Why are we so obsessed with anonymity?

Terry Nugent
Nov 3 · 6 min read

In 1999, Stephen Manes quoted McNealy as saying, ‘You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.’ Manes criticized the statement in his Full Disclosure column: ‘He’s right on the facts, wrong on the attitude. … Instead of ‘getting over it’, citizens need to demand clear rules on privacy, security, and confidentiality.” The authors of Privacy in the 21st Century admitted, “While a shocking statement, there is an element of truth in it.”

One doesn’t hear much of Scott McNealy this century, but he was a big deal in the last. He was prescient about the perils of privacy in the digital epoch. When he declared the death of privacy, I for one shrugged and accepted his conclusion. After all, I had no particular expectation of privacy in real life. I spent almost all of my time with people who knew who I was. In my travels and transactions I was often asked for identification. I never had an issue with identifying myself offline, so why should I expect to be treated differently online.

On the wake of The War on Terror, the Edward Snowden revelations, and the 2016 Presidential election, paranoia about privacy has reached a fever pitch.

Perhaps part of our narcissistic age is overestimating the interest others have in what any particular individual is doing online. There is little incentive for governments, corporations, or anyone else for that matter to sift through the exponentially multiplying terabytes of big data to focus on what particular corner of the Web you’ve been browsing.

The main purpose of tracking in the business world is to sell you products and services with ads. Polls show most people prefer to see ads that are of interest to them. So advertisers and their audience agree that getting the right message to the right person at the right time. So what’s the issue?

The secondary reason businesses want to know who you are online is to protect you from fraud. I haven’t seen Any polls on the subject, but I would imagine 99% of people oppose fraud. Again, what’s the big deal?

A third reason near and dear to my heart is staying logged in so you don’t have to remember your user name and password every time you return to a site. Passwords are the bane of my existence. I’m persuaded that the only one who can’t login to my password protected sites is me. Around the world thieves and scoundrels access my accounts effortlessly while I alone lack access. Therefore I’m willing to sacrifice a great deal, certainly anonymity, to escape password hell.

Well, the Washington Post’s Geoffrey A. Fowler can tell you, or at least what he and his sources think it is. Of course the good of WaPo is owned by a policy failure named Jeff Bezos, who also owns Amazon, a company whose customer list includes just about everybody, thus relieving it from tawdry tasks such as identifying site visitors.

His latest discovery is a technique that’s been around for a while called “digital fingerprinting”. This technique caught on when the little ships of code called cookies which had been the basic method for identifying visitors began to fall prey to privacy paranoia. It uses multiple data points about your hardware and software to establish a digital profile. That profile is used to identify your tech specs, which are unique enough to track. That doesn’t mean the fingerprint is necessarily associated with your offline identity. That requires association with data you voluntarily provide when you register or join a site. There are other ways to link your digital fingerprint with your personal information, but suffice it to say that while it can be done and is done it is not automatic.

Fowler himself admits: “Fingerprinting sites don’t necessarily know you by name.” But he raises the unnamed specter of even greater horrors: “But they’re connecting the dots on information that could be just as valuable.”

Nonetheless, it’s an easy thing to criticize in an environment of privacy paranoia and Fowler does just that:

“Just when you thought we had hit rock bottom on all the ways the Internet could snoop on us — no. We’ve sunk even lower.

There’s a tactic spreading across the Web named after treatment usually reserved for criminals: fingerprinting…. It’s true that not all fingerprinting is used for devious purposes. But it is the digital equivalent of airport security conducting strip searches of everyone. More effective? Perhaps. Good? No.”

Such over-the-top rhetoric might once have been more at home in the tabloids than the once esteemed WaPo, but times change and this is the age of Bezos and Fowler, not Graham, nor Bradlee, nor Woodward and Bernstein.

While Fowler doesn’t seem to need any help fanning paranoia, he enlists sources who amplify his alarmism.

“Patrick Jackson, chief technology officer of privacy software company Disconnect, (said) “Fingerprinting is designed to be user-hostile. It even takes the fact that you don’t want to be tracked as a parameter to make your fingerprint more unique.”

He also quotes Google and Apple, who pretty much know who everybody is, as having “identified fingerprinting as a growing threat. “Because fingerprinting is neither transparent nor under the user’s control, it results in tracking that doesn’t respect user choice,” wrote Google’s Chrome browser engineers in May.

Note these sources are all corporations with obvious conflicts of interest, either profiting from the privacy business possessing a competitive identity advantage.

Fowler asserts: “What’s at stake is a pretty fundamental attribute of the Web: anonymity. One of the original benefits of the Internet is that anyone can express themselves and access information without fear.”

Yet isn’t anonymous or false flag political speech the most controversial of all the subjects of critics of the digital realm? Surely one can’t have it both ways.

Apparently this is such an onerous tactic that it is used by…wait for it..The WaPo itself: “Washington Post spokeswoman Molly Gannon said, ‘The Post is using industry-standard advertising systems to support our ad business and serve our users relevant ads.’ Of course they are! The only way newspapers can make money these days is to sell ads. Targeted ads. Ads that work.

Fowler no doubt takes perverse journalistic pride in biting the hands that feed him, which. Is one of the reasons why there are so many unemployed journalists these days.

In case the dull reader wonders how bad fingerprinting could be if the authors own employer uses it, Fowler answers the rhetorical question: “What’s the big worry? It’s hard to know how this snooping might be used to harm or exploit us. ‘Data collected today can be used against us today, tomorrow or even 10 years from now,’ says Jackson, who used to work for the ((National Security Agency)) (parentheses added for ominous effect). ‘Your browsing history, the apps you use and the data you give companies can lead to voter manipulation, targeted behavior modification, and further aids the mass surveillance of our activities on and offline.’

No polemic is work it’s salt without a triumphant close. Fowler trumpets his as follows: “At least a few sites understood fingerprinting was an ethical issue. After I contacted it, AccuWeather told its ad firms to cut it out. So did Comcast, one of the country’s largest media companies. When I reported we found its Xfinity.com site fingerprinting users, Comcast removed the code — and made the ad firm that had been collecting the data confirm it didn’t store or share any of it.”

Notably absent from the roster of heads on the pike of his own is his own employer.

Fowler also provides helpful hint on how we Davids can fight the digital Goliaths. These range from the prosaic (stay in the walled garden of the Apple ecosphere, or use Firefox) or the exotic “You can add browser privacy extensions such as uBlock Origin, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Privacy Badger or Jackson’s Disconnect (remember him? The guy with the itty bitty conflict of interest? I bet you can even buy his software on Amazon) to help stop some fingerprinting. But beware this software might break some of the sites you want to visit. (We will bear any burden in the name of privacy)

Unfortunately for Jackson’s Disrupt , apparently Google is joining the anti-fingerprinting fray: “In May, Google promised it was going to join the fingerprinting fight — an important move because Chrome is by far the most-used browser. It says its plans include reducing the way browsers can be ‘passively’ fingerprinted, so that it can detect and intervene against ‘active’ fingerprinting efforts as they happen.When these changes arrive on Chrome in the first half of 2020, they should make a difference. That is, until it’s time for the next round of battle against the snoops.”

Fowler will rejoice as the rest of us struggle to remember more and more passwords and fraudsters blithely bypass security and companies figure out some other way to find out who’s that knocking at their digital doors.

Fowler’s analogy of physical fingerprints has a corollary. In analog days the only people who burned their fingerprints off with acid to ensure anonymity were criminals. Today criminals are the only ones who don’t have to worry about digital fingerprints or passwords.

M.H.O.

In My Humble Opinion

Terry Nugent

Written by

Seeker of wisdom and truth.

M.H.O.

M.H.O.

In My Humble Opinion

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade