Let’s say the internet gets so bad that it becomes almost impossible to carry on a civilized conversation on a social network or to avoid a flood of anonymous emails. The people become fed up and can’t take it anymore. A revolution takes place and a miracle happens: every one is required to get a real id that can be traced back an actual person. This id is then required to do anything on the internet.
How many people are going to still post death threats, character assassinations, or make racist or sexist comments. How many people are are going to email you saying they’re a Nigerian prince that wants to give you money. It would sure go a long way to cleaning up some of the cesspools that make up social networking and the garbage pit that is email today.
Knowing who you are cuts both ways. A woman trying to hide from an abusive boyfriend or husband would want to keep her identity unknown. People facing political persecution would like to keep a low profile.
Perhaps the biggest hurdle to setting up ids would be verification. How do you prove someone is who they say they are when documents can be easily forged and fake identities created. You could use finger prints or eye scans, but the effort to set up the infrastructure to do so would be massive.
Then there is the issue of maintaining the information in a safe and secure manner. We couldn’t rely on any countries government. They wouldn’t be able to resist the temptation to use it to track people. It would have to be an independent agency.
Is setting up such a system unfeasible? Even if all the hurdles could be overcome and a real id system could be created, is that something we would want? Are we better off with the way it is today and just live with its ills or relying on mods and spam filters to keep thing somewhat under control.
I’m aware that Web 3.0 is making strides in this area. It remains to be seen if it will be viable.
It’s hard to say since there are major security issues with that. I think it’d be better if we weren’t anonymous but we’re not really ‘there’ yet mentally and culturally and it’d be used for nefarious purposes.
I do often wish I knew who I was talking to for real because I’d have vastly different behavior if I’m talking to a 15 year old kid, a 30 year old redneck or a 50 year old doctor for example.
Fifteen to 20 years ago many people thought that the anonymity of the internet provided a permission structure for people to act incivilly. But if anything, the rise of social media has disproven that. People post the most incredibly toxic shit on Facebook or Twitter, often under their own names, right now. It’s not the relative anonymity, or lack thereof, that dissuades people from toxic behavior. It’s a collective action problem that rewards whatever the community (however defined) doesn’t rise up to stamp out.
Require a real ID (which sounds vaguely Orwellian where it doesn’t sound nebulous) and you’ll still get Ben Shapiro and Steven Crowder and your uncle yelling transphobic trash on Twitter and Facebook and elsewhere. Places like Reddit and the fediverse are rapidly becoming outliers.
And as pointed out in OP, requiring all accounts tied to an identifiable person would be a disaster for people in abusive relationships, or who have a stalker, or other endangered persons. (Thinking back to Google Buzz and the ways it enabled online harassment and abuse before Google mercifully cut it showrt.)
The current, semi-anonymous, system is possibly the worst system devised, with the possible exception of all the others. No system is going to solve a collective-action problem. We, the collective, have to step up and fix it ourself.
(My understanding of Web 3.0 is limited to the crypto space, which seems inherently scammy; if there’s more to it than that, and I should be aware of it, I’d love to be educated.)
I suspect a lot of innocent people would get hurt.
You could use finger prints or eye scans, but the effort to set up the infrastructure to do so would be massive.
I am not so sure whether that’s true. If people accept that, it could be done on a large scale, and the interest by federal states and technology companies is already as I assume.
Even if all the hurdles could be overcome and a real id system could be created, is that something we would want?
No. There are too many drawbacks of such a system. For example, the commodification of biometrics and other personal data by private tech companies would further decrease human dignity. Biometrics could too easily lead to discrimination as many biometric features reveal pathological and/or biological conditions. For examples, a certain range of fingerprint patterns can be related to some vascular diseases.
If your property is secured by biometric data, there is also a danger that thieves physically assault and intimidate the property owner to get access to the property. The result could be an irreversible damage to the owner that could by far exceed the value of the property they want to protect. In 2005, for example, thieves chopped off a man’s finger to steal his car which was protected by a fingerprint recognition system.
If a person’s biometric data is compromised, it cannot be reissued like a password could. That would leave this person vulnerable for future identification processes and their potential misuse.
I could elaborate much more on this, but I guess you got the point. If we continue turning human beings into data points by using biometric data, we dehumanize the person imo. The issue goes far beyond privacy and surveillance as it is much more about human dignity and individual autonomy. In the end, it is a threat to democracy.
