Do we trust in online anonymity?

On June 13, 2014, the Supreme Court of Canada, ruling in a case (R. v. Spencer, 2014 SCC 43) concerning police requesting information about online activity:
“Some degree of anonymity is a feature of much Internet activity and depending on the totality of the circumstances, anonymity may be the foundation of a privacy interest that engages constitutional protection against unreasonable search and seizure. In this case, the police request to link a given IP address to subscriber information was in effect a request to link a specific person to specific online activities. This sort of request engages the anonymity aspect of the informational privacy interest by attempting to link the suspect with anonymously undertaken online activities, activities which have been recognized in other circumstances as engaging significant privacy interests.”

Constructing Human Anonymity

Can Human Anonymity be Constructed?

Are Human Identity and Human Anonymity compatible in online or Internet interactions, transactions?

To begin to wrestle with these questions take a look at the complex and challenging process recommended as a best practice by the Washington Post for constructing imperfect anonymity online.

https://ssl.washingtonpost.com/securedrop

SecureDrop – The Washington Post.

Why is human anonymity so hard to construct on line and how is this difficulty central to the human trust experience ?  Does the elaborate process the Washington Post has created indicate that someone is intending to tell the truth as they know it? Or that they are intending to mislead or lie about something? One thing  I take away from the Washington Post SecureDrop process is that both the sender and receiver of the message anticipate and intend that the message not be distributed even though the sender and receiver don’t know each other. This is a very high standard of privacy—my mouth to your ear.  Further it seems clear that both sides without even knowing the content of the message anticipate or want to make it possible for the importance of the message to be inferred as well as maintained. This is not throw away language but language that both the human sender and the human receiver must have confidence—to a very high degree of certainty—will be transmitted completely with its original content. This is a powerfully human experience of trust, mistrust, of risk and even intimacy. From this view the stakes for the  human trust experience are very high.

I will be building a privacy use case for online anonymity from an exploration of online anonymity.

Constructing Anonymity like navigating a wild American river.ver Photograph in motion
Animas River Colorado USA

The Human Trust Experience and The Importance of Economic Inclusion

Critical to the success of the NSTIC Strategy and the IDESG is the breadth and depth of trust and confidence, innovation and economic progress it releases created through the standards and certification it accredits. As Obama said in his release of the NSTIC Strategy “…we cannot know what companies have not been launched, what products or services have not been developed…what we do know is this: by making online transactions more trustworthy and enhancing consumers’ privacy…we will foster growth and innovation, online and across our economy in ways we can scarcely imagine…ultimately, that is the goal of this strategy.”
Precisely because we cannot predict how innovations will emerge and from whom we cannot rightfully leave anyone out by making barriers for participation or designing solutions without questioning our assumptions. We don’t know if innovations will come from the self-employed, the small business, the large business or even the unemployed. Evaluation of issues of economic inclusion must be central to the development of the Identity Ecosystem Framework, the identification and authentication standards risk models (NSTIC Objective 1.2) and the administration of the standards development and accreditation (NSTIC Objective 1.4) and ultimately the promise of our democracy to govern and fulfill its promise of equal opportunity.

Economic Inclusion and the Human Trust Experience

Integrating Economic Inclusion

Economic Inclusion is a part of the larger subject of inclusion. Here I am referring particularly to integrating economic inclusion into Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and on the internet in general.

Related subjects are universal design and diversity among others.

Purpose and Key Features

  • Improving the human trust experience across the economic spectrum and stakeholders in our democracy.
  • Ensuring that people and businesses across the economic spectrum including the middle and low end are welcomed and included.

• Ensuring that the needs and opportunities in all areas of contemporary life including business models, value propositions, standards and work products serves the needs of people and businesses of the middle and low end of economic spectrum.

• Increasing cooperation and life sustaining development of products and services.

Methods

• Integration of economic inclusion and human trust experience evaluation criteria into the development and contemporary communities around the world.
• To connect with and liaise with others creating to create Human Trust Experience Ambassadorships to voice the needs of the human trust experience

Examples of Economic Inclusion Criteria and Human Trust Experience Criteria are:

• Risk Evaluation by Perspective
• Purchasing Power Parity
• Micro business pricing (USPTO)

Human Trust Experience and Affordability

In Internet and Communication Technology (ICT) affordable means across the economic spectrum from micro-enterprises, entrepreneurs and individuals to large enterprises. Affordable ICT standards should include royalty free, GNU or General Public License and/or other forms of licensing innovations. Some of these license innovations are often called open source.

Affordability has many facets. An affordability criteria will require its own Evaluation Methodology to order and guide the development and understanding of its dimensions particularly in commercial activity.

Facets to be included will include but not be limited to:ncluded in

Human Trust Experience and Data Actions

Recently I attended a Privacy Workshop hosted by NIST. One of the insights that emerged is the difference between security language and privacy language. For example while a phrase like “data actions” may from the security engineering perspective be useful and meaningful from the perspective of human beings this term is quite empty. Identity is emergent, tender, personal, lying in the field of emotions and life and death. Identity is alive. We should not be impatient that such an important subject is hard maybe beyond our ability at present to speak to. Privacy too is new and unformed.

I sensed that by the end of the NIST Privacy Workshop there was an awareness of the raw and vast scope of the problem.

When “data actions” means inferring what a human being is going to do or think next, monetizing that and generating revenue for a third party or releasing the recent date of your brother’s death for monetary purposes, the emotional danger of these “actions” emerges.

Context is a wonderful tool to help us. But some things carry across context. I think we should look for our humanity in every context and accept nothing less.