Internet Anonymity - Abuse

Curtis Lin

Cheryl Clarks

7/31/11

BU Summer – Persuasive Writing

It’s Become Too Much

Choi Eun-Woo, a South Korean man of the age of 43, decided to visit a community website, Daum, to see if there were any interesting articles online. To his surprise, on one of the articles, he saw his name, his picture and where he lived. The article also showed his hand near the waist of a young woman. He was accused of sexually harassing a woman on a train. He didn’t remember ever doing that. He thought that, possibly, the picture must have been photoshopped and edited. Continuing to read through the article, Choi saw the distasteful comments about him, leaving him feel bad. But he felt worse – he felt a foreboding sense of danger which would enter his real life, apart from the internet. And to his dismay, he was right. Day by day, he was pointed to, and received mean looks from people – even at his workplace! He tried to establish the fact that the article was wrong, but to no avail. After a few months of trying show innocence, he couldn’t take it anymore, and committed suicide. The innocent Choi Eun-Woo died. And it was simply due to bullying over the internet – cyber bullying.

Fake masks over the internet, cyber bullying are a part of the deterioration of internet protocols. Although we humans may remind ourselves time and time again about the potential problems of the internet, when faced with a society so closely integrated with the internet as South Korea, it’s definitely no longer up to us. The perpetrators get away with these crimes easily since it’s supposedly just the internet, but suicides and threats are constantly increasing due to the internet. It’s time for a change. We must erase anonymity in order to forcibly decrease the amount of cyber bullying cases and to get rid of internet masks as well. People will restrain themselves, and they will be more thoughtful and understanding of what their actions may do – as they’ll think more, and provide stronger, more intellectual messages when joining internet conversations, as to uphold their own integrity and empower their identity.

Now, what many people argue is that erasing anonymity means erasing freedom of speech. I do agree that it does potentially take away some freedom to express views publicly on the internet. However, many people are taking advantage of this praised internet anonymity, which enables them to hurt, harass, send death threats, as well as commit various crimes over the internet without much chance of reprisal. Inflammatory posts, which have recently been greatly increasing in number, would quickly die down. In general, due to pressure of how people see them and view their intelligence, people on the internet would become more constructive and less bent on expending their negative emotions unto other users, and become more wary of what they say to others. In other words, the internet would have an essence of courtesy that appears from real life – only even more so, because what they say on the internet is actually recorded for thousands of others to see.

John Dvorak, author of Pros and Cons of Internet Anonymity, also argues that people would shy away from things which would make them look foolish. He, after all, emphasizes that “these folks would say nothing at all if there were no anonymity” (Dvorak), in which he discussed sociopaths wouldn’t discuss the most abnormal of things on the net if they were to lose their anonymity. I agree that people would indeed shy away from saying things on the internet that are outright embarrassing or maybe even of vindictive and hateful nature. Thus the loss of anonymity on the internet would go as far to decrease the pace and maybe even stop the tides of cyber bullying from touching the shoreline and face of the internet community.

But this doesn’t mean that freedom of speech over the internet is completely taken away. The internet could still be used – and would promote – closed circles of intellectuals who would be able to share ideas and give opinions in a constructive manner, and would be able to reply to others with opposing views in a logical, coolheaded manner, which would not lead to fights over the internet. In a way, users would think more than once before posting, and would try to show that they are indeed civilized and are good members of the internet society. Removing anonymity would no doubt promote more enticing intellectual discussions with users with the most self-controlled personalities.

The internet, without anonymity, would also further encourage intellectual posts by increasing the prestige of the poster. This could lead to a “competition” in which people would try to prove their point in intelligent and persuasive ways, be clear about their evidence, cite sources, and basically be a good community member of the internet. It’d be like reading a large amount of essays and points of view online, increasing the literacy and decreasing the mediocrity of internet content. Without internet anonymity, the internet would mean serious business.

Removing internet anonymity would also increase the speed and pace of crime investigation. Rather than having to wait on a suspected person’s ISP to reveal logs, as well as deciphering the logs, it would be easier to simply look at the person’s name who is blogging, posting, or simply giving off any new content on the internet. This, in fact, would decrease crime rate since each post and comment would carry the author’s real name. Crime rate and speed of resolving crime over the internet would decrease considerably.

Of course, this will all come down to security issues. Many dissenters would probably feel that – how would this be possible in a safe way? Anyone can just type someone’s name in and pose as him or her. Well, I feel that something similar to the South Korean KSSN or i-PIN number would work well: during registry, the KSSN would be used to identify the person, but not be publicly available. Rather, the name would be displayed on the forefront, and the SSN, which would also include where they lived and their identity, would be in the background, invisible from the public to see. Of course, this would pose security threats – to hackers, anyway. If hackers retrieved a database of SSN from a given website, then much internet fraud could possibly occur. Thus, it may be possible to place protocols, such as leaving SSN in printed documents and leaving the internet database with nothing but the users. The SSN database could possibly exist on another computer, offline to the internet. Simply put, after a user registers with their SSN, it sends the data – a check for verification – and gains an “okay” from the server, the user is registered, and the SSN is sent to the database and transmitted into another computer through USB or other offline means.

Abuse of internet anonymity is growing to the point which anonymity needs to be rid of. Although it may limit our freedom now, it would spawn an age of intellectual and quality advancement of media and information on the internet. The internet society would grow stronger, and become a more professional society than it is today. Lives would also be saved, as cyber bullying and crimes over the internet would decrease considerably, as identities of such potential perpetrators would be easily known, thus making the internet a safer and better place to be. Step forward into a stronger society of the internet in this new age.