Amid unrest, a hard new look at online anonymity | The Social – CNET News:

This article takes an interesting look at the issues with Facebook’s true name policy and the impact it has on activists and dissidents in repressive countries. It quite rightly talks about the fact that for most of the history of the Internet use of “screen names” was the default.

The odd thing about this debate is that there is basically no authentication of the names used. Many people assume that since most users are under true name that all of them are. It is trivial to set up a new account with a plausible name which can not be traced back to the real user.

I would hope that dissidents, activists and others at risk would take advantage of this simple capability to protect themselves. Yes, this is in violation of the terms of service, but I think it is for a much greater good.

If you choose to do this, take care with who you friend under this alias. If the social network you create matches your real one, or that of another account, it may be very easy to unmask your identity.

A reader of this blog recently emailed me to ask:

What s/w do you recommend to keep anonymous while using Gmail, IE, Outlook, and Facebook on a laptop?

This is actually a very tricky question because the nature of all of these tools, except Internet Explorer (IE), is to be associated with a visible and discoverable account and identity in the “cloud”. I will discuss IE last and separately.

Gmail ties to your gmail and other Google accounts. Outlook ties to some existing email account at some email provider. Facebook is tied to your Facebook account and is explicitly designed for making your information public.

The profound question here is, what do we even mean by being anonymous using these services? I would argue that the best one can manage is to be pseudonymous; that is to maintain a persistent and visible pseudonym / alias which, while discoverable, is not associated with your true identity.

Fortunately Gmail and Facebook are free and typically do not require any real credentials to set up an account, and many of the free email providers work similarly. Using Anonymizer Universal (AU), and a browser with no history or cache to set up the accounts would ensure they were not connected to your real identity. It is important that the accounts never be accessed in any way except through AU, or they will be forever after associated with your real IP address. Furthermore, it is critical that the browser used is never used for any activity connected to your real identity, or the cookies and other digital detritus in your browser may allow these sites (or other folks) to tie the pseudonym to your other real name accounts.

IE is in many ways the easiest because there is no underlying account, but all the same rules apply. You need to ensure that you isolate your anonymous or pseudonymous activity from your real name activity.

For all of this activity a virtual machine can be a very effective tool. For example, if you use a Mac you can use a virtual machine running Windows or Linux for all of your alias activities and use the normal operating system for your real name activities. Similar tools exist for other operating systems.

Today we are releasing the results of a survey on how people understand the risks of going on-line, and what does and does not work to protect against various threats.

One of the most interesting results was that a significant majority of respondents thought that firewalls provided identity protection on line. While important, they are addressing a very different threat.

More information on our results can be found here.

In this interview with Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, comes out very strongly against anonymity starting at about 5:10 in the video. His argument is that: "If you are trying to commit a terrible evil crime it is not obvious that you should be able to do so with complete anonymity."

The problem is that absolute and complete anonymity is easy for criminals. There is a robust economy in stolen account, botnets, stolen credit cards, open networks and other capabilities that enable absolute anonymity for anyone willing to violate the law. It is only anonymity for the law abiding that is difficult, and the reason Anonymizer exists. Arguing against anonymity is, for all practical purposes, only arguing against anonymity for legitimate purposes while it thrives for illegitimate purposes.

I will spare you the lecture on the history of anonymity and anonymous speech dating back to the founders of the United States.

BTW, this was delayed for a while while I struggled with getting embedding working within WordPress. It seems to be working now on FireFox, but not when I view in Safari. Please comment with how I am being stupid if you know what is going wrong.

Browser ‘Privacy Modes’ Not So Private After All – PCWorld

This article does a good job of discussing why the built in “privacy mode” built in to most browsers is less effective that you might have thought or wished.