The Buzz Bin

I read an interesting commentary in Wired called Lesson from Tor Hack: Anonymity and Privacy Aren’t the Same that got me thinking about a lot of things.

In the piece, Bruce Schneier compares anonymity on the Web to that of an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. He says in AA, although you don’t have to show ID or even use your real name, the meetings are not private. Anyone can attend, see you, hear your voice. Anonymity is not the same as privacy.

A lot of times on the Internet, especially as bloggers, we think it’s secure. Think the Fake Steve Jobs. Sometimes, we even go to special lengths to ensure it and that’s where Tor comes in. It’s a network of computers around the world that pass Internet traffic randomly, or, as it was called, onion routing.

One problem is that you can de-anonymize it. Another is that just as many bad guys as good guys are getting hold of it. More on that can be found here.

The point is we’re not as anonymous as we think we are. Bloggers who post under various entities can easily be found out. Dark Web, funded by the National Science Foundation, is a fascinating research project that uses a technique called Writeprint. It automatically extracts thousands of multilingual, structural, and semantic features to determine who is creating ?anonymous? content online, with 95 percent accuracy.

What this says to me is that anyone can find you. So if you have something to say, say it strongly and stand behind it. There’s no reason to hide behind anonymity.