UK Home Secretary wants to ban anonymous social media accounts, is determined to bring "big changes"

[Video Beagle]

On 10/18/2021 at 7:41 AM, jagdtigger said:

Her statement says otherwise.....

"Age" is not an issue here.....again, I'll leave it at that

[Estiar]

I don't think this could be enforced as long as the internet is international. What's to stop a British citizen from pretending to be American or French or Australian? It's not as if they can enforce actions from beyond their boarders in this way. As we've seen things like piracy and proxies being largely unimpeded by law, I don't think real identities can be policed either.

[Tenelia]

On 10/21/2021 at 8:15 PM, Mark Kaine said:

-snip-Sadly the west isn't asia, it'll be a lot more difficult here , also due to poor education and general understanding,  plus lobbying,  as you said.-snip-

Yup... Plus culture over there is remarkably different. For one, I cannot imagine such an adversarial relationship between business, government, and society around here. While most of Asia doesn't have the formal processes that exist in the west - and therefore get things done through personal relations (i.e. hello neighbourhood police sir, here's a head of spinach, could you help me look into this problem?) - but the general consensus leans towards very tight interwoven communal principles across society. I'm just not sure how things are going to play out this decade. Is late-stage capitalism going to fix its issues, or will it implode like in 1929?

[poochyena]

Hard to give an opinion without details. Sounds like it just means she wants to force social media companies to give up user data to police? Thats not exactly the same as giving up anonymity. At worse, it would just give up your identity of the sites that the police ask info from, presumably through a warrant.

There is also the issue of multiple people using an account, especially business/brand accounts. Would be interesting to know how that would work...

[SolarNova]

Anonymity allows for honesty without fear of retaliation for your opinion. Honest discussion is necessary.

but

Anonymity allows for near immunity from consequence for outright illegal actions.

 

An immoral act / opinion need not require real world responsibility and consequence.

Similarly an illegal act need not always require real world responsibility and consequence.

 

The 1st is self explanatory, the 2nd becomes obvious when u realize there are laws that make no sense, are based on 'belief' and/or 'morality' rather than logic and reason,  are based on political partisanship, and/or are otherwise out of date.

 

However when something is done online using anonymity as a shield that is obviously illegal,, with exception to those 'arguable or outright wrong laws', ..the anonymity becomes a problem. Easy example being; live streaming or otherwise posting videos of murder organized online.

 

Current media sites have to deal with this already, and have things in place to stop it. Though some stuff will always fall through the cracks.

 

Personally i think current media sites do a damn good job of keeping outright illegal content of their sites considering the traffic they get.

If you get a billion (1,000,000,000) uploads onto ur site a week and a thousand (1000) of them are illegal and get through..sure its easy to say "OMG i found 1000 images of XYC, thats gross and outright illegal, company Z has to do more to stop this"  but ur not putting it into the perspective of those 1000 things being 0.0001% of that weeks uploads.

 

Now their ability to keep opinion, discussion, and legal information free flowing and fairly moderated on the other hand, that they are failing miserably at.

[Mark Kaine]

On 10/25/2021 at 3:29 AM, estiar said:

don't think this could be enforced as long as the internet is international.

True, thats an issue,  but it depends on what "it" actually is... as per my example of south Tyrol (which isn't even a sovereign country) this can be implemented regionally... iirc the poor guys actually had to use their *real names* as forum names... i checked, they're now back to use "nicknames"...  

Not sure what happened there??? But I think they still need to register with their real names... 

 

So it really depends .

 

*btw i tried to find more info in this... not very successful... but theres a "law" for " non anonymous accounts" apparently. 

 

 

[Kisai]

On 10/25/2021 at 9:25 AM, SolarNova said:

 

 

Personally i think current media sites do a damn good job of keeping outright illegal content of their sites considering the traffic they get.

If you get a billion (1,000,000,000) uploads onto ur site a week and a thousand (1000) of them are illegal and get through..sure its easy to say "OMG i found 1000 images of XYC, thats gross and outright illegal, company Z has to do more to stop this"  but ur not putting it into the perspective of those 1000 things being 0.0001% of that weeks uploads.

 

That's kinda failing to understand how algorithms work. Even though those 1000 illegal things might exist, they are "easily discovered" by those looking for it. That's why manual reporting processes are required. Auction and Store sites such as eBay and Amazon have a hard time keeping illegal stuff off their sites, because the website is whole detached from sellers. You only regain that control by requiring sites to only be first-party sellers. So no more "mom and pop" stores online, only Amazon, and if Amazon won't take your product, your business dies. So big companies that can ship stuff in volume to Amazon get to win in that situation.

 

On the flip side of it, not all "illegal" things are illegal in the sense of anything but trademark infringement. Trademark infringement matters when a product is counterfeit, fake, and unsafe. It doesn't matter however it's it's merely compatible, made a good effort at product safety, and isn't trying to undermine the trademark. Like many fake cell phone chargers before everything moved to USB, were listed as "OEM", basically products produced in the same factory, but with either the trademark stripped from it, or stuff that was destined for the landfill for cosmetic reasons.

 

Just like with food waste, sometimes, a thing is only illegal because business processes dictate destroying the product to increase shelf space.

 

So someone who is unaware of perfectly good food being dumped by the dumpster-full might never consider going around the back of the store and looking. Yet those that know about it, have potentially unlimited free food for life if they steal it from the trash. Yes, it's still theft, but you're putting only yourself in danger. Now if suddenly the entire neighborhood knows about it, the store will be forced to make it harder for people to steal from the trash because it will affect their sales, or the city will fine them for not securing their trash (which is more likely) since people make a mess and wildlife will take advantage of it.

 

And that's basically the analogy for "people sometimes do illegal things that don't hurt anyone, because the business rules are completely detached from reality", you can use software, movie and music piracy in the same example. People do not deserve to be thrown in jail for crimes where nobody was hurt. Which takes this argument back to the original topic. How do you know some troll on a chan/cow site isn't actively trying to get a target killed. We all know about swatting. When you force people to not be anonymous, that only makes it easier to target them for having an opinion.

 

[Mark Kaine]

On 10/30/2021 at 12:57 AM, Kisai said:

We all know about swatting. When you force people to not be anonymous, that only makes it easier to target them for having an opinion.

Yes, we do, European politicians not so much ... 

 

On 10/30/2021 at 9:55 PM, comander said:

would NOT be happy if there was a mandate that essentially shut this site down. 

It doesn't mean that, it just means you need to register your name with LTT or *any* other site really. So it doesn't really change much, you do that already with other sites, provided you use Amazon, etc... and websites probably are required to keep your ip address right now already,  which,  for authorities is about as good as your name. 

 

 

This is more a psychological change , rather than a technical one. People would now *know* they are not 'anonymous' instead of falsely thinking they are.

 

I mean, i don't really know what this law proposes of course,  but thats how i imagine playing this out. 

 

[Mark Kaine]

2 hours ago, comander said:

LTT, as far as I can tell isn't obliged to maintain a permanent record.

Maybe not - its operated in Canada afaik, and I'm not particularly familiar with the laws there , but by default most forum software will log ip addresses,  for 6months-a year-or possibly forever... in the past I knew several websites/ forums that took high pride in keeping logs of their users... 

 

If you think about it, its also highly contradictory,  on one hand websites are supposed to respect your privacy,  on the other hand they're expected to hand out any info to the authorities when asked (and i seriously doubt *that* is different in Canada than in most other countries... ? That's besides there probably isn't a high demand in particular... i was also speaking more broadly, using ltt as an example since that was your main focus,  i just don't think its working much differently across sites)

[jagdtigger]

11 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

for 6months-a year-or possibly forever...

Yeah thats an issue, funny though because for example if you have a security camera you can only store recordings for 30 days and plaster all your entrances with warning about the camera. But when it comes to logs, there is no such regulation....

Anyway best place to  store logs: /dev/null