Somebody Knows You’re a Dog
The seminal cartoon by Peter Steiner has inspired a veritable cult movement (and even a theatre production) with its humorous take on the effect of the internet on human interaction: “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” Published in the July 5, 1993 issue of The New Yorker magazine, the piece offers an admirably prescient view of anonymity in the wired age.
Besides the cute play on words, the illustration is funny because anthropomorphizing animals is funny. (I’m reminded of the old joke where two horses, having returned to their stable in the evening, engage in heated discussion about their strenous work day, at which point the farmer’s dog pipes up with some comment. The astounded horses turn to each other and exclaim, “Holy shit, a talking dog!”). But the popularity of the cartoon isn’t due only to the fact that it tickles the funny bone. The author managed, several years before the dot.com boom, to sum up the thorny issue of online anonymity in an amusing buzzphrase that perfectly captured the zeitgeist of the 1990s. Anonymity on the internet was perceived as a resounding positive, liberating us from our canine constraints to project an image onto the world of ourselves, not as we are but as we would like to be.
But it didn’t take long for the flip side of our newfound incognitos to become apparent. Most obviously, particularly in light of the turbulent world events of recent years, the internet holds the potential to hamper severely law enforcement and intelligence activities. Baddies, armed with strong encryption and speed-of-light connectivity, can free themselves from the prying eyes of those whose job it is to protect us. As with so many of life’s pertinent questions, there is no right or wrong answer as to where to draw the line between the enhanced civil liberties furnished by the net and the need to curtail these freedoms in the interest of security. It’s a judgement call bound to give rise to a broad continuum of perfectly defensible opinions, ranging from virtual anarchy to mandated cryptology chips that provide law enforcement with a “backdoor” to decipher all encrypted correspondance.
But let’s drop that hot potato. Internet anonymity raises an intriguing technical dilemma as well, one that lends itself more easily to analysis. The plain fact of the matter is that sometimes we want the parties with whom we interact repeatedly on the net to recognize us and remember certain pertinent details about us, including our relationships with others. This works today in certain microcosms, as with one-click shopping on Amazon. But we’re still forced to maintain a menagerie of address books, buddy lists and passwords that we turn to in various contexts. Cookies and password managers help, but your identity ends up tied to your web browser, and God forbid you should purge your browser cache or switch computers.
One serious effort to rectify this has come from Microsoft in the form of its .NET Passport. The idea is that you create an identity that resides on Microsoft’s server and can be beamed to whatever website you are visiting, so you only have to log in once and you never have to fill out Yet Another Registration Form. The service has encountered only mild success, to say the least, and this isn’t only because no one trusts Microsoft as far as they can spit. The whole premise is totally misguided: people want to own and control their online identity, not relinquish it to a multinational conglomerate.
This is one of the most striking areas where peer-to-peer technologies can show their value. There is absolutely no technical reason why the your profile couldn’t reside on your own machine, digitally signed to ensure authenticity. You could then upload your identity “certificate” to any website (or other internet-based service) that you access, eliminating the need to log in or register. Ever. What’s more, the profile would be available to local applications other than your web browser, so all of the multitude of instant messaging clients, for example, could plug into the same central buddy list (whether they would choose to do so is, regrettably, another question).
Naturally, none of this has escaped the attention of Microsoft’s many rivals, who formed the Liberty Alliance Project in September 2001 with the goal of producing a “federated identity infrastructure”. The first specs were released over two years ago, but the effort has hardly lit the world on fire (or even permeated the consciousness of the average internet user). Seeing as the standard was put together by a huge consortium of bitter competitors united mainly by their hatred of Microsoft, this is scarcely surprising (remember CORBA?). What is needed is an open (and open source) effort to produce a simple yet comprehensive trusted identity that can be shared from the user’s machine both with other users and with centralized services.
Internet anonymity is a blessing, but it’s also a curse. One the one hand, we want complete power to guard and craft our online identity and share it with others only selectively. But let’s face it, even on the internet, sometimes you want people to know you’re a dog. Arf!
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