I disagree that anonymity has no influence at all. If you consider eBay, attaching anonymous users to nick names would mean that you could easily switch between different nick names if - for instance - you receive some displeasing comments. There is no way to trace back if a user used different nick names before (with a unconvenient history). At the moment, eBay reacts quickly and efficient to exclude users which are cheating. It then becomes quite cumbersome to start selling/buying on eBay again (new address, new bank details etc) if the user is traceable by the system.

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