A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to have a discussion with Dr. Greg Shannon about privacy and anonymity. He had some very interesting insights, and with his permission, I thought I would share some of the conversation. I’ve made some edits– mostly my responses, to make them more concise– but nothing too major.

Hello, friendly blogpeople!

In Accelerando, Charles Stross mentions as a side note that reputation is handled as a matter of course in the immediate pre-acceleration society, and specifically, that it is communicated by trusted servers and built up in the manner of a stock market, with, as he terms them, “goodwill dividends” from highly-rated reputations. People and companies can be traded on the same market, so the protagonist has a reputation traded above IBM.

For the last few days, an incensed debate has been taking place on the OpenID Mailing List, regarding the purpose and value of anonymous people participating in the OpenID lists generally, and in the development of the OpenID standards specifically. One of the most heated instantiations of this has come in this thread, where many members have stated that one of the most prolific participants on the mailing list, “Shade,” shouldn’t be allowed to contribute to the work of the group, because no one could know her (well, his or her, but I’ve always thought of Shade as female) intentions or biases. One member went so far as to say that anonymity was fine for people on the periphery of the conversation, but as Shade had consumed too much of his time and attention, he was no longer finding her anonymity acceptable.