Historically, anonymity was used to protect activists. Unfortunately, this protection equally applies to human rights defenders and to their opponents.
This ambiguity about anonymity is at the heart of the internet development: the global network has evolved from a space of free expression and anonymity toward a global tracking of individuals. It is therefore not surprising to meet major players of internet with a diametrically opposed view: among the main defenders of anonymity, there is Richard Stallman, creator of the Free Software Foundation in 1985, while on the opposite, there are Eric Schmidt, Council President of Google and Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, who both consider anonymity as a brake on the “new internet”
Indeed, we will see that technologies of the internet as well as its fantastic processing capabilities make it possible to identify and monitor systematically all individuals as well as their behaviors, even at the humanity scale.
Just like in the real world, this massive collection of information is problematic, from an ethical point of view, regarding their use. We will discover how to protect ourselves from abuses and reduce the impact of digital attacks.
Amoung the main defenders of anonymity, there is Richard Matthew Stallman, who was born in New York in 1953 and
graduated from the University of Harvard as well as from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT).
Richard Stallman has founded in 1985 the
Free Software Foundation , a “nonprofit organization
with a worldwide mission to promote computer user freedom and to defend rights of all free
software users”
For an opposite conception of anonymity, we find Eric Schmidt, Council President of Google. He provides a radically different vision. On August 4th , 2010 at the Techonomy Conference he announced his vision of anonymity: the only way to fight technological abuses of people with malicious intentions is a true transparency and no anonymity because “it is too dangerous for there would not to be some way to identify you”. His vision is that we have to respect the privacy of everyone as the respect of privacy is natural and normal. And this is the only way of doing things. Nevertheless, regarding anonymity, it should not exist: if someone wants to commit a crime, he shouldn't have to benefit from a complete anonymity
