On the issue of privacy, I think that social etiquette is a powerful force and tends to evolve to answer needs. Just because most people today will Google and read what, arguably, they oughtn’t doesn’t mean that tomorrow they won’t find it distasteful to do so.

I talk about it because I think that raising the possibility, talking about the issue in these terms, is my way of helping bring that day about. But it will happen or not happen largely, I think, as the result of social necessity. I see privacy as equivalent to security, in computing terms. As they say, security through obscurity isn’t. (Which we can quibble with—I certainly believe that obscurity has a role in security.) Privacy through through technical barriers isn’t going to work, they will be defeated. And privacy through obscurity is a modern thing, too, the result of the move to cities and urban anonymity. But human culture is very old and we’ve clearly culturally evolved quite a few ways in which to deal with privacy issues. It seems to me that it’s simply the fact that technology moves so much more quickly than the cultural changes that follow that we’re in a period of low-privacy. Culture will catch up and people, quite simply, will learn not to look.

Perhaps you’re right; in my real life I’ve been called too nosy (although political flamewars could be seen as somewhat relevant to the job in question). But as others above point out the issue is that whatever fault I had here is likely to be more common than not among people in general, and this strikes me as a quite reasonable practical justification for pseudonyms.

It also means that outing someone is likely to be a greater punishment than the crime, which is really what this debate is about IMO. I really can see the case for outing people as a way of maintaining the proper kind of community. That puts a lot of premium on trusting those who wield the outing power. But what I’ve seen here is something of a double standard; posters themselves and those who agree with them can be highly tendentious and rather personal. But the poster and the group can get very offended and self-righteous very fast when someone is argumentative in return. This varies by poster, but some are much better at giving it out than they are at taking it. To the extent there is a commenter community at CT, I’d like to see it defined by vigorous disagreement with the posters just as much as agreement. Of course, it’s not my site.

An alternative you apparently didn’t consider was to say that it seems to you, as you understand my argument, that it’s incoherent or even contradictory in that I’m arguing for both accountability and that people not hold me accountable, and then asked for clarification.

Instead, what you just wrote quite explicitly confirms that you were being disingenuous while simultaneously arguing that I’m unfairly labeling you so! What chutzpah!

I seem to have successfully avoided being called ‘stupid’, but alas – I’m called ‘disingenuous’ instead. Oh well.

I’m arguing that privacy and accountability aren’t mutually exclusive. Specifically, that the functional nature of privacy is that it allows limited accountability. Everyone is not just with everyone else in all their actions. We need people to not know everything about us because they cannot be counted upon to act justly with us in every circumstance. Sometimes it’s best that they don’t know things. Best for everyone. But it’s best that they don’t know because they choose to not know, rather than that they don’t know because I’m ensuring that they cannot know. The latter presumes bad intent and that trust cannot be possible. The former presumes good intent and that trust is possible.

If we didn’t have the social function of privacy etiquette, we’d have to enforce privacy in ways that would make accountability, when necessary, much more difficult.

If you can justify it to yourself, and eventually others if you want to make an argument on its basis, then you can work through everything I’ve written on Google to hold me accountable for something. I don’t know what that might be, but you could. If you could justify it. The etiquette barrier of privacy is what requires, or what should require, that you do so. Even now, with few arguing as I do that we should voluntary limit ourselves in what we can know about other people via the Internet, you’ll find that exhaustively trolling through Google results of what I’ve written to make a petty argument will rub a lot of people the wrong way. And depending upon where you look, and for what purpose, you’ll get people claiming you invaded my privacy.

This is the equivalent to publishing one’s thoughts in a newspaper? Really? I think they’re not even in the least comparable.

Almost without exception, for it to matter in my Real Life, someone from my Real Life would have to seek out what I’ve written on the web, just as they would have to take positive action to read my diary. It’s not coming to their eyes unsought.

Also, the point of the diary example wasn’t about random strangers, but the people for whom reading my diary (were one to exist) would be trivially easy. Such as my significant other. There are few practical barriers against most possible and most important invasions of privacy. Your coworkers could routinely search your desk, your SO could read your diary and listen to your phone calls, etc. Most invasions of privacy don’t occur not because they can’t, but because people won’t.

“…the only reason I can imagine for doing that is that you want the world to know what kind of person Keith M Ellis is…”

I’ve explained why I do it. You don’t have to imagine. Which is for the best, as your imagination seems to be a bit limited and notably uncharitable.

I think that it’s both true, each in different respects, that what we write here and elsewhere on the Internet is both trivial/unimportant and important. It’s trivial in that talk is cheap and ubiquitous. It’s important because, nevertheless, talk has consequences; it affects people in the real world. Using my real name, in full, unifies the corpus of what I’ve written and holds me accountable to it. That’s good for both me and the people who read what I write.

“I’m prompted to wonder if that just might be because your opinions are not particularly inflammatory to the rabid virtual vigilantes that exist out there in large festering numbers.”

And you’d be wrong. It’s interesting that you’d just speculate and not go ahead and Google. I have strong opinions and, sadly, often express them in provocative terms. I’m outspoken in supporting, for example, feminism and gay rights, both issues that draw a great deal of rancor from reactionaries—a lot of it turned to personal attacks. I also very strongly believe in intellectually connecting the abstract with the personal and thus often ground my expressed view with personal details, easily used against me.

I’ve been in many a flame-war. I’ve had Internet Tough Guy arguments with threats of violence.

My email is almost always available in connection with everything I write, and it’s remarkable how few nasty emails I’ve received in the last quarter-century of being online.

“It’s been done before…”

So have a lot of things, all rarely. This is a flimsy rationalization, not a compelling argument showing considerable risk.

“I think it’s unrealistic to think that we might google a job candidate’s name, find three valid hits for professional work and one for, say, ‘convicted in porn ring’, and not read that, too.”

You’re cherry-picking an extreme case to make a point. More realistic is Googling someone for information you legitimately have a right to and seeing two-hundred Crooked Timber comments.

I think that we should, and will, develop a clear etiquette about Googling someone’s name, specifically. I don’t think employers should do this. If I were an RN, it wouldn’t be hard to Google “Keith Ellis” and “medicine” and “nursing”.

And Google presents just enough content and context to let you know what you probably have a responsibility to ignore.

“What if, for example, a person applies for a position in a particular field, and a google search results in a flamewar on a professional listserv?”

If it’s related to their work, I think it’s fair game, even if it’s in a more casual context relating to that work. Engaging in frequent flamewars in discussions among professional peers is most certainly relevant to someone potential employment. Flamewars about political issues is not.

And here you publish your thoughts on the friggin World-Wide-Web, the equivalent of publishing them in a newspaper or plastering them on billboards all over the world. Get real, etiquette is not going to do anything for you here.

When you sign your comments as ‘Keith M Ellis’ – as opposed to, say ‘Keith’ – the only reason I can imagine for doing that is that you want the world to know what kind of person Keith M Ellis is – as oppose to just making a point in a discussion; signing it as ‘Keith’ would’ve been more than sufficient for that purpose.

Having said that, I think it’s often clear when people use pseudonyms because they don’t want to own their own words in a public forum. I think that’s reprehensible, and have no problem with the CT group banning or publishing the IP of a sock puppet or troll—although I would hope that the person would be warned before any such action were taken.

For the record, at least one CT writer, and a few regular commenters, know my RL name. Even Cliopatria has recognized that there are many bloggers and commenters who have built up personae and reputations under their pseudonyms, and allow pseudonymous commenters, as long as they have a recognizable persona and comment only under one pseudonym.

Keith Ellis—I think it’s unrealistic to think that we might google a job candidate’s name, find three valid hits for professional work and one for, say, ‘convicted in porn ring’, and not read that, too. What if, for example, a person applies for a position in a particular field, and a google search results in a flamewar on a professional listserv? To me, this is as relevant as any other example of their work. “Plays well with others” is often a job requirement.

someone who has almost always used my real, full name on the Internet … I’ve never had a single problem or incident, ever, of any kind.

And it didn’t occur to you that the fault might be yours in Googling a job applicant and reading blog entries that turn up?

The idea that privacy is or should be primarily enforced via legal/practical/technical barriers is ahistoric and, more importantly, simply false in almost all the social arenas where personal privacy is most important. Instead, what people do is rely upon etiquette and shame to restrict one’s own behavior from invading other people’s privacy. There is no law that says I can’t read someone else’s diary that I find when I stay at their home. Of for that matter, of my marriage partner. And yet, I don’t. I don’ read other peoples’ mail when it is in plain sight.

Relying upon anonymity of any form to solve the most currently pressing problems threatening privacy—that is, those threats to privacy that are the result of simply technological changes that make the impractical/difficult/impossible easy—is a losing game. As long as people feel that it’s appropriate to randomly Google and read anything someone said in their entire history on the Internet there will be technical improvements that make this easier and easier to do. The only way to solve this problem is to change the social acceptability of the behavior of the person who is invading privacy. Just as always has been the solution to privacy problems.

Stop Googling job applicants and reading anything other than results that pertain to their professional life. It’s not your business.

As for how much of a problem a lack of anonymity might be for people…my experience of someone who has almost always used my real, full name on the Internet and elsewhere online (here in comments since the fourth post on Crooked Timber in early July 2003) has been that I’ve never had a single problem or incident, ever, of any kind. I make my phone number available on my web page and have since 1994. No one has ever called me who’s read something I’ve said on the Internet. And I’m prolific.

I don’t doubt that this is a problem right now for people interviewing for jobs. MQ demonstrates that it’s a problem. And I also don’t doubt that the situation is different for women.

Even so, most claims of the necessity of anonymity I read in debates such as this presume problems that the defenders of anonymity have never actually been at risk of experiencing. The risks are taken for granted.

That said, I’m a bit skeptical about the evaluation of offenses against the “no personal insult” standard. As someone upthread has mentioned, threads here too often have the character that if your viewpoint is unfavorably judged by majority opinion (especially if it’s the opinion held by a contributer), then personal insults are acceptable. Or, at the very least, less unacceptable. That, I think, is partly a function of CT’s continued movement over the years to the embrace of the blog culture of snark (originated here from the beginning by dsquared). It’s gotten worse over the years and it’s part of why there are few women contributers here. CT started out as different from much of the blogosphere. More self-consciously academic—in a good way. Today, it reads much more like the rest of the political commentary web, with commenters who are also more and more like the commenters found elsewhere.

I don’t claim sainthood myself; far from it. But there was a time when I could come to CT and find myself urged to my better instincts, rather than to my worse, as I typically am almost everywhere else.

And anonymity doesn’t help. All my snark and profanity and arguing myself into corners for no other reason than cussedness is all out there to find, both as part of a corpus that spans the net, as well as part of a body of writing attached to my own, real-world name. Personally, I think that’s a good thing. I don’t think it’s all appropriate for any random person to read, per the above argument about privacy. But I do think we’re all better off—you and me and everyone else—that in some sense I can’t hide from the responsibility for what I have written, and will write.