swan_tower | Clearing the Slate: usernames

Continuing my effort to clear out my Firefox tabs and my brain, let's talk about usernames.

yuki_onna posted about this a little while ago, and I have to say I'm on her side. But first, let's talk about the original poster's argument.

I feel like pretty much everything he says can be turned around from a positive into a negative. True, on Facebook you don't have the problem of signing up only to find your customary username has already been taken. Instead you have the problem of signing up with a name that's maybe shared by 7,142 other people. An improvement, or only a differently annoying issue? Also, he says you don't have to use your real name, just a name -- but hang on, isn't that essentially the username thing all over again, except without the restriction that it must be unique? And maybe a requirement that your chosen name has to come in two parts (e.g. Pony McRainbow). If you can still use a made-up name, you still have the problem he describes, of realizing belatedly that somebody you know in person and somebody you know online are actually, y'know, the same person.

But that has an easy fix. If you want your legal name associated with your pseud, put it in your profile or wherever. If you want to keep them separate, you can.

Which is part of Cat's point. Facebook wants you to use your real name (and other real information) so you can be more effectively tracked: pinned down, advertised to, your information sold to third-party vendors, linked up with things you never intended to touch. Oh, so you're the Melanie Dunn whose grocery purchases swing erratically between Hostess snack cakes and green vegetables (better sell you some diet aids!), who's a registered Democratic voter in Kansas (do your neighbors know?), whose medical history shows a procedure at a particular doctor's office three years ago (and we can guess what that was). So when you go posting on your blog about how you think bigots should get over the whole Islamic community center thing, rest assured people will have an easy time connecting that with your weight and your political activities and the fact that maybe you had an abortion. Aren't you glad they know who you are?

False names, whether unique usernames or non-unique pseudonyms, can protect people.

But you know, even if that were taken out of the equation, I'd still like usernames, and my reason is the other part of Cat's point. Choosing a username is an act of identity creation -- one we don't often get to do in modern American society, or (so far as I'm aware) in other high-tech nations. Your parents pick your name, without any input from you, and changing it is a legal hassle. Nicknames are generally assigned by those around you, though you can try to show up to college or your job in a new city and sell people on the idea that while your name is William, usually you go by Bear. We have very few opportunities to choose something that reflects who and what we are, or want to be -- or we did, until usernames came along and gave us a whole new field to play in.

The fantasy writer in me can't help but think about the mystical power of names, and how the process of choice invests them once more with a whiff of that power. They have meaning. How is that not cool?

Is the meaning sometimes stupid? Of course. You may get to a point where you're embarrassed to be known as shake_that_bootay. But unlike Aschlyee, who's embarrassed by her parents' enthusiastic leap onto the bandwagon of "let's find a totally new way to spell this name!," you can put it behind you pretty easily. You can escape your party-hard high school years, major in Classics, get involved in radical politics, and rename yourself alecto_reborn. Then, when you're tired of being a Fury, go into the business world, and settle down as dahlia_blue.

There have been times and places in the world where that sort of change was normal and expected, where having six names by the time you died was nothing unusual. (Read the Romance of the Three Kingdoms if you don't believe me.) We've reinvented a form of that here, and I for one like it.

Celebrate your username! Tell me the story of why you chose it, whether you're tempted to change it, and if so, what to.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

oneminutemonkey.livejournal.com

I guess I really am a child of the online age. I grew up on BBSes and Prodigy, GEnie and Usenet, as everything was exploding in all directions.
I've gone by a number of identifiers over the years. When I was young and foolish and mucking about local BBSes, it was Penguin, in honor of my love of Opus from Bloom County. When I hit GEnie, it was Everbard, which sounded nifty and evocative and suggested my love of stories. (That name still lingers in my primary email addresses....) For quite a while in some of the online communities I frequented, I was Peregrine, a name I picked from a name book which I liked for its sound and memorability.

Then I came to Livejournal, and once again, I needed a name. By that point, I was, strangely enough, slightly embarrassed by the Everbard name, and ready to move on. I never actually thought LJ would last, and me with it, so I threw something together out of thin air. Inspired by a book I'd seen at work, I took the title "The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey" and compressed it into the snappy, strange, memorable Oneminutemonkey. I've been slightly embarrassed by it ever since, but it's as much me as any other name. I'm occasionally tempted to move on, to change it to my real name or something, but it's nice having the identity.

I tell you, the weird thing was, for years I could go to cons and no one would know who Michael Jones was, but they'd sure as heck remember Everbard from GEnie....

Oneminutemonkey may be silly and frivolous, but it does stand out a little, and I can invent a thousand different stories behind its meaning and origin. "Oneminutemnonkey: when you don't have an infinite amount of time for an infinite amount of monkeys" or some such.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

From:

swan-tower.livejournal.com

It's kind of hilarious, how many people's answer to the "where'd the name come from?" question is, "I grabbed something at random because I didn't think I'd go on using it." That was my first LJ username, actually, which was my e-mail username, which was the one they'd assigned me when I got to college, i.e. first initial and part of my last name. But it was not what you'd call user-friendly, so I switched to swan_tower.

I love the strata that can build up, as one goes through a series of transformations. (What can I say; I majored in archaeology.)

From:

zunger.livejournal.com

Quite an interesting post. :) I'd add one thing about the name-changing matter which has been troubling me of late: however much you attempt to maintain anonymity, a sufficiently motivated attacker will generally be able to tie your identities together. It may be as simple as noting lots of common relationships between the two potentially separate people, it may be as technical as noting that posts from the two people tend to come from the same class C subnets or as intricate as doing textual analysis of the two people's written corpora to see that they have the same verbal tics, but at this point it would take an extraordinary effort -- one probably beyond the practical reach of individuals -- to avoid any linking by a sufficiently determined attacker.

Now this is true of any sort of security, which is why you always have to start out deciding on your threat model -- what kinds of attackers you expect and care about, and how far you're willing to go to deal with them. But it takes on a different slant in the case of trying to separate identities for a few reasons.

First, your textual and activity-record output is permanent and dispersed over the whole Internet; it's simply not feasible to clean it up, much as the EU regulators would like to mandate that. Too many people know too much. This means that if you want to tighten your security in the future, forget it; the level of separation you get is the min over all levels you've ever wanted over time.

Second, the technical ability of others to do these comparisons is increasing rapidly over time. Textual analysis to determine authorship used to be the province of a few hyperspecialized scholars, who did things like tracking forged insertions into the epistles of Paul. Nowadays it's something which any CS undergrad can learn to do. (Thus the fate of "Richard Bachman") And more complex comparisons, involving combining multiple types of data (text, IP addresses, web history, etc) are accessible to anyone with the information. So a level of paranoia which produces one level of identity separation now is unlikely to produce the same level of separation in the future -- and mixing that with the first point, this means that as time goes to infinity, identity separation goes to zero.

And third, there are more and more people doing identity merging on seemingly disparate net identities, many of them for perfectly "ordinary" reasons. You want to be able to look up a person's name on the Internet? Well, the algorithms that determine that "Norma Jean Mortenson," "Norma Jean Baker," and "Marilyn Monroe" all refer to the same individual are the same as the ones that reveal that dahlia_blue and shake_that_bootay are the same individual. To say nothing of the number of people doing this for less-salubrious reasons. (Hi, DHS!)

So the era of being able to change identities on the Internet seems to be fading. How this plays in to various recent public discussions of identity, anonymity, and so on is an interesting question, but I would say that this is an input to the discussion. Thanks to the "ratchet effect" of (1) and (2), no amount of legislation, regulation, or public outrage is likely to have any significant impact on the long-term trend. So we're just going to have to deal with it.

From:

zunger.livejournal.com

[Continued, due to LJ text length restrictions]

One thing which I think will come of this -- and I've seen a lot of it in my own life, as well as that of many others -- is that ordinary people are starting to adopt the strategy of celebrities, of developing a public persona similar to or distinct from one's private persona as the taste may be. My username has been fixed for pretty much my entire time on the Internet, and it's actually my last name. (A holdover from the academic age of the Net, when I first got it; one tended to use a last name, or a last name plus an initial, or [as a mark of honor, being "the" kt@ or whomever] simply ones initials) And I tend to sign pretty much everything I post in public with that username and often my full name as well. It's a good systematic way of dealing with enforced publicity; forge a public persona and make sure that one displays it consistently.

(Not dishonestly, mind you -- as people who know me in daily life probably know, my day-to-day and .net personae are pretty much the same)

Of course, this doesn't work very well in all cases, especially cases like the example you gave. And I don't have a very good answer to how to deal with that. But I want one.

From:

swan-tower.livejournal.com

You're right that actual, defensive anonymity is hard (perhaps impossible) to achieve against a truly determined attacker. My own particular level of concern has three facets:

1) I don't want companies to be automatically permitted to monetize my information. We may be able to legislate this one, though it isn't certain.

2) I don't want your average schmoe on the Internet to be able to "out" me with five minutes of work. A sufficiently advanced schmoe will be able to do it with enough time and effort, and I'm not advanced enough to stop him, but my comfort level -- which may or may not be achievable in the long run -- is one where trolls have to do some actual work to expose things I'd rather keep private. As you say, it's a matter of deciding what kind of attacker you're concerned about, and what you'll do to stop them.

3) When I wrote up that example persona, I wasn't actually thinking about sweeping the old identities into the woodchipper, never to be found. The point I had in mind was about the face you present to the outside world: this is who I am now. Like someone taking a new name when he becomes a monk. It doesn't hide who he was before entering the monastery, but it signals that he is (theoretically) trying to be a different person now.

Clearing the Slate: usernames

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