[00:00.900 --> 00:02.880]  This is the Nymwars.
[00:03.180 --> 00:04.660]  May I present to you Eva Galperin.
[00:11.470 --> 00:12.270]  Hi there.
[00:12.570 --> 00:14.190]  My name is Eva Galperin.
[00:14.410 --> 00:20.670]  I am the International Freedom of Expression Coordinator at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
[00:21.350 --> 00:23.990]  How many of you here know what EFF is?
[00:24.930 --> 00:26.930]  Oh, that's what I like to see!
[00:27.450 --> 00:29.090]  So I don't have to explain.
[00:30.110 --> 00:41.590]  I spend a lot of my time trying to keep journalists and activists and dissidents all over the world from getting killed because of things that they say online.
[00:42.230 --> 00:49.350]  And one of the most important tools that we have in our toolbox is anonymity and pseudonymity.
[00:49.350 --> 00:59.250]  So I'm here to give a talk today about sort of the development of pseudonymity online over the last couple of years.
[00:59.930 --> 01:02.230]  What has happened to it and where I think it is going.
[01:04.510 --> 01:07.750]  You can follow me on Twitter if you have a sudden urge to do so.
[01:07.970 --> 01:08.590]  I'm Eva Side.
[01:11.530 --> 01:14.630]  So, we're going to start with the super, super easy stuff.
[01:14.790 --> 01:15.750]  We're going to get that out of the way.
[01:17.110 --> 01:18.450]  My slides are not showing.
[01:18.790 --> 01:20.030]  This is a sad story.
[01:26.970 --> 01:28.790]  This is a very sad story indeed.
[01:28.990 --> 01:30.070]  What is happening to my slides?
[01:31.990 --> 01:32.510]  No!
[01:36.330 --> 01:38.910]  I'm assuming it's either the FBI or the CIA.
[01:38.910 --> 01:39.030]  Okay.
[01:44.410 --> 01:45.190]  Any day now?
[01:48.170 --> 01:48.850]  Yes, please.
[01:54.680 --> 01:55.560]  Okay, no problem.
[01:56.020 --> 01:59.820]  Well, there was a guy here whose job it was to make this happen.
[02:00.340 --> 02:00.920]  That's okay.
[02:01.460 --> 02:01.760]  All right.
[02:02.180 --> 02:04.360]  So, we're going to talk really quickly about...
[02:04.980 --> 02:05.580]  There you go.
[02:05.860 --> 02:06.200]  Yeah?
[02:06.500 --> 02:06.980]  We got...
[02:06.980 --> 02:08.840]  That wasn't very helpful, was it?
[02:09.640 --> 02:10.360]  Give us a...
[02:11.880 --> 02:12.820]  Keep talking.
[02:12.940 --> 02:13.220]  All right.
[02:13.480 --> 02:13.980]  So, we're going to...
[02:13.980 --> 02:16.580]  I'm going to talk really quickly about...
[02:16.580 --> 02:17.740]  About pseudonymity.
[02:18.380 --> 02:18.960]  And...
[02:18.960 --> 02:21.460]  And the exciting ways in which it differs from...
[02:21.460 --> 02:22.360]  From anonymity.
[02:23.260 --> 02:25.820]  The pseudonym is...
[02:25.820 --> 02:26.700]  Yay!
[02:27.920 --> 02:29.060]  Look at that!
[02:30.280 --> 02:35.420]  A pseudonym is a fictitious name used by an author to conceal his or her identity or pen name.
[02:35.920 --> 02:42.000]  It is different from anonymity, which is the state of being unnamed or unidentified.
[02:42.580 --> 02:48.920]  One of the most important differences between pseudonymity and anonymity is that you create sort of this...
[02:48.920 --> 02:50.720]  You create a personality online.
[02:50.900 --> 02:57.400]  You create somebody with a track record, with a certain level of accountability, even if it doesn't necessarily have your name attached to it.
[02:57.500 --> 03:00.760]  And that is a feature of pseudonymity that is not present in anonymity.
[03:02.740 --> 03:06.720]  Pseudonymity is really important in the history of the United States.
[03:07.580 --> 03:17.380]  Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison got together to form sort of a supergroup that wrote the Federalist Papers, and they all did it under pseudonyms.
[03:20.320 --> 03:21.300]  This guy.
[03:23.800 --> 03:24.780]  This chick.
[03:27.300 --> 03:28.880]  Mandatory Lady Gaga content.
[03:31.460 --> 03:48.060]  So, once upon a time, when you got out onto the great big Internet, you would find yourself in a chat room or an online forum or a news group, and you would have to make some sort of decision about what you were going to call yourself.
[03:48.620 --> 03:59.600]  Now, most people did not use their full names or even their first names, largely to prevent name collisions, which led to this culture of pseudonymity.
[04:00.100 --> 04:04.700]  Some notable pseudonyms are Scud, who may or may or may not be here.
[04:05.120 --> 04:06.680]  Nedek, whom I know is here.
[04:07.120 --> 04:09.160]  Moot, who founded 4chan.
[04:10.000 --> 04:12.620]  Some guy named Emmanuel Goldstein.
[04:13.060 --> 04:13.700]  Barnaby Jack.
[04:13.940 --> 04:31.320]  Generally, people who are interested in computer security tend to be very interested in exploring the Internet using pseudonyms because they are concerned about not necessarily having their name attached to their work, which may in some ways be controversial.
[04:32.910 --> 04:38.400]  Now, not all pseudonyms were appropriate for every forum.
[04:38.580 --> 04:52.880]  The pseudonym that you use on your local MMO is not necessarily the pseudonym that you're going to be using for, you know, a, I don't know, a forum about exchanging recipes.
[04:53.140 --> 04:54.460]  It would just be kind of weird.
[04:54.640 --> 04:56.060]  And everybody understood this.
[04:58.240 --> 04:58.680]  Until...
[05:00.410 --> 05:03.080]  Alright, so the Internet, it lets you play with your identity.
[05:03.240 --> 05:05.040]  There's a very famous cartoon on the Internet.
[05:05.380 --> 05:06.520]  Nobody knows you're a dog.
[05:09.350 --> 05:17.120]  The problem with on the Internet no one knowing that you're a dog is that sometimes this whole play with your identity can go wrong.
[05:17.760 --> 05:27.080]  About a year ago today, there was a scandal involving Amina Araf who blogged for six years.
[05:28.120 --> 05:31.340]  She maintained a blog called A Gay Girl in Damascus.
[05:33.060 --> 05:38.020]  So, as far as pseudonyms go, this was a pseudonym with a great deal of credibility.
[05:38.020 --> 05:46.180]  She was writing about sort of gay culture in Syria, which was controversial.
[05:46.580 --> 05:50.940]  And she wrote in a really stirring and interesting way.
[05:51.340 --> 05:56.780]  Furthermore, not only did she write in her own blog, but she would comment in other people's blogs.
[05:56.940 --> 06:06.420]  And she created sort of this... she was part of this whole community of queer bloggers online, and especially queer bloggers in the Middle East.
[06:06.760 --> 06:22.300]  What is particularly interesting about Amina is that in all of the six years that she blogged very passionately about her life in Damascus, no one actually ever met her.
[06:23.980 --> 06:35.920]  And this didn't really set off any concern or ring any bells until a gay girl in Damascus was apparently kidnapped.
[06:39.100 --> 06:40.960]  As a result of this, we discovered this.
[06:41.980 --> 06:43.660]  This is a gay girl in Damascus.
[06:43.820 --> 06:44.680]  His name is Tom McMaster.
[06:45.340 --> 06:46.260]  He's in his 40s.
[06:46.300 --> 06:47.020]  He is not gay.
[06:47.020 --> 06:47.900]  He is not a girl.
[06:48.060 --> 06:48.840]  He is not Syrian.
[06:52.600 --> 07:11.520]  Interestingly enough, when other members of Amina's community came out and talked about how hurt and betrayed they felt that this woman who was telling this important story, who had been quoted in newspapers, who...
[07:11.520 --> 07:18.040]  There were reporters who claimed that they had actually had physical meetings with her, and it turned out that the meetings had not actually taken place.
[07:20.640 --> 07:33.680]  When these people expressed their sort of outrage that Tom McMaster had decided to masquerade as a gay 20-something living in Syria, this is what he had to say.
[07:35.220 --> 07:42.700]  While the narrative voice may have been fictional, the facts on this blog are true and not misleading as to the situation on the ground.
[07:42.920 --> 07:44.760]  I do not believe I have harmed anyone.
[07:44.760 --> 07:49.080]  I feel I have created an important voice for issues that I feel strongly about.
[07:49.800 --> 07:51.060]  This is his apology.
[07:53.360 --> 08:15.060]  Now, obviously, there are some problems with this, and I think Andy Carvin gave one of the most salient criticisms, which was that when voices like Amina's are so publicly discredited, it creates a cry-wolf effect, and it makes it very difficult to take other voices at face value,
[08:15.640 --> 08:18.620]  especially the voices of queer bloggers coming out of Damascus.
[08:20.020 --> 08:24.580]  And so in that way, you could argue that he did, in fact, do some harm.
[08:24.880 --> 08:30.440]  And this is one of the things that people are really concerned about when it comes to pseudonymity.
[08:30.440 --> 08:37.160]  That on one hand, people can play with their identities, but on the other hand, they can pretend to be people that they're not.
[08:37.500 --> 08:48.340]  So somehow, having a real name, or what Google later refers to as a name-shaped name, creates greater trust.
[08:48.340 --> 08:58.560]  And that when people exchange real-looking names, that they will take each other more seriously, and are more likely to be authentic.
[09:01.160 --> 09:10.560]  Now, I find this argument really interesting, because while Tom McMaster did not use his real name, he was using a pseudonym, it was a name-shaped name.
[09:10.560 --> 09:20.080]  This would have passed any standard for Facebook, or Google+, or any social network that has a real names policy.
[09:21.120 --> 09:47.520]  The other thing that social networks are very worried about, such as Friendster, Facebook, LinkedIn, Blizzard basically very briefly considered requiring people to use their real names on their support forums, so that anybody who ever Googles you will know about some kind of problem that you had with your level 70 troll mage.
[09:49.200 --> 09:57.380]  And the comment sections of some newspapers also adopted a requirement that you use Facebook logins, or a requirement that you use your real name.
[09:57.380 --> 10:01.960]  And the reason that they did this was trolls.
[10:05.770 --> 10:08.410]  People who run social networks are very worried about trolls.
[10:09.270 --> 10:10.340]  More trolls.
[10:11.550 --> 10:12.950]  These kinds of trolls.
[10:13.210 --> 10:20.450]  And the reason why is what is referred to as the greater Internet f*ckwad theory.
[10:21.230 --> 10:30.860]  This theory posits that a normal person armed with anonymity and an audience online will behave like a total douchebag.
[10:32.790 --> 10:42.670]  And for, I would say, the last couple of years, this is a theory that has gained many adherents, including Facebook.
[10:43.550 --> 10:52.240]  Facebook did, until recently, have an extremely strict real names policy that required you to use your real name, or your account would be suspended.
[10:55.380 --> 10:56.940]  Why do they really do this?
[10:57.420 --> 10:58.720]  Oh, I bet you can guess.
[11:01.120 --> 11:02.900]  Big fat piles of cash.
[11:03.420 --> 11:18.900]  It turns out that if a social network or a company can take all of the information that they have about you, your age, your web browsing habits, the brands that you like, the people that you talk to, the place where you're located, the places where you go.
[11:19.060 --> 11:27.520]  And they can combine that with your real name and say, your credit report, that your identity is worth an enormous amount of money to advertisers.
[11:27.980 --> 11:35.280]  And the more authentic your profile looks to advertisers, the more money the company can sell it for.
[11:39.870 --> 11:41.730]  Now we run into some problems.
[11:42.910 --> 11:44.130]  This is Wel Gonim.
[11:44.610 --> 11:57.210]  He was a Facebook user a couple of years ago who ran a very important Facebook group called We Are All Khalid Said.
[11:57.930 --> 12:00.790]  And he did it under a pseudonym.
[12:01.050 --> 12:03.330]  He was working at Google at the time.
[12:03.510 --> 12:05.330]  He was engaged in activism.
[12:05.330 --> 12:12.590]  He felt that having his name attached to this activism would be possibly deleterious to his health.
[12:12.970 --> 12:15.670]  And therefore did not use his real name.
[12:16.630 --> 12:31.850]  Obviously, once the Khalid Said site started to become very popular and gained some enemies in, say, I don't know, Egypt, his account was reported as being in violation of the real name's policy.
[12:32.550 --> 12:36.810]  Because his account was in violation of the real name's policy, it was suspended.
[12:37.130 --> 12:41.850]  And there was no more administrator for the We Are All Khalid Said group.
[12:44.130 --> 12:50.570]  Now, the way that this problem was resolved was essentially in a backdoor deal where somebody talked to somebody at Facebook.
[12:50.770 --> 12:56.730]  And they said, well, gee, if you can find somebody to vouch for this guy, we'll go ahead and we'll let him run this very important group.
[12:56.730 --> 13:17.450]  But if you are not some important guy at Google, if you're just some, you know, 15-year-old blogging in your parents' basement, which is, I understand, where most bloggers blog from, if you don't have contacts at Facebook or contacts at Google to vouch for you,
[13:17.450 --> 13:25.850]  then when somebody reports your pseudonym as in violation of the real name's policy, there is absolutely nobody there to help you.
[13:26.070 --> 13:28.070]  And that's why these policies are a very serious problem.
[13:29.890 --> 13:33.930]  So, everybody was very upset about Facebook's real name's policy.
[13:34.610 --> 13:40.390]  And Google Plus decided that they were going to enter the social networking space.
[13:40.390 --> 13:43.690]  People were very excited because they needed an alternative to Facebook.
[13:44.010 --> 13:46.790]  They were thinking perhaps it will have better privacy protections.
[13:47.050 --> 13:57.070]  Facebook was in the habit of launching upgrades and updates that would suddenly take information that had previously been private and making it public by default.
[13:57.390 --> 14:02.110]  That's the sort of thing that, you know, people don't necessarily want in their social network.
[14:02.590 --> 14:17.530]  They thought that perhaps circles might make it easier for them to manage their relationships with other people so that they could post their wild, boozing snapshots only to their friends and not, say, to their grandmother.
[14:19.690 --> 14:26.570]  And furthermore, Google had a, you know, sterling reputation for not being evil.
[14:26.870 --> 14:27.950]  Please try not to smirk.
[14:30.330 --> 14:36.270]  What we have here is a Facebook post from a very enthusiastic adopter of Google Plus.
[14:36.270 --> 14:47.390]  He announced that, with the advent of Google Plus, I will soon be deleting my Facebook account in protest of the ever-worsening privacy policies and many other reprehensible terms and condition changes.
[14:47.430 --> 14:49.290]  I encourage you all to join me.
[14:49.730 --> 14:52.770]  We were all going to go over to this other social network for like 10 minutes.
[14:55.850 --> 14:59.090]  Unfortunately, Google Plus decided that they too would have a real names policy.
[14:59.250 --> 15:05.550]  And not only were they going to have a real names policy, but it was going to be even more restrictive and weird than Facebook's.
[15:05.550 --> 15:10.650]  Google Plus' real names policy was automated.
[15:11.050 --> 15:26.530]  They actually had a spider that would crawl all the account names and flag suspicious things and simply suspend them without any kind of warning or due process.
[15:26.850 --> 15:34.110]  And they wound up suspending accounts that had handles, mononyms.
[15:34.170 --> 15:35.370]  I see size in the audience.
[15:36.010 --> 15:38.790]  Our personal representative for mononyms.
[15:39.130 --> 15:40.990]  People with stage names.
[15:40.990 --> 15:44.330]  People whose names contained non-standard characters.
[15:44.930 --> 15:46.370]  Non-Western names.
[15:46.490 --> 15:58.450]  It's actually really common for people in Hong Kong to adopt a sort of secondary Western-sounding name that is not made entirely of Chinese characters because it's just easier to type on a U.S. keyboard.
[16:01.090 --> 16:05.750]  And amusingly enough, they also suspended a bunch of Google employees.
[16:07.910 --> 16:09.590]  It's not like they didn't know who they were.
[16:12.190 --> 16:14.130]  So activists were outraged.
[16:14.430 --> 16:15.710]  They blogged like crazy.
[16:15.850 --> 16:16.770]  They wrote op-eds.
[16:16.770 --> 16:21.510]  We had a hashtag, the nymwars and plusgate.
[16:21.830 --> 16:31.270]  We launched a site called MyNameIsMe, which had a bunch of sort of personal testimonials from people talking about how important their pseudonyms were to them.
[16:33.210 --> 16:40.870]  This included Violet Blue and Cory Doctorow, who does not actually write under a pseudonym, but still talked about how important it was.
[16:40.870 --> 16:49.970]  There was a fantastic wiki written up by the geek feminism folks called Who Is Hurt By Real Name Policies.
[16:50.090 --> 17:10.450]  And they pointed out that, you know, women, minorities, people with unpopular opinions, people who are in jobs that need to sort of keep their private lives private, like teachers, doctors, all benefit from the use of pseudonyms online.
[17:11.090 --> 17:18.430]  We had indices of the blog posts and the coverage that it was actually very easy for journalists to find and to create more coverage.
[17:18.970 --> 17:28.130]  We tried to encourage people to do some research because it turns out that the greater Internet f*ckwad theory has not actually been tested by academics in any way.
[17:28.950 --> 17:30.350]  And Dana Boyd is busy.
[17:32.970 --> 17:38.270]  And we had meetings with Google executives in which we basically threw our hands up and said, seriously, what are you doing?
[17:40.710 --> 17:43.310]  And lo, it was good.
[17:46.270 --> 17:51.290]  Many months later, Google Plus changed their real names policy.
[17:51.290 --> 18:08.310]  And they decided that they would allow people to have pseudonyms as long as they could point to some place where they had been using that pseudonym for a sufficient length of time or it had a sufficient following.
[18:08.570 --> 18:11.290]  This amounts to pseudonyms for famous people.
[18:15.870 --> 18:16.910]  Kind of a winner.
[18:16.910 --> 18:18.650]  A winner is you if you're famous.
[18:21.310 --> 18:26.690]  And here's what the chief architect of Google Plus had to say about this sudden change of heart.
[18:26.950 --> 18:32.130]  He said, we thought that people would behave very differently when they were and when they weren't going by their real names.
[18:32.350 --> 18:35.750]  After watching the system for a while, we realized that this was not in fact the case.
[18:35.870 --> 18:40.230]  And in particular, bastards are still bastards under their own names.
[18:41.090 --> 18:44.230]  A quote that I would like stitched on a sampler somewhere.
[18:46.570 --> 18:50.190]  Now, again, there are still some problems with the Google Plus real names policy.
[18:50.910 --> 18:53.650]  They have a preference for name-shaped names.
[18:54.130 --> 18:57.790]  So, for example, Psy is still out of luck with his mononym.
[18:59.870 --> 19:01.950]  And he is still under review.
[19:03.010 --> 19:08.230]  There's no indication of what the threshold is for an existing handle with a sufficient following.
[19:08.230 --> 19:12.950]  But as far as I can tell, it's basically, if you're famous, we'll let it slide.
[19:14.850 --> 19:23.910]  And users whose previous attempts at using Nyms have been rejected don't know that they have the opportunity to try again.
[19:24.170 --> 19:28.130]  So people simply wandered off from Google Plus because it wasn't terribly helpful.
[19:28.770 --> 19:35.190]  Now, I can't see you, but let's make some noise.
[19:35.190 --> 19:38.910]  Make some noise if you actually still use Google Plus.
[19:39.850 --> 19:40.410]  Eh?
[19:40.670 --> 19:40.830]  Eh?
[19:43.210 --> 19:45.750]  I am going to guess that this is not the entire room.
[19:48.960 --> 19:57.500]  Google Plus' change of heart is really just the beginning of the sort of backlash against real names policies.
[19:57.500 --> 20:00.820]  And for and in defense of pseudonyms.
[20:01.420 --> 20:06.560]  In February of 2012, Facebook launched a very similar policy.
[20:06.680 --> 20:14.620]  Whereas they had had this very strict real names policy in the past, they now have a real names policy that amounts to, if you're famous, we'll let it slide.
[20:16.320 --> 20:18.240]  This is wonderful for famous people.
[20:18.660 --> 20:25.200]  If you are, say, Salman Rushdie, and your account has been suspended on Facebook, which is something that has happened.
[20:26.120 --> 20:37.520]  If you are Michael Ante, and you are, you know, a Chinese blogger who has published under this pseudonym for many years, including in the New York Times, and you've had your account suspended, this is very useful.
[20:37.780 --> 20:45.220]  But again, if you are a 15-year-old blogging in the basement, where most blogging happens, you are still out of luck.
[20:45.920 --> 20:52.940]  Especially, and this is especially important if you are, say, in a Syrian basement at this time, or a basement in any authoritarian regime.
[20:53.860 --> 21:01.920]  So, this is not the end, because there are other companies that have found this...
[21:02.680 --> 21:05.040]  have found a niche.
[21:05.240 --> 21:15.460]  They understand that the Internet needs pseudonymity, and they need to create tools that allow people to express themselves online in a way that lets them play with their identities.
[21:15.460 --> 21:28.840]  And then you get companies like Tumblr, and Pinterest, and Discus, which actually did some research on anonymous and synonymous comments, and found that they were very useful.
[21:29.100 --> 21:34.720]  Though the actual methodology is kind of questionable, so really the jury is still out.
[21:36.700 --> 21:49.660]  Tumblr is particularly interesting in that they have been vehement in their defense of free speech and sort of the right to call yourself whatever you want on Tumblr, which I have really enjoyed.
[21:50.220 --> 22:02.100]  Tumblr does have some content policy issues, but really when it comes down to keeping yourself anonymous or synonymous, they have been very strong proponents of this particular type of free speech.
[22:04.920 --> 22:05.280]  So that's a great question.
[22:05.280 --> 22:10.820]  Finally, I would like to say that you should support the EFF.
[22:11.880 --> 22:12.820]  We're sure wonderful.
[22:14.220 --> 22:15.540]  I need money for a cape.
[22:17.940 --> 22:19.700]  And now I would like to open the floor to questions.
[22:37.560 --> 22:37.880]  Excellent.
[22:39.160 --> 22:43.080]  Do you know of any examples of networks that are doing it well?
[22:43.360 --> 22:46.180]  Because I've known folks who are like, hey, I'm starting up this social network.
[22:46.220 --> 22:50.140]  And they ask me, it's like, hey, how can I do this in a way that isn't shitty?
[22:50.360 --> 22:52.780]  And I'm like, I wish I had an example to show you.
[22:53.980 --> 23:01.320]  You can read, like I pointed them to the, there was the Google engineer who did the like long posts about what they were...
[23:01.320 --> 23:05.040]  when they changed things and what they were trying to do.
[23:05.320 --> 23:07.040]  And that's the only example I had.
[23:07.280 --> 23:14.560]  I think that the premise behind social networking sites is in some ways problematic.
[23:15.500 --> 23:25.280]  The exchange that you're making as a user is that you are going to exchange all of this information about yourself in exchange for this free and nifty service.
[23:25.280 --> 23:31.460]  And your real name attached to that information makes it more valuable.
[23:31.760 --> 23:42.360]  As long as companies are using this as their business model, they have absolutely no incentive to allow you to express yourself anonymously or under a pseudonym.
[23:42.620 --> 23:48.380]  And every incentive to track you and find out as much information about you as they possibly can.
[23:48.380 --> 23:58.180]  So this business model is highly problematic for activists and people who are concerned about their privacy.
[23:58.800 --> 24:05.340]  That said, there are companies that are not social networks that are doing a particularly good job of this.
[24:05.700 --> 24:07.840]  Twitter will let you call yourself whatever you want.
[24:09.540 --> 24:11.680]  Discus will let you call yourself whatever you want.
[24:11.680 --> 24:17.680]  Even Google's Blogger platform will allow you to use a pseudonym.
[24:18.500 --> 24:23.200]  Same goes for, I think, Posturus and Pinterest and Tumblr.
[24:23.440 --> 24:32.860]  Sort of this whole new generation of sharing platforms is largely supportive of pseudonymity, which I think is a very good sign.
[24:35.540 --> 24:38.860]  So this is not so much just a question, but a comment.
[24:39.000 --> 24:40.820]  And I'd love to hear your comments on it as well.
[24:42.280 --> 24:44.840]  I was born with an excruciatingly common name.
[24:45.140 --> 24:54.360]  And so pseudonyms for a person like myself is a way to actually be noticed and not hide some of the content that I want to have found.
[24:54.660 --> 24:59.980]  So, I don't know, I just wanted to hear your comments on that in the context of everything you've been speaking about.
[25:00.780 --> 25:13.120]  Well, again, I think that one of the things that pseudonyms empower us to do rather than being sort of forever wedded to our real names is that we become empowered to decide how much of ourselves we want to share with the world.
[25:13.640 --> 25:19.080]  And that's a flexibility we simply don't have in a world in which our real names are attached to everything that we do online.
[25:20.580 --> 25:23.300]  I'd like to kind of whip out the F word now and say Facebook.
[25:24.780 --> 25:34.100]  I'm seeing what Microsoft, as it kind of rose to become a monopoly here, people assume certain things that, like when you hand them software, it's on a Microsoft platform.
[25:34.460 --> 25:36.660]  When you hand a document, it's in Word format.
[25:37.000 --> 25:40.840]  I'm seeing the same kind of thing with Facebook, with logins, connectivity.
[25:41.360 --> 25:43.720]  Hey, you know, get in touch with me on Facebook.
[25:44.900 --> 25:49.460]  How, I mean, I don't think there's going to be a critical mass point where we really can't avoid that.
[25:49.460 --> 25:50.360]  So how do we treat it?
[25:50.360 --> 25:55.520]  How do we kind of maybe make an end run or I don't know?
[25:56.120 --> 26:02.400]  That's actually one of the problems that we were hoping a service like Google Plus would address.
[26:02.720 --> 26:16.740]  And one of the reasons why Google Plus' real names policy was such a profound disappointment to many of the people who engage in heavy use of social networks and who make social networks successful.
[26:16.740 --> 26:26.660]  And I would go so far as to posit that the lack of adoption by those people is one of the reasons why Google Plus didn't really take off in a Facebook-like way.
[26:27.000 --> 26:32.540]  Google still claims that Google Plus is incredibly successful because it has lots of users.
[26:32.720 --> 26:40.640]  But the way that they count their users is very different from the way that Facebook does it.
[26:40.640 --> 26:48.460]  And as a general rule, Google Plus users do not spend nearly as much time on Google Plus as they do on Facebook.
[26:49.060 --> 27:03.420]  I think that any discussion of pseudonymity online absolutely has to wrestle with the problem that Facebook is the sort of 900-pound gorilla in the room and that they don't allow a lot of room for pseudonymity online.
[27:04.260 --> 27:24.860]  There are projects like the Diaspora Project that are working on this sort of open-source, decentralized version of a social network that would allow people to sort of decide how much of their private lives they want to make public.
[27:24.860 --> 27:31.780]  But I think it's a long way from becoming a reality at this time.
[27:31.960 --> 27:37.520]  I would certainly encourage people to think about sort of alternatives that they could pursue.
[27:38.080 --> 27:40.240]  I'm in a room full of software developers.
[27:41.080 --> 27:43.160]  Surely someone here can work on it.
[27:45.740 --> 27:54.020]  I wonder if we have misunderstood the reasons why large social networks chose not to allow pseudonyms.
[27:54.020 --> 27:56.340]  I mean, you said, okay, advertisers, etc.
[27:56.600 --> 28:04.220]  But you could make an argument that the advertisers don't care what your name is as long as they know your age and your friends and all of these sorts of things for targeting.
[28:04.720 --> 28:08.800]  What about the law enforcement argument?
[28:09.100 --> 28:10.840]  Do we know anything about that?
[28:11.100 --> 28:19.120]  What about the other part of that thread from Jonathan Zunger mentioned that they saw that conversion rates for...
[28:19.120 --> 28:32.940]  that is someone who came back to Google+, for people who were not within this sort of, let's say, technically oriented community, were much lower when they ran into people using pseudonyms.
[28:33.000 --> 28:36.180]  In other words, they claimed that pseudonyms were scaring the straights.
[28:36.600 --> 28:45.160]  And I wonder if we don't characterize why they actually want to do this, if we'll ever be able to convince them otherwise.
[28:45.160 --> 28:49.540]  Well, I think you're actually mischaracterizing Jonathan's quote.
[28:50.260 --> 28:57.640]  He said specifically that people were turned off when they saw non-name-shaped pseudonyms.
[28:57.640 --> 29:04.800]  when they saw, you know, Netic23 instead of John Adams.
[29:05.180 --> 29:06.880]  Not to pick on that guy over there.
[29:07.940 --> 29:09.000]  And... Thanks for owning me.
[29:11.140 --> 29:11.620]  Yes.
[29:11.740 --> 29:14.240]  EFF has no respect for privacy.
[29:17.140 --> 29:20.760]  So it turns out that that is what Google was concerned about.
[29:20.860 --> 29:24.800]  And that's one of the reasons why they insist on what they refer to as name-shaped names.
[29:24.800 --> 29:30.640]  You could also argue that advertisers aren't concerned that they have your real name.
[29:30.820 --> 29:35.040]  They are concerned that they have something vaguely name-shaped that sounds plausible.
[29:35.680 --> 29:46.240]  And as non-technical people, that they are also turned off by random strings of letters and numbers that may or may not be traceable back to an actual human being.
[29:46.240 --> 29:52.440]  I think that the law enforcement argument is not without merit.
[29:53.000 --> 29:57.290]  Certainly, Eric Schmidt has come out in public and said that anonymity...
[29:58.060 --> 30:01.420]  I think this was... this may have been about two years ago.
[30:01.720 --> 30:10.180]  But the quote was that anonymity on the Internet has to go away because governments simply will not allow it.
[30:10.180 --> 30:13.560]  They need to know who you are for law enforcement purposes.
[30:15.480 --> 30:28.360]  And while I think that is a reflection of how much pressure there is on companies to provide that kind of information to governments, it's also the best argument I have ever heard for fighting it.
[30:35.700 --> 30:37.780]  This is more of a general comment than a question.
[30:37.780 --> 30:48.960]  But I think another angle to all this is becoming more and more evident as we have things like the ability on news sites or blogs to sign in with your Facebook login and post a comment.
[30:49.260 --> 30:59.400]  And, like, Google recently started pushing Google Plus users to start YouTube accounts or convert their existing ones to use their real name as on Google Plus rather than the YouTube username.
[30:59.820 --> 31:01.540]  And so we're seeing this sort of creep.
[31:01.540 --> 31:05.640]  And it's not just what you're doing on that social network or on that blogging service or platform or whatever.
[31:05.640 --> 31:13.560]  It's a way to connect more of what you do across the web to your identity rather than, you know, rather than keeping it all in one place.
[31:13.720 --> 31:15.220]  I think that's an excellent observation.
[31:15.600 --> 31:21.460]  Certainly there are efforts by large companies to create this sort of monolithic identity.
[31:22.170 --> 31:35.860]  And there is a very interesting related problem that happens when a company that allows pseudonyms pseudonyms or anonymous accounts is purchased by a company that insists on real names policies.
[31:36.220 --> 31:38.100]  What happens to all of those accounts?
[31:38.340 --> 31:55.100]  And you can see something very interesting happening when, with this conversion process that's happening between Google Plus accounts and YouTube right now where you have the option to sort of merge your Google Plus account, which presumably has a real name on it,
[31:55.400 --> 32:04.440]  and your YouTube account, which you may have made, you know, five, six, ten years ago and contain some sort of other pseudonym.
[32:05.300 --> 32:14.140]  I do appreciate that Google did not do this automatically and did not automatically opt people into merging these two accounts.
[32:14.140 --> 32:15.820]  So you have a choice.
[32:17.180 --> 32:20.720]  But I think that that is definitely a trend that we'll be seeing more of in the future.
[32:24.100 --> 32:25.020]  Any more questions?
[32:25.500 --> 32:27.480]  Have we solved the problem of pseudonymity on the Internet?
[32:30.620 --> 32:31.520]  One more question.
[32:31.720 --> 32:34.540]  So how does the rubber meet the road?
[32:35.440 --> 32:48.160]  What influence can EFF specifically, how does the EFF exert influence over these private companies with their private social networks that they're creating, how can we affect what they do?
[32:48.420 --> 32:50.480]  Well, there are a couple of different things that we do.
[32:51.410 --> 33:12.180]  One of the most noteworthy is something very similar to what happened to Weil Gonim, which was that some important person who really needed to maintain their anonymity online, you know, working from an authoritarian regime towards political goals, gets suspended on Facebook,
[33:12.480 --> 33:14.300]  and he calls us.
[33:14.520 --> 33:15.640]  And then we call Facebook.
[33:15.880 --> 33:18.100]  And we say, hey, let this guy back on.
[33:18.280 --> 33:21.320]  And they say, well, I guess.
[33:22.560 --> 33:23.640]  But here's the thing.
[33:23.960 --> 33:25.000]  I not scale.
[33:27.040 --> 33:33.900]  And if you don't know who I am, and you can't call me, and you don't know that you have a choice, I can't help.
[33:33.900 --> 33:38.740]  And that's one of the most important reasons why the policies need to change.
[33:39.120 --> 33:49.040]  And this continued sort of backroom deal, we help you piecemeal policy is simply not working.
[33:49.160 --> 33:55.480]  We need to have good policies in the first place, not policies that we just kind of fix ad hoc.
[33:58.850 --> 34:15.950]  So I guess I was wondering if you think that there's also a good reason for enforcing real names or at least wanting to have like a good reason for pseudonyms because isn't it kind of annoying on a social network to see people you know by one name going by another and,
[34:15.970 --> 34:22.130]  you know, kind of breaking reality from what exists on the social network?
[34:22.450 --> 34:33.810]  I don't think that my annoyance or feeling that reality has been broken in some way is enough of a reason to impose on someone else's decision about how they want to present themselves online.
[34:34.770 --> 34:39.390]  More like that you would prefer that there's a good reason or that they have a reason, not just...
[34:39.390 --> 34:41.350]  I don't think they have to justify themselves to me.
[34:43.510 --> 34:44.390]  I mean...
[34:45.670 --> 34:46.390]  Well, yeah.
[34:46.590 --> 35:05.830]  I mean, I'm saying that like, if you're trying to connect real people with their real friends, that there's some sort of like, human desire to kind of have everyone kind of fit into the same ball that you put them in the rest of the time, even on the social network.
[35:06.050 --> 35:07.210]  I mean, just to be a devil's advocate.
[35:07.550 --> 35:12.770]  Certainly, the desire exists, but the...
[35:14.770 --> 35:18.250]  It is not enough of a reason to take choice away from users.
[35:18.250 --> 35:19.370]  I mean, of course...
[35:19.370 --> 35:31.650]  There are so many very strong arguments for allowing people to choose how they present themselves online that I don't feel they are outweighed by, but I find this really annoying.
[35:33.870 --> 35:35.850]  I am perhaps taking a cheap shot.
[35:36.970 --> 35:37.110]  Yeah.
[35:37.530 --> 35:41.150]  Well, I mean, I'm just trying to be a devil's advocate for, you know...
[35:41.150 --> 35:51.970]  Because, I mean, people have all these desires for a community, but they don't necessarily, you know, always like being in a community.
[35:52.730 --> 35:54.930]  So we should force them to be in communities?
[35:54.930 --> 35:58.250]  I think that we need to give people the choice, too.
[35:58.510 --> 36:11.970]  But that people push back against it because they like, you know, they like, you know, John to be John and not John to be John, except on Facebook where he's like, you know, Bob, some other name.
[36:13.850 --> 36:15.630]  It is true that there are people who like that.
[36:16.730 --> 36:17.650]  Thank you for your comment.
[36:21.100 --> 36:41.040]  I can't help but notice that your comment is very, very parallel to the arguments that were made early during the Nym wars, where both from Google and from sycophants saying that if you don't use your real name on Google, then how are your friends going to find you?
[36:41.920 --> 36:42.920]  And I would say that...
[36:42.920 --> 36:43.840]  He says at a hacker convention.
[36:44.200 --> 36:44.620]  Yes.
[36:44.840 --> 36:46.980]  And I would say that this is exactly backwards.
[36:47.640 --> 36:53.500]  If you aren't allowed to use whatever name you want, then how are your friends going to find you?
[36:54.420 --> 36:58.280]  Because, for example, I don't know how many of you know aesthetics.
[36:59.020 --> 37:00.440]  He's one of the guys here.
[37:00.620 --> 37:04.660]  I happen to know his legal name, but most people don't.
[37:04.680 --> 37:06.560]  And I never call him that.
[37:06.800 --> 37:11.100]  And if I went looking for him, it's not what I would look for.
[37:11.260 --> 37:16.720]  And if he wasn't allowed to go by aesthetics, I would not be able to find him.
[37:19.100 --> 37:27.940]  And I think that that argument is an argument against requiring people to use some particular name that they don't want to use.
[37:28.520 --> 37:32.240]  Finally, there are people who do not use their real names for safety reasons.
[37:32.240 --> 37:42.480]  And when you create a social network that requires people to use their real names just for your overall comfort, what you're doing is you're not making an inclusive network.
[37:42.700 --> 37:47.000]  You're making a network only for people who don't have safety concerns.
[37:47.000 --> 37:57.000]  only for people who are in, you know, who don't have minority opinions or who have never done anything controversial or who have nothing to lose.
[37:57.480 --> 38:03.880]  And I don't think that you can really build an inclusive network without giving people this kind of choice.
[38:07.020 --> 38:09.600]  This is kind of another devil's advocate question.
[38:09.820 --> 38:10.120]  Awesome.
[38:10.280 --> 38:12.980]  I was wondering, every little battle is important.
[38:13.200 --> 38:20.460]  But considering how our privacy is being invaded from so many other angles, why do we draw the line here and not somewhere else?
[38:20.760 --> 38:24.980]  Or why should we fight this battle and not focus our energy on another one?
[38:25.980 --> 38:30.060]  Well, as it turns out, it's not a zero-sum game.
[38:30.060 --> 38:54.100]  If we spend our energy fighting real names policies online, we do not lose out on energy to fight invasions of privacy by corporations or people spying on us because websites use straight HTTP instead of HTTPS by default.
[38:54.100 --> 38:56.240]  We can do all of these things at once.
[38:56.720 --> 39:03.180]  And I submit as Exhibit A at the Electronic Frontier Foundation where we do, in fact, do all of these things at once.
[39:04.560 --> 39:12.160]  I do think that this is an especially important issue because activism will always happen in the place where many people congregate.
[39:13.280 --> 39:17.900]  And for better or for worse, in some ways, Facebook became that place.
[39:19.320 --> 39:42.020]  There is a Tunisian activist named Sami Ben-Gabria who described the way in which the Tunisian government slowly but surely shut down or blocked just about every method of communicating and sharing videos with masses in Tunisia aside from Facebook.
[39:43.540 --> 39:49.140]  Facebook was the only platform in which they could conduct their revolution online.
[39:49.420 --> 39:53.540]  And that's the reason why it was so essential to the revolution.
[39:53.960 --> 40:11.180]  I think that if Facebook and Google and other large companies are going to be the battleground where these things happen, then we absolutely need to face them because people's lives are at stake.
[40:11.780 --> 40:12.460]  Thank you.
[40:15.160 --> 40:18.360]  I just...okay, I don't know anything about law at all.
[40:18.540 --> 40:24.600]  And I don't even know if it makes sense, but it sounds like there needs to be a legal right to privacy online.
[40:24.600 --> 40:31.780]  And that may be, like, one of the only ways to get companies that have financial incentives to prevent you from doing that to help.
[40:31.780 --> 40:32.740]  I mean, is that possible?
[40:32.880 --> 40:34.220]  Is that something that people should fight for?
[40:34.520 --> 40:36.840]  Well, we run into a problem with the First Amendment.
[40:37.680 --> 40:53.160]  You see, while on one hand you have a First Amendment right to call yourself whatever you want, the company which is hosting your speech has a First Amendment right to host whatever kind of speech they want and to set the rules however they want.
[40:53.160 --> 41:09.440]  I think that rather than calling for a legal remedy, what we really need is just a broader ecosystem of social networks where people can share this kind of information with each other.
[41:09.620 --> 41:19.180]  It's okay if somewhere out there there's a social network that requires people to use their real names, just as long as there are also social networks that don't require you to use your real name.
[41:19.180 --> 41:19.800]  That makes sense.
[41:20.000 --> 41:20.100]  Yeah.
[41:20.400 --> 41:20.520]  Okay.
[41:20.840 --> 41:21.040]  Thanks.
[41:23.750 --> 41:29.070]  Is there any privacy reason why names need to be globally the same for every viewer of a system?
[41:29.190 --> 41:33.970]  Like, I have Aesthetics real name in my phone because I know him under that other name.
[41:34.410 --> 41:37.630]  It doesn't hurt him that I have him saved under that name in my phone book.
[41:39.010 --> 41:47.310]  There's no reason why at the presentation level, if I'm logged into Facebook, if I see his name that is a non-name-shaped name, it doesn't appear, I could have it...
[41:47.310 --> 41:54.950]  I could save a local nickname for him and have it displayed that way, which solves the problem of users not liking pseudonyms that are chosen by other people.
[41:55.330 --> 41:57.130]  Is there any privacy concern with that?
[41:58.370 --> 42:11.210]  None that I can think of off the top of my head, aside from the possibility that linking your real name to a pseudonym may somehow be dangerous.
[42:11.430 --> 42:18.770]  If other people knowing what your real name is and your pseudonym together is dangerous, then that's probably not a very good idea.
[42:25.130 --> 42:28.730]  One more instance of the rubber hitting the road.
[42:29.430 --> 42:45.890]  I seem to remember in the early days of the discussions on the nymwars hashtag, there was someone complaining that once their Google Plus account had been suspended, that they were losing access to things like Gmail, but also certain numbers of their functionalities on their Android phones.
[42:46.470 --> 42:53.330]  And I've heard tell, I don't know whether to believe, that Facebook is thinking of getting into the smartphone market.
[42:53.610 --> 43:06.030]  How do we deal with this interaction between the nymwars related problems and people's actual physical phones and the GPS data that comes with it?
[43:06.230 --> 43:14.950]  Well, I think you've identified a very alarming trend, which again is just sort of this consolidation of identity across all facets of our lives.
[43:15.350 --> 43:24.150]  And it is true that when people were having their Google Plus account suspended, that they were losing other types of Google functionality.
[43:24.150 --> 43:27.910]  When we questioned Google about this, they presented this as a bug.
[43:28.670 --> 43:29.310]  They said...
[43:32.370 --> 43:34.890]  We didn't mean for you not to be able to use Google Reader.
[43:38.390 --> 43:48.190]  I'm unable to comment on whether or not that's actually a bug, but certainly that is one of the greatest dangers of this ongoing consolidation of identity.
[43:48.470 --> 43:57.590]  That when, if you present yourself under a pseudonym, that if you get suspended in one place, that you lose all kinds of access to other fun features of the Internet.
[43:59.590 --> 44:02.090]  So I have a devil's advocate comment rather than a question.
[44:02.190 --> 44:02.430]  Is that okay?
[44:02.650 --> 44:03.070]  Bring it.
[44:03.270 --> 44:03.510]  Cool.
[44:04.110 --> 44:07.630]  So I think it's really important to fully understand the system in order to be able to change it.
[44:07.750 --> 44:11.170]  And I fully am in agreement with being able to use synonyms.
[44:11.290 --> 44:16.790]  But I think the motivation with companies like Facebook and Google for using real names is not for advertising.
[44:17.070 --> 44:20.310]  Because I think that the best ways of tracking are not using real names.
[44:20.390 --> 44:21.370]  There's other ways of tying things.
[44:21.370 --> 44:22.650]  And I think that that...
[44:22.990 --> 44:28.270]  I just really think that the main driver for them is the creation of value, which for them is growth.
[44:28.490 --> 44:33.090]  So I think the reason they use names is because that allows more people that have...
[44:33.090 --> 44:36.390]  that don't have the same concerns as we do about privacy to adopt more easily.
[44:36.750 --> 44:40.030]  So I think we need to kind of understand their motivations to be able to change the system.
[44:40.250 --> 44:52.610]  And I'm not sure what the answer is, but maybe, you know, in the short term, some kind of a map where we can use name-like names, but just have a distributed map to have those mapped to whatever we want to be searchable and indexable by.
[44:53.290 --> 44:58.510]  Well, I think that the best counter to that is that norms change over time.
[44:59.270 --> 45:08.770]  At this time, non-technical people are sometimes scared off by non-name-shaped names when they encounter them on the Internet.
[45:09.270 --> 45:18.490]  But that is because often the only time that they encounter these names is in some strange and unfamiliar, you know, technical context.
[45:18.870 --> 45:24.270]  If they saw names like this more often, I posit that perhaps they would be less frightened of them.
[45:24.710 --> 45:27.670]  It is not necessarily incumbent upon us to change.
[45:28.170 --> 45:29.410]  They can change as well.
[45:36.190 --> 45:43.310]  I think we as a community really get these issues, but I'm sure many of us have friends who aren't technical users.
[45:43.690 --> 45:50.190]  How do we open a dialogue with our friends and family who don't understand these issues and explain to them why this is so important?
[45:52.970 --> 46:02.890]  Well, often the reason why people don't understand why pseudonymity on the Internet is so important is because it's not important to them.
[46:02.890 --> 46:16.550]  It does not impact their own lives, and so they have difficulty thinking of a use case in which using your real name online would be embarrassing or unpleasant or life-threatening.
[46:17.270 --> 46:21.930]  So generally, the way that I approach this is by presenting them with use cases.
[46:22.390 --> 46:39.490]  You know, you may be comfortable using your real name online for everything you do, but imagine, if you will, that you are a woman with a stalker or you are a dissident in China or you are a hacker at a conference in New York.
[46:40.490 --> 46:43.870]  There are many, many reasons why people want to protect their names.
[46:44.430 --> 46:49.310]  And usually, once you bring up these other use cases, it's very helpful.
[46:50.210 --> 46:54.290]  Usually that's true, but sometimes I've encountered people who still just don't seem to care.
[46:56.410 --> 46:59.030]  Anything you might suggest for that situation?
[46:59.550 --> 47:00.110]  I mean...
[47:00.110 --> 47:03.390]  Well, it depends on the basis of their not caring.
[47:04.010 --> 47:13.470]  There are people who don't care because it doesn't matter to them that a service or that the Internet might not be for everyone, in which case you address that issue.
[47:13.470 --> 47:21.430]  There are people who simply cannot empathize with people who are not like themselves, in which case they should seek therapy.
[47:23.730 --> 47:28.990]  So yeah, it's really all about sort of getting to the root of the criticism and finding out why they still don't care.
[47:29.290 --> 47:29.870]  Thank you.
[47:30.170 --> 47:30.490]  No problem.
[47:33.910 --> 47:47.550]  So, it seems like the compromise that Google came up with of just giving pseudonymity to famous people doesn't really necessarily meet all the needs of, say, activists or a whole other swath of people.
[47:47.690 --> 47:53.770]  Do you have plans to push further to go to a place where there's full pseudonymity?
[47:56.720 --> 47:57.340]  Yes.
[47:58.200 --> 48:09.420]  There's absolutely no doubt that I was displeased by Google Plus' compromise and also by the compromise that Facebook finally reached in regards to pseudonymity.
[48:09.960 --> 48:15.920]  Precisely because it amounts to a two-tiered system in which you can have a pseudonym provided that you are sufficiently famous.
[48:17.580 --> 48:23.180]  The sort of people that I generally defend at work are not famous.
[48:24.180 --> 48:25.840]  and they need help.
[48:27.000 --> 48:32.440]  At the same time, I am not sure how much further we can push these companies.
[48:32.740 --> 48:34.540]  They feel that they have already made a compromise.
[48:35.300 --> 48:54.620]  And frequently what I do is I suggest that people who are really concerned about their privacy online or concerned about maintaining their pseudonymity because their lives are in danger should avoid these networks with very serious real-names policies.
[48:55.280 --> 49:04.180]  It's not the world's most useful advice because, as I said, most activists go where the people are.
[49:04.360 --> 49:08.360]  And if you tell them, don't go where the people are, they'll probably still go anyway.
[49:08.820 --> 49:10.960]  So this is a problem that continues.
[49:11.300 --> 49:12.200]  More research is needed.
[49:18.400 --> 49:18.980]  Are we good?
[49:19.180 --> 49:19.460]  Solved?
[49:22.680 --> 49:24.040]  Alright, the Internet is now free.
[49:24.220 --> 49:24.880]  Thank you very much.
[49:25.120 --> 49:25.980]  Thank you very much.