Online Anonymity Ambiguous

The organization, affiliated with the Yale College's Center for Internet Studies (CIS) and the Law School and School of Management's Law and Technology Society, featured the CIS's Co-Director, Bob Dunne as one of its panelists. The event also included a plug for students interesting in aiding in developing the CIS.

Dunne opened the event by pointing out the ambiguity of “online privacy.” He cited the differences between being left alone, keeping personal information private, and being completely anonymous.He also pointed out that issue of privacy is hard to discuss because “technology plays such a large role.” An example he provided was that of Sun's JINI, which would allow various household appliances to talk to each other. “As the technology increases, the variations on this theme get pretty broad,” he said. “I don't think any of us will know [what to do about privacy] for quite a while.”

Jonathan Kidd, a second-year graduate student in English, spoke next. He described how, for his research into identity and community formation, he goes online as a teenage girl named “Willow.” He explained, “The Internet does a lot for a certain aspect of freedom you don't see in everyday life.”

Next was Stephen Latham, a professor at SOM and a Health & Ethics Professor at Quinnipiac. He offered a different perspective. “I, for myself, am more worried that the information about me gathered on the Net is true than that it is gathered,” he said. Latham considers targeted marketing to be not that bad, so long as is it isn't misdirected. “Mostly, [marketers] don't want to ruin my life. They don't want to inconvenience me. ... They don't even want me know what they know about me.”

The fourth panelist was R. Bhaskar, a professor at SOM in the field of computation, who began what would become a series of attacks on Kidd. “I suspect that many of us think that if someone went on a chat room and insinuated that their profession was something other than what it is, we would find it deplorable,” he said. He described cyberspace as a collection of places, paralleling easements, commons, private property and land held in the public trust, each with a varying degree of permitted anonymity. He summarized, :”The most pressing question in all these issues is `to what extent is the information about me my property?'” He argued in favor of a an amendment to the Constitution declaring privacy a right.

The final panelist was Michael Godwin, author and former counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, distinguished between privacy related to government, corporations, and other individuals. He explained that “the Internet crystalizes fears,” and that the debates over anonymity are nothing new. To him, society functions based on a lack of anonymity: “The thing that makes society work is the likelihood that they will be caught if they act bad.” Godwin pointed out that when information is given out voluntarily, there isn't much that can be done to control it, especially in the case of corporations aggregating data on buying habits. He also described the government as being essentially clueless when it came to restricting cyberspace.

- Kushal Dave