real-name policy

13 results back to index

Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest by Zeynep Tufekci

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 4chan, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Andy Carvin, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, British Empire, citizen journalism, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, context collapse, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Future Shock, gentrification, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, index card, interchangeable parts, invention of movable type, invention of writing, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, loose coupling, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, pre–internet, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, real-name policy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Streisand effect, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Twitter Arab Spring, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Chapter 6 is an in-depth look into how and why a few platforms—Facebook, Twitter, Google, and YouTube—have emerged so dominant in the networked public sphere, and what their user policies, business models, and algorithms mean for social movements—including a case in which Facebook’s real-name policies almost tripped up the most influential page of the (yet to come) Egyptian revolution, and its algorithms might have smothered emergent social movements, like the Black Lives Matter movement, while promoting feel-good (and worthy) charity drives. Chapter 7 examines the affordances involving identity and reputation—from anonymity to pseudonymity to real-name policies—in online spaces. This chapter includes examples ranging from the striking and disturbing case of child pornographers who find community online to mothers who realize that they can discuss most difficult questions freely in anonymous digital boards, to hoaxes, fabrications, and harassment campaigns online.

…

Anti angrily decried the contrast between his treatment and that of Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg’s puppy, named Beast, which is allowed its own page. Because of Facebook’s real-name policy, to this day, Anti does not have a Facebook page. Even in developed nations where people are not necessarily hiding from the authorities, Facebook’s policies cause problems for social movements. LGBTQ people have been some of the sharpest and most vocal critics of Facebook’s real-name policies. LGBTQ people may go by names that are different from their legal ones as a preference or as a protection against family members who are angry about their sexual orientation or gender identity and who may act abusively toward them.

…

The Facebook page “We Are All Khaled Said” became the focal point for the agitation of hundreds of thousands of Egyptians. Eventually a call for protests on January 25 posted on that page roused people to action that turned into an uprising. However, that course of events was almost tripped up because of Facebook’s “real-name” policy. One of the most consequential decisions that social media platforms make for their users is whether people can use pseudonyms—and easily create multiple accounts—or whether there is a formal (legal “terms-of-service”) requirement that they use their “real” name, however defined. Few platforms require “real names,” but Facebook does.

Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media by Tarleton Gillespie

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, borderless world, Burning Man, complexity theory, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, deep learning, do what you love, Donald Trump, drone strike, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Snowden, eternal september, fake news, Filter Bubble, Gabriella Coleman, game design, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, hiring and firing, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, Internet Archive, Jean Tirole, John Gruber, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Minecraft, moral panic, multi-sided market, Netflix Prize, Network effects, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, power law, real-name policy, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, social web, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, two-sided market, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Facebook and LinkedIn’s desire to tether user profiles to real names broke from the logic of the early web, where pseudonymity was imagined to grant people the freedom to be more creative, intimate, flexible, and honest, freeing them from the burden of social markers of race, place, and gender.29 But this freedom, many argued, also made it easier to circulate illicit content and engage in harassing behaviors, without fear of social or legal consequence or the social inhibition of being known.30 Facebook regularly justifies its real-name policy in these terms, as an essential part of its efforts to protect users from harassment, trolling, racism, and misogyny—though in fact these problems plague Facebook anyway, even with a real-name policy in place.31 Some critics have suggested that Facebook in fact needs to require real names for economic reasons: the massive troves of user data it collects are valuable precisely because they map to real people.32 Facebook has faced a series of public challenges for its dogged commitment to its real-name policy. Some feel the requirement imposes an undue burden on those who have reason to shield their identity: victims of past domestic abuse or stalking, those engaged in politically sensitive activities, or whistleblowers and activists who might fear identification or reprisals.

…

Nathan Matias, “The Real Name Fallacy,” Coral Project, January 3, 2017, https://blog.coralproject.net/the-real-name-fallacy/. 31boyd, “The Politics of ‘Real Names.’” 32Lil Miss Hot Mess, “One Year Later, Facebook Still Hasn’t Fixed Its Controversial ‘Real Names’ Policy,” Daily Dot, October 6, 2015, http://www.dailydot.com/opinion/facebook-real-name-policy/. 33Lizze Plaugic, “The Enduring Strangeness of Twitter Parody Accounts,” Verge, March 14, 2016, https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/14/11208538/twitter-parody-accounts-ted-ron-burgundy. Haimson and Hoffmann, “Constructing and Enforcing ‘Authentic’ Identity Online.”

…

When people stand behind their opinions and actions with their authentic name and reputation, our community is more accountable. If we discover that you have multiple personal profiles, we may ask you to close the additional profiles. Facebook Some platforms require users to participate using their real names. Facebook and LinkedIn have long insisted on a “real name” policy; Google+ did for its first few years, until relaxing the rule in 2014. LinkedIn also prohibits inaccurate information in user profiles.28 In addition, platforms that facilitate the exchange of goods, money, or services often require proof of identity as part of a credit card or other payment transaction architecture, though some (like Etsy) allow that information to be obscured behind a pseudonymous profile that need not match the real name and fiduciary identity made known to the platform.

Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom by Rebecca MacKinnon

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, business cycle, business intelligence, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital Maoism, don't be evil, Eben Moglen, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, future of journalism, Global Witness, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, national security letter, online collectivism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, pre–internet, race to the bottom, real-name policy, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Tactical Technology Collective, technological determinism, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

After holding a number of conversations with activists and human rights groups, in mid-2011 the company rolled out an easy-to-use appeals process for people to contest the deactivation of their accounts, a process which until then had not existed for people without personal connections to Facebook staff. Facebook also developed a new “community standards” page to explain its terms of service in a simple and accessible way. Yet while that page as well as the official legally binding Terms of Service page were translated into Arabic, as of mid-2011 those key documents explaining Facebook’s real-name policy and other “rules” whose violation could trigger account deactivation and suspension had yet to be translated into the languages of a number of other vulnerable user groups, such as Chinese and Farsi. GOOGLE GOVERNANCE After a year in self-imposed exile, Lokman Tsui decided that his departure had done nothing to help change Facebook and rejoined.

…

Many of Google Plus’s earliest members also rejoiced at what seemed to be a more flexible approach to identity compared to Facebook’s, citing its official “community standards” page, which said, “To help fight spam and prevent fake profiles, use the name your friends, family or co-workers usually call you.” The Chinese blogger who publishes widely in English under the name Michael Anti—not actually his real Chinese name—happily joined Google Plus after having been kicked off Facebook for violating its real-name policy in late 2010. Many others around the world who have professional reputations associated with long-standing pseudonyms instead of their real names signed up for Google Plus with their pseudonyms. These included an Iranian cyber-dissident known widely in the Iranian blogosphere as Vahid Online, as well as an engineer and former Google employee whose real name is Kirrily Robert but who is much better known online and professionally by her user name, Skud.

…

She launched the website my.nameis.me, dedicated to discussing questions of identity and why pseudonymity and anonymity have a necessary place in a free and democratic society. Technology gurus and activists from around the world weighed in, contributing statements and testimonials. Though few mainstream news organizations had written about the human rights implications of Facebook’s real-name policy, the torrent of commentary flowing at the same time from many influential technologists—coming right on the heels of Google Plus’s launch, which was in itself a major news story—brought the public debate about online identity into the mainstream in a way that had not previously been the case.

Lurking: How a Person Became a User by Joanne McNeil

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andy Rubin, benefit corporation, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Chris Wanstrath, citation needed, cloud computing, context collapse, crowdsourcing, data science, deal flow, decentralized internet, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, eternal september, fake news, feminist movement, Firefox, gentrification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, green new deal, helicopter parent, holacracy, Internet Archive, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Julie Ann Horvath, Kim Stanley Robinson, l'esprit de l'escalier, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Mondo 2000, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, packet switching, PageRank, pre–internet, profit motive, Project Xanadu, QAnon, real-name policy, recommendation engine, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Turing complete, Wayback Machine, We are the 99%, web application, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, you are the product

And Myspace is the new Woodstock,” the electronic pop musician Kyunchi told Paper magazine in 2019. But there isn’t quite the same nostalgia for Friendster, and part of that could be attributed to Jonathan Abrams’s recent attempts to retrofit the history of his company so it neatly appears first in a lineage leading up to Facebook’s “authenticity” and oppressive real-names policy. Friendster failed when it tried to classify its users as real or fake, or visible or anonymous, before users were ready. Even if the desire for “real identity” had been present back then, it meant very little in the mid-aughts, without status updates, notifications, feeds, and an omnipresence of information buttressing a name as a through line of information about a person, rather than just another detail like favorite film or height.

…

Maybe someone did die! What right did Facebook have to rearrange a digital world for someone without their consent? Later that year, Facebook’s reputation continued to sink, culminating in a long-drawn-out standoff with drag queens, who were kicked off the service due to its stringent and restrictive “real names” policy. The policy also alienated trans users, Native Americans, and other users with names that were not expressly white and cis normative. These users had to go through intense check-ins with Facebook customer service, sending in passport photos and other official documents, an absurd overreach from something that was not a government body, but a private internet company run by a dude in a hoodie.

…

These users had to go through intense check-ins with Facebook customer service, sending in passport photos and other official documents, an absurd overreach from something that was not a government body, but a private internet company run by a dude in a hoodie. Notice which communities were singled out when the platform cracked down on “inauthenticity.” Facebook had no similar hard line against the widespread practice of law enforcement creating actual fake profiles as a tactic to infiltrate activist communities like Black Lives Matter. The real names policy was a tool for harassment, but this harassment was structural, too. White supremacist groups flagged Native Americans and others for deletion as a form of abuse, but the platform’s indifference bore out the consequences of this harassment. “Facebook workers—particularly those who live outside of the United States and Canada—may not be familiar with Native naming conventions.

Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech by Sara Wachter-Boettcher

"Susan Fowler" uber, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, AltaVista, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, Grace Hopper, Greyball, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, job automation, Kickstarter, lifelogging, lolcat, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, microaggression, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, real-name policy, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Tactical Technology Collective, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, upwardly mobile, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce, work culture , zero-sum game

Unlike, say, Twitter, which allows you to select whatever username you want, Facebook requires everyone to use their real name. The official line from Facebook is that this policy increases users’ safety because you always know who you’re connecting with. And it’s true, in some ways; for example, the anonymous trolls who threaten women on Twitter are mostly absent from Facebook. But the real-name policy has also received intense criticism from groups like the LGBTQ community, political refugees, people who’ve been victims of stalking and are seeking safety from abusers, and many others who argue that using their legal names on Facebook would either compromise their safety or prevent them from expressing their authentic identity.

…

If you’ve spent any time reading about online harassment, it won’t surprise you to know that many people misused the reporting feature in order to abuse others—flagging, say, hundreds of drag queens, or all the people involved in a Native protest movement, as fake names in a single day. Suddenly, Facebook’s assertion that its real-name policy prevents abuse didn’t feel quite so believable. To Facebook’s credit, it did recognize that this process was a bit too easy for users reporting names, and too cumbersome for those on the other end of the reports. In December 2015, it rolled out updates designed to take some of the burden off people accused of using a fake name, and put more on those who make a report.

…

As a result, it’s more beholden to investors than to the people who use the product. And while investors hate losing engagement, they hate headlines that tell the world the company they’ve funded is a home for racial profiling even more. Same with Facebook: the site walked back (though, of course, did not remove) its real-name policy only when a large contingent of users revolted and turned the story into a PR nightmare. That’s why we all need to pay a lot closer attention to the minutiae we encounter online—the form fields and menus we tend to gloss over so quickly. Because if we want tech companies to be more accountable, we need to be able to identify and articulate what’s going wrong, and put pressure on them to change (or on government to regulate their actions).

Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection by Jacob Silverman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, basic income, Big Tech, Brian Krebs, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, context collapse, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake it until you make it, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, game design, global village, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, life extension, lifelogging, lock screen, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Minecraft, move fast and break things, national security letter, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, payday loans, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, pre–internet, price discrimination, price stability, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, real-name policy, recommendation engine, rent control, rent stabilization, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social graph, social intelligence, social web, sorting algorithm, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telemarketer, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yottabyte, you are the product, Zipcar

Huffington Post. July 27, 2011. huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/27/randi-zuckerberg-anonymity-online_n_910892.html. 159 “people behave a lot better”: ibid. 159 malicious comments: Gregory Fernstein. “Surprisingly Good Evidence That Real Name Policies Fail to Improve Comments.” TechCrunch. July 29, 2012. techcrunch.com/2012/07/29/surprisingly-good-evidence-that-real-name-policies-fail-to-improve-comments. 160 Facebook’s PR firm: Dan Lyons. “Facebook Busted in Clumsy Smear on Google.” Daily Beast. May 11, 2011. thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/05/12/facebook-busted-in-clumsy-smear-attempt-on-google.html. 162 Christopher Poole on identity: Aleks Krotoski.

…

Such a policy can easily lead to measures to chip away at users’ freedom of expression or to coerce them into certain actions. (Facebook’s history of secret experimentation on users, along with its interest in boosting ad click-through rates, suggests that they are already deeply involved in the behavior modification business.) And there’s little evidence that these sorts of real-name policies accomplish much. In the last decade, South Korea experimented with requiring real names to post comments on many Web sites, eventually requiring them on all sites that received more than 100,000 visitors per year. But so-called malicious comments only decreased by less than 1 percent, while people who posted frequent harsh comments appeared undeterred.

…

Facebook—itself notorious for its fickle and confusing privacy policies, with each frequent change inevitably exposing more user information—was secretly using a PR firm as a front to drum up criticism of a competing company’s privacy practices. Add to that Facebook’s creation of what have been called “dark profiles” for people who have never signed up for the service, along with its habit of retaining information that users believed they had deleted, and one gets the sense that the promulgation of a real-names policy is but another element to gather as much information as possible, to make us transparent first and foremost to Facebook and its advertising platform. A SINGLE LOG-IN Not long ago, Web users had more options about how they conducted themselves online. Chat rooms, message boards, and online games invited us to employ whatever name we wanted.

Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World by Bruce Schneier

23andMe, Airbnb, airport security, AltaVista, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Benjamin Mako Hill, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, congestion charging, data science, digital rights, disintermediation, drone strike, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, failed state, fault tolerance, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, friendly fire, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, informal economy, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, lifelogging, linked data, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, moral panic, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, national security letter, Network effects, Occupy movement, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, real-name policy, recommendation engine, RFID, Ross Ulbricht, satellite internet, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, Snapchat, social graph, software as a service, South China Sea, sparse data, stealth mode startup, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, telemarketer, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, undersea cable, unit 8200, urban planning, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, yottabyte, zero day

Facebook pretty much demands real names: Facebook has been reconsidering the policy after being confronted by users who are potentially endangered by it. Facebook (2014), “What names are allowed on Facebook?” https://www.facebook.com/help/112146705538576. Reed Albergotti (2 Oct 2014), “Facebook changes real-name policy after uproar from drag queens,” Wall Street Journal, http://online.wsj.com/articles/facebook-changes-real-name-policy-after-uproar-from-drag-queens-1412223040. It quickly became clear: People’s willingness to pay has changed somewhat. Lots of us are now used to paying small amounts, or even large amounts over time, for smartphone apps, but the surveillance aspect of Internet business has remained.

…

Cookies are inherently anonymous, but companies are increasingly able to correlate them with other information that positively identifies us. You identify yourself willingly to lots of Internet services. Often you do this with only a username, but increasingly usernames can be tied to your real name. Google tried to compel this with its “real name policy,” which mandated that users register for Google Plus with their legal names, until it rescinded that policy in 2014. Facebook pretty much demands real names. Anytime you use your credit card number to buy something, your real identity is tied to any cookies set by companies involved in that transaction.

…

., 170, 183–84 Espionage Act (1917), 101 Estonia, cyberattacks on, 75, 132 Ethiopia, 73 European Charter, 169 European Court of Justice, 202, 222 European Parliament, 76 European Union (EU), 195, 200, 202, 226, 238 Charter of Fundamental Rights of, 232, 364 Data Protection Directive of, 19, 79, 80, 159, 191, 209 data retention rules in, 222 Exact Data, 42 executive branch: abuses of power by, 234–35 secrecy of, 100, 170 Executive Order 12333, 65, 173 Facebook, 58, 59, 93, 198 customer scores and, 111 data collection by, 19, 31, 41, 123, 200, 201, 204 as information middleman, 57 manipulation of posts on, 115 paid placements on, 114 real name policy of, 49 Facebook, surveillance by: data-based inferences of, 34, 258 Like button and, 48 relationship mapping by, 37–38 tagged photo database of, 41 face recognition, automatic, 27, 29, 31, 41, 211 fair information practices, 194, 211 fair lending laws, 196 false positives, 137, 138, 140, 323–24 Farrell, Henry, 60 FASCIA, 3 fatalism, mass surveillance and, 224–25 fear: government surveillance and, 4, 7, 95–97, 135, 156–57, 182–83, 222, 226, 227–30 media and, 229 politicians and, 222, 228 privacy trumped by, 228 social norms and, 227–30 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI): CALEA and, 83, 120 COINTELPRO program of, 103 cost to business of surveillance by, 121–22 counterterrorism as mission of, 184, 186 data mining by, 42 GPS tracking by, 26, 95 historical data stored by, 36 illegal spying by, 175 IMSI-catchers used by, 165 legitimate surveillance by, 184 Muslim Americans surveilled by, 103 PATRIOT Act and, 173–74 phone company databases demanded by, 27, 67 surveillance of all communications as goal of, 83 warrantless surveillance by, 67–68, 209 wiretapping by, 24, 27, 83, 171 Federal Communications Commission (FCC), 198 Federal Trade Commission, US (FTC), 46–47, 53, 117, 198 Feinstein, Diane, 172 Ferguson, Mo., 160 fiduciary responsibility, data collection and, 204–5 50 Cent Party, 114 FileVault, 215 filter bubble, 114–15 FinFisher, 81 First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles, 91 FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act; 1978), 273 FISA Amendments Act (2008), 171, 273, 275–76 Section 702 of, 65–66, 173, 174–75, 261 FISA Court, 122, 171 NSA misrepresentations to, 172, 337 secret warrants of, 174, 175–76, 177 transparency needed in, 177 fishing expeditions, 92, 93 Fitbit, 16, 112 Five Eyes, 76 Flame, 72 FlashBlock, 49 flash cookies, 49 Ford Motor Company, GPS data collected by, 29 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA; 1978), 273 see also FISA Amendments Act Forrester Research, 122 Fortinet, 82 Fox-IT, 72 France, government surveillance in, 79 France Télécom, 79 free association, government surveillance and, 2, 39, 96 freedom, see liberty Freeh, Louis, 314 free services: overvaluing of, 50 surveillance exchanged for, 4, 49–51, 58–59, 60–61, 226, 235 free speech: as constitutional right, 189, 344 government surveillance and, 6, 94–95, 96, 97–99 Internet and, 189 frequent flyer miles, 219 Froomkin, Michael, 198 FTC, see Federal Trade Commission, US fusion centers, 69, 104 gag orders, 100, 122 Gamma Group, 81 Gandy, Oscar, 111 Gates, Bill, 128 gay rights, 97 GCHQ, see Government Communications Headquarters Geer, Dan, 205 genetic data, 36 geofencing, 39–40 geopolitical conflicts, and need for surveillance, 219–20 Georgia, Republic of, cyberattacks on, 75 Germany: Internet control and, 188 NSA surveillance of, 76, 77, 122–23, 151, 160–61, 183, 184 surveillance of citizens by, 350 US relations with, 151, 234 Ghafoor, Asim, 103 GhostNet, 72 Gill, Faisal, 103 Gmail, 31, 38, 50, 58, 219 context-sensitive advertising in, 129–30, 142–43 encryption of, 215, 216 government surveillance of, 62, 83, 148 GoldenShores Technologies, 46–47 Goldsmith, Jack, 165, 228 Google, 15, 27, 44, 48, 54, 221, 235, 272 customer loyalty to, 58 data mining by, 38 data storage capacity of, 18 government demands for data from, 208 impermissible search ad policy of, 55 increased encryption by, 208 as information middleman, 57 linked data sets of, 50 NSA hacking of, 85, 208 PageRank algorithm of, 196 paid search results on, 113–14 search data collected by, 22–23, 31, 123, 202 transparency reports of, 207 see also Gmail Google Analytics, 31, 48, 233 Google Calendar, 58 Google Docs, 58 Google Glass, 16, 27, 41 Google Plus, 50 real name policy of, 49 surveillance by, 48 Google stalking, 230 Gore, Al, 53 government: checks and balances in, 100, 175 surveillance by, see mass surveillance, government Government Accountability Office, 30 Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ): cyberattacks by, 149 encryption programs and, 85 location data used by, 3 mass surveillance by, 69, 79, 175, 182, 234 government databases, hacking of, 73, 117, 313 GPS: automobile companies’ use of, 29–30 FBI use of, 26, 95 police use of, 26 in smart phones, 3, 14 Grayson, Alan, 172 Great Firewall (Golden Shield), 94, 95, 150–51, 187, 237 Greece, wiretapping of government cell phones in, 148 greenhouse gas emissions, 17 Greenwald, Glenn, 20 Grindr, 259 Guardian, Snowden documents published by, 20, 67, 149 habeas corpus, 229 hackers, hacking, 42–43, 71–74, 216, 313 of government databases, 73, 117, 313 by NSA, 85 privately-made technology for, 73, 81 see also cyberwarfare Hacking Team, 73, 81, 149–50 HAPPYFOOT, 3 Harris Corporation, 68 Harris Poll, 96 Hayden, Michael, 23, 147, 162 health: effect of constant surveillance on, 127 mass surveillance and, 16, 41–42 healthcare data, privacy of, 193 HelloSpy, 3, 245 Hewlett-Packard, 112 Hill, Raquel, 44 hindsight bias, 322 Hobbes, Thomas, 210 Home Depot, 110, 116 homosexuality, 97 Hoover, J.

Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-Connected World by Bruce Schneier

23andMe, 3D printing, air gap, algorithmic bias, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Brian Krebs, business process, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Heinemeier Hansson, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fault tolerance, Firefox, Flash crash, George Akerlof, incognito mode, industrial robot, information asymmetry, information security, Internet of things, invention of radio, job automation, job satisfaction, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, loose coupling, market design, medical malpractice, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, national security letter, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, NSO Group, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, printed gun, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ransomware, real-name policy, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart transportation, Snapchat, sparse data, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, The Market for Lemons, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, Uber for X, Unsafe at Any Speed, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

Doowon Kim, Bum Jun Kwon, and Tudor Dumitras (1 Nov 2017), “Certified malware: Measuring breaches of trust in the Windows code-signing PKI,” ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ACM CCS ’17), http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~tdumitra/papers/CCS-2017.pdf. 51Facebook has a “real name” policy: Amanda Holpuch (15 Dec 2015), “Facebook adjusts controversial ‘real name’ policy in wake of criticism,” Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/15/facebook-change-controversial-real-name-policy. 51Google requires a phone number: Eric Griffith (3 Dec 2017), “How to create an anonymous email account,” PC Magazine, https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2476288,00.asp. 52He was found by a dogged FBI agent: Nate Anderson and Cyrus Farivar (3 Oct 2013), “How the feds took down the Dread Pirate Roberts,” Ars Technica, https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/10/how-the-feds-took-down-the-dread-pirate-roberts. 52Pedophiles have been arrested: Joseph Cox (15 Jun 2016), “How the feds use Photo-shop to track down pedophiles,” Vice Motherboard, https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/8q8594/enhance-enhance-enhance-how-the-feds-use-photoshop-to-track-down-pedophiles.

…

With a bank, it is a solid identification based on a face-to-face interaction in a branch office. With a credit card purchase, it’s a weaker authentication based on a person knowing a bunch of personal information. Sometimes identification is tied to a phone number, an address, a national ID card, or a driver’s license. Facebook has a “real name” policy: people are supposed to use their real names, but there isn’t any verification unless there’s a dispute of some sort. Google requires a phone number to set up a Gmail account—although people can use an anonymous “burner” phone. Other times, identification isn’t based on anything. My Reddit account is nothing more than a unique username; the only identification is to itself and all the posts I’ve made under that username.

Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O'Neil

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, Bernie Madoff, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carried interest, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crowdsourcing, data science, disinformation, electronic logging device, Emanuel Derman, financial engineering, Financial Modelers Manifesto, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, I will remember that I didn’t make the world, and it doesn’t satisfy my equations, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, Internet of things, late fees, low interest rates, machine readable, mass incarceration, medical bankruptcy, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price discrimination, quantitative hedge fund, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, real-name policy, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sharpe ratio, statistical model, tech worker, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working poor

Auditors face resistance, however, often from the web giants, which are the closest thing we have to information utilities. Google, for example, has prohibited researchers from creating scores of fake profiles in order to map the biases of the search engine.*2 Facebook, too. The social network’s rigorous policy to tie users to their real names severely limits the research outsiders can carry out there. The real-name policy is admirable in many ways, not least because it pushes users to be accountable for the messages they post. But Facebook also must be accountable to all of us—which means opening its platform to more data auditors. The government, of course, has a powerful regulatory role to play, just as it did when confronted with the excesses and tragedies of the first industrial revolution.

The Middleman Economy: How Brokers, Agents, Dealers, and Everyday Matchmakers Create Value and Profit by Marina Krakovsky

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Al Roth, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Black Swan, buy low sell high, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, deal flow, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, experimental economics, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, Jean Tirole, Joan Didion, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kenneth Arrow, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market microstructure, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Network effects, patent troll, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, power law, real-name policy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, search costs, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, social graph, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, the strength of weak ties, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber for X, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Y Combinator

One reason Facebook overtook MySpace in popularity, for example, was the way Facebook enforced a certain degree of quality control over its users: whereas MySpace allowed people to join anonymously (or to sign up under multiple fake identities), Facebook forced its users to sign up under their real names and addresses, creating the kind of accountability and trust that ultimately made it a more attractive gathering place. Advocates of privacy and Internet freedom have at times balked at Facebook’s real-names policy, but most people were “willing to trade their privacy for the privileges of joining a network based on trust,” as the journalist Julia Angwin has written.11 Other middleman businesses—think of Airbnb—have learned that it’s in their best interest to set and enforce policies for good behavior because these ultimately attract better participants on both sides.

Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World by James Ball

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Abraham Wald, algorithmic bias, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Charles Babbage, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, false flag, Gabriella Coleman, global pandemic, green transition, housing justice, informal economy, Jeffrey Epstein, Jeremy Corbyn, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Julian Assange, lab leak, lockdown, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Minecraft, nuclear winter, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, Piers Corbyn, post-truth, pre–internet, QAnon, real-name policy, Russell Brand, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Snapchat, social contagion, Steve Bannon, survivorship bias, TikTok, trade route, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks

This affects an online community in a lot of ways. Clearly, it gives people leave to post things they might not post if they had to put their real name next to them. Online anonymity is commonly cited as a driver of abuse, though there is no shortage of racist, sexist and homophobic speech on Facebook, which has had a real-name policy since its inception. But other effects are more interesting. When you can’t be identified as a longstanding member of a group by virtue of your name or online handle, the community needs to create an in-group and out-group in other ways – and one of these is to generate online slang, which becomes immediately identifiable to people in the group while being impenetrable to outsiders.

Culture & Empire: Digital Revolution by Pieter Hintjens

4chan, Aaron Swartz, airport security, AltaVista, anti-communist, anti-pattern, barriers to entry, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, bread and circuses, business climate, business intelligence, business process, Chelsea Manning, clean water, commoditize, congestion charging, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, Debian, decentralized internet, disinformation, Edward Snowden, failed state, financial independence, Firefox, full text search, gamification, German hyperinflation, global village, GnuPG, Google Chrome, greed is good, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, independent contractor, informal economy, intangible asset, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Rulifson, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, M-Pesa, mass immigration, mass incarceration, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, no silver bullet, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, packet switching, patent troll, peak oil, power law, pre–internet, private military company, race to the bottom, real-name policy, rent-seeking, reserve currency, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, selection bias, Skype, slashdot, software patent, spectrum auction, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route, transaction costs, twin studies, union organizing, wealth creators, web application, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day, Zipf's Law

Here is how I think this game will play out: As whistle blowers leak information about illegal spying by the alphabet agencies, we'll see denials by business and promises by governments to roll back such activities or limit them to extreme cases. Those denials and promises will be empty. In order to build more accurate on-line profiles, we'll see "real name" policies by websites and legislation by countries that make it illegal to use aliases in on-line communities or communicate anonymously. We'll see various forms of attack on anonymous communities, covering the gamut of negative media reports, planting illicit material, claims of infiltration by security agents, and so on.

This Machine Kills Secrets: Julian Assange, the Cypherpunks, and Their Fight to Empower Whistleblowers by Andy Greenberg

air gap, Apple II, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bletchley Park, Burning Man, Chelsea Manning, computerized markets, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, disinformation, domain-specific language, driverless car, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, hive mind, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mondo 2000, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, operational security, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, profit motive, Ralph Nader, real-name policy, reality distortion field, Richard Stallman, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social graph, SQL injection, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Teledyne, three-masted sailing ship, undersea cable, Vernor Vinge, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, X Prize, Zimmermann PGP

In mid-January 2011, HBGary Federal’s Aaron Barr set about trying to deanonymize Anonymous. With a software developer at the security firm named Mark Trynor, Barr had built a tool designed to scrape users’ social networking pages and aggregate the data for analysis. Facebook enforces a “real name policy”: No pseudonyms allowed. That meant if Barr could map Anons’ Facebook identities to the ones used in the group’s IRC instant messaging forums, he could pin down their real-world identities. “One of the goals is to tie as many of the IRC nicks to FB profiles as possible,” he wrote in a report on his research.