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E-conomy / Paul Andrews
Anonymity not helping credibility

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I don't know who Anonymous Coward is, but I wish he'd come clean.

Anonymous Coward is a popular generic nom de geek for readers who post messages on Slashdot, a Web news forum heavily populated by techies. Slashdot's motto, "News for nerds; stuff that matters," pretty much says it all.

Anonymous Coward (whose pseudonym also says it all) carries on a curious geek tradition going back more than a quarter century — as long as public electronic bulletin boards have been around. If you've spent much time in chat rooms, online forums or other Net hangouts, you know how widespread pseudonymity is.

Lately I've been wondering, though, if it's time to abandon tradition. Online credibility has to keep solidifying if the Internet is going to continue making progress as a trusted medium, not just for communications but for business and commerce. One huge step toward bolstering credibility would be the standard operating procedure of using one's true identity.

It should be noted that pseudonymity is not the same as anonymity. Most Web users who go by nicknames can be identified through registration, IP addresses and other means. Anonymous Cowards are unidentified for the purposes of discussion, but they are not untraceable.

I myself am registered on various forums under pseudonyms. But I've never liked posting under a false name. It just doesn't seem right — if I really believe in what I'm saying, I ought to at least back it up with my real name. Yet using one's own name in many forums feels a bit like walking into a room with no clothes on.

The problem is, pseudonymity creates a culture that fosters and even tacitly sanctions true anonymity. And anonymity is what really hurts the Web. Hackers, spammers and other digital lowlife thrive more easily in an environment where nobody has to use their own name.

Consider last month's scandal at Amazon.com, where a technical glitch revealed authors "pimping" their own books and slamming competing works, under false or generic identities.

A few good arguments exist for Internet anonymity. Political reprisal under a repressive regime is one. Whistle-blowing on corporate corruption is another.

Other rationalizations, though, don't hold up under scrutiny. The typical argument in favor of pseudonymity is that there are folks who don't want to be identified for professional or personal reasons, who still have important things to say. I admit that I'd hate to see all the Anonymous Cowards drop off Slashdot simply out of an ID requirement.
 
But the Net's rules, as I've long argued, shouldn't really be any different from the social conventions that humans have worked out over the millennia. And the convention is that if you're going to participate, people need to know who you are.

Why should the Net be different than, say, a public hearing? If the majority of citizen comments on a zoning change, for example, were done pseudonymously, would they carry much weight in the decision-making process?

If you make a comment at a cocktail party, do you feel compelled to say, "By the way, I'm speaking only for myself, not my employer"?

Even if there are real conflicts — e.g., a Safeway employee who wants to testify about a supermarket rezoning — they can be addressed with disclaimers.

I'm on several mailing lists, in fact, where disclaimers are used all the time. If someone has a potential conflict of interest, disclosure only makes his or her comments more trustworthy — in the sense they can be better evaluated by recipients.

Mailing lists, moreover, point to the credibility advantages of identification. Participants tend to go by their own names, and the signal-to-noise ratio is much higher.

Many forums and e-groups are taking steps to reduce use of pseudonyms by requiring links to true IDs. I'd like to see pseudonyms go away entirely. For the Web to improve credibility, security and civility, true identity needs to be the rule rather than exception.

Paul Andrews is a freelance technology writer and co-author of "Gates." He can be reached at pandrews@seattletimes.com.

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