 So first, a show of hands, who in the room has ever used a NIM or a pseudonym online? Next question, who still does use a NIM or a pseudonym online? The FBI is watching. And how many of you think that being able to use a NIM or a pseudonym online is important? Are we doing pretty good, all right? So when people ask me why I insist on using terms like wallet name instead of real name, aesthetics is always one of the people that I end up using as an example. When I met aesthetics in 2010, I was introduced to him as aesthetics. Our mutual friends refer to him as aesthetics, even when he's not around. And so for me, that is his quote, real name, although it probably isn't what it says on your wallet, right? It depends which wallet. So Google, unfortunately, had a different opinion. And in 2011, he was suspended twice by Google Plus, and so went on to start NIM rights, which is probably one of the only good things that came out of NIMWARS. NIMWAR rights is focused on empowerment and education around digital identity. Aesthetics has spoken on those topics at events in Germany, New York City, and San Francisco, at venues including hacker conferences, digital rights events, and universities. He's also been involved with the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace, which is an Obama strategy to try and solve identity-related challenges in areas like medicine and social security. Without further ado. OK. Hi. I guess I should stand up, then. Or if I stand up, we'll up-lock the screen. If you stand in the middle, you're fine. OK. Because it's easier to stand up and pace around. So hi, everyone. Thanks for coming. Hi. Cool. So two things I want to note. First off, I've never been to Harvard, so this is a really crazy thing for me. So thank you so much for having me. And second, it's OK to interrupt me during the talk if you have a question to shoot at me. And I just wanted to mention that I was so honored with being invited here that I actually created a little Nim Harvard logo thing. So yeah, I thought that was pretty cool. So the title of this talk is Protecting Identity in the Digital Age. And I'm going to say right now that four of the words in that statement are really, really, really loaded and probably worthy of academic disciplines on their own right. So we're not going to cover everything. I don't have solutions, but I do want to have a discussion. So here are some of the elements of the discussion that we're going to be having. And first, I want to tell the origin story, which is basically where this all started. So how many of you are familiar with Nim Wars? OK, about half. OK, you guys familiar with Google? OK, familiar with Google Plus. OK, cool. So basically, Google Plus rolled out in summer of 2011. And it seemed really cool. I was really interested. I was an early adopter at one of the reasons because I hate Facebook and I was looking for somebody to come and crush them. And it was really, really great until I logged in one day and I saw this. If you can't read it, it says basically your profile is suspended. And upon investigation, I found I was being suspended on what became known to me as the real names policy. And it turned out I was not the only one who was suspended. There were a whole bunch of people all using different kinds of names for different reasons. Some of them had been using those names for a very long time. I think Salman Rushdie is one of the people. And there's a few others that are of really interesting note. So a bunch of people are like, hey, I should be able to be who I am on the internet. This is bullshit. And they fought back. And this created what was known as the NIMM wars. I think that PIRM was actually coined by Eva Galper at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. And basically, it boiled down to we were using names that didn't look name-shaped as we came to call it. And it wasn't just a bunch of weird freaks on the internet. This is one of my favorite examples. William Shatner got suspended. Google did not believe that he was really William Shatner. So yeah, Captain Kirk. So there's a bunch of crazy stories like that. In any case, the theses that I want to bring, and these are things that are really challenging for some people. Number one, there is no such thing as a real name. And there's this whole one item about that that I'll get to in a bit. And a subnote to that, people ask me, is the name real? I say every name is real. And we can cover that a bit too. Number two, as we'll get to in the end, efforts to enforce such an idea cause more problems than they solve. And there's some really, it's not just Google+, there's a lot of catastrophes that have happened over this. So we've been talking about names, so let's find out what names are. And this is one of the biggest points of contentions that I run into. Names and identity are different. And there's a lot of confusion about identity versus identities, versus identifiers, versus names, and so on. So I thought a lot about this, and I define a name as a label or symbol that is used to identify a person, thing, or concept within a given context. And just to illustrate the importance of names, up on the top left, I have Adam naming the animals in the Garden of Eden from the Book of Genesis. Because among other things naming them, you can identify them, it creates a power dynamic going on, or a power relationship I should say. And on the top right, we have basically a royal seal, like the symbol that you can use for authentication and verification and so on. Which among other things means that names have multiple purposes. So here's some different kinds of names. Does anyone here have all of these documents, by the way? It's a cat car driver's license and so on. Hiled. What? Well, not, yeah, okay, so fuck Ohio, right? Well, they fucked up 2004 of the election, right? So, in any case, two points I wanna make about this. First off, you can have, well, two examples really. You can have names that are completely legal and different on these. So for example, let's say you have a middle name, but it doesn't show up on one of your IDs. The other example that I've used is, let's say that you have a driver's license in a passport and then you get married and you change your name and then you get your driver's license renewed, but not your passport. So suddenly you have two completely legal documents bearing two completely different legal names, which is interesting to think about. And besides legal names, there's all kinds of different reasons that people might use names or pseudonyms and so on. I don't have enough time to get into all the examples. You guys recognize the guy on the right, by the way? Frank Zappa for those in the younger audience. So, by the way, quick question. How many of you are familiar with Publius? Okay, I'll get into explanation about that later, but basically Publius was the name that was used by the authors of the Federalist Papers to get the Constitution into place. But the thing I wanna focus on here, God, the Frank Zappa story. Okay, so Frank Zappa, among other things, is known for having kids with funny names. Two of them are Mooney and Dweezel. So, the story here is that Frank Zappa and his wife were at the hospital and they had this kid and they wanted to name him Dweezel. So they go to the nurse and the nurse is like, oh, okay, what name do you want on the birth certificate? And Frank says Dweezel and the nurse says, no, you have to use a real name. So Frank sat there and he just thought about four random names of our musicians he knew, put that on the birth certificate. Fast forward five or six years. Dweezel, who they've been calling Dweezel all along, discovers that that's the name on his birth certificate. So at the age of like five or six, he gets his parents to legally change his name to Dweezel. So I thought that was pretty interesting. But there are some even more interesting examples like this one. This guy is kind of a nut job. So you can't see it here, but his legal name before all this craziness was Snap Happy Fish Suit McGilligan, then he had his name legally changed to the word variable. And then, which he could tell is kind of a troll, right? But then the court finally stepped in when he tried to get his name changed to fuck censorship. And the court decided it was too obscene to be used. And there's a lot of things to say about this and many different topics within that. But I just thought that example was kind of crazy. I mean, the guy's a nut job, but you know, this is the United States. You can be a nut job if you want. So another example that we run into, this kind of illustrates, oh you're not and I guess you saw this one. Yeah, so this kind of illustrates some of the issues we run into complementing technology and identity. So this is a woman. It's hard to see her name is Janus. Her first name is Janus and her last name is this long Hawaiian name that I can't actually pronounce. And it caused some issues with the Hawaiian driver's license system. So you can see here, they actually left her first name off and just have her last name. Actually, they chopped a letter off of the last name too. And she's run into issues with this, which is why there's a news article about it. I think there was an issue with a police officer and I believe it was a real ID. So all kinds of crazy things. But we've talked a lot about what names are. I wanna focus also on why names matter. And there's two reasons I'm looking at this. First off, I suspect that this notion of having one true or one real name is at least in part rooted in monotheism. The second is because this is about Western culture primarily and Western culture takes its root from Judeo-Christianity. Therefore, I wanna look at the Bible. So here we have the Gospel of John chapter one verse one and the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God. So if you step back and think about that for a moment, the word in is really interesting. The word was with God and the word was God, which that's a really interesting relationship. And if you look at the original Greek, the word is translated from this Greek word logos. So logos has a lot of interesting connotations. It takes its roots, among other things that it started surfacing in ancient philosophy. And I'll just define it here. We're beginning with Heraclitus as a term for principle of order or knowledge. And this shows up all over the place. For example, in some of Plato's dialogues, here's a quote from the Theatres, where no, and I'll just quote here, where no logos can be given of a thing, then it is not knowable. Where a logos can be given, then it is knowable. So if you're looking at a name and defining a name as kind of the logos, where a logos is an element which unlocks knowledge, that's really powerful. And just a quick quiz for the audience here. Anyone? Goose bump. Goose bump. Wow. Don't know. Okay. Well, why do you, why does it not belong? It's not a name I'm used to seeing. It's not a name I'm used to seeing. Oh, okay. And yeah, everyone has different responses to that. One of the common ones is I just know. So the question that I try to get people asked is when you see a name, how do you know that it's a real name or not a real name? And I suspect that it's because in our cultures we develop a kind of internal lexicon because they're both valid words, right? All these words are valid and we're able to distinguish what kinds of words they are. So how is it that we're able to say, this name is valid, this one is not? And the other thing I point out, Jerome, to me, that sounds French, whereas William sounds English and I can kind of differentiate geographic locations which is effectively differentiating cultures. So the question I then pose, if we can do that with these names, then these funny, fake sounding internet names, maybe that's just part of an internet culture, which means the name is completely valid within the culture itself. So enough about names I want to get into identity, I promise we would. So I'm calling this now Facebook's method because I used to call it Google's method and then they retracted their names policy. So go Google sort of. So there's a couple of things, there's a whole bunch I could go over with this, but first off, it's a very top down hierarchical system where you have the one true real name at the very top of the hierarchy and then all the pseudonyms, aka the fake names at the bottom. And the important thing to capstone is labels give someone else power over you. A name is something which is granted to you by a government or by a corporation. To me, that doesn't jive really well and that's really not a good explanation of identity. So I did some research and anyone here a fan of Carl Jung? Okay, I see a few nods. So I'll just do a cursor one minute philosophy 101 here. So Jung kind of separates identity into two types of identity, rational and emotional identity. Rational is composition of symbols, math, logic, set theory, things like that. And it's basically definitions and then you have emotional identity which is effectively emotions the way that you feel. So like the example that I like to use, the word happy, it describes an emotion. When I say the word happy, everyone has a different emotion, a different reaction to it, but we can use that word to relate the emotion to each other even though we can't ever experience somebody else's full emotion. So this whole yin-yang type thing, this is an entire academic school in itself but hopefully that one minute gave a decent justification for it. So I thought about this a lot. I was looking at Freud and came up with what I call my own method and this is a draft if anybody has suggestions for it, I'm totally open to it. And the point here is that labels help to define relationships. So another word that might come to mind is persona which is very similar. So you have the yin-yang, yung-yang thing in the middle that would be you and then your relationship with Twitter and all the things that are in circles are basically systems. It could be a social system, it could be a technical system and the lines between the systems are the relationships and then the name that we have here, it's the label which defines the relationship and the reason that I call it a relationship is because relationships, things that come to mind are consent, they are agreements, you can build trust on relationships and have different types of trust within relationships and so on and there's a lot of different things to this and because we have all these different facets of relationships, thus facets of persona, it means that we have different kinds of labels. So here are a few and this also answers the question of what is a name? And the general vernacular name is typically short for pseudonym but it actually means a whole lot more and I think like I said, every name is a real name. So the top one, we have a pseudonym which is a name used to cover or hide a base name and it's really important to note that within a pseudonym you have two names, one which is kind of a, like a mask is a physical pseudonym for example. So you have the pseudonym and then you have the base name. So whatever your legal name or whatever was given to you and then it has to have two names. So a polynym would be a name consistent in multiple words or symbols like Bill Clinton, like two words, right? First name, last name. A mononym is a word that consists of one word or symbol. So Madonna is one, Shera is one, things like that. And then an autonym and this one is, a lot of people confuse autonym and actually anonym with pseudonym and autonym is a name, it stems from autonomy, like self-rule, self-regulation and autonym is a name which is bestowed upon oneself or possibly by others, but that gets a little confusing. So the example I like to use with autonym is Pope Francis. Pope Francis was elected by the college cardinals to be the Pope. He promptly chose the name Francis. Nobody's gonna say that Pope Francis is a fake name which means he has two base names and that's something that a lot of people have difficulty understanding. So also anonym, there's a couple ways you could look at this. One of the easiest example is if you leave a comment on like an internet blog or a web forum without login in, it'll often just put anonymous or slash dot anonymous coward, things like that. So this is just kind of an explication of what the names are. So I told you I'd get back to the Federalist Papers, right? So this gets interesting. So for those who don't know, the Federalist Papers were, and there's also the Anti-Federalist Papers. The Federalist Papers are the basically letters, the scripts that were written by people who were trying to get the Constitution ratified. They are in favor of our strong essential government. But the thing about it is there are three guys, Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison who wrote these and they were all signed by the name Publius. And also the Anti-Federalists used pseudonyms too including Brutus. And the question that I have for you, had they been forced to drop Publius and use their legal names when they were writing these, would we have the Constitution today? So just something to think about. So technology gets interesting. So there's two reasons. This on the left here there's a driver's license from 1937. On the right, it's a more modern driver's license. So there's two reasons that I decided to use this as kind of the segue. First, it shows how society's relationship with identity has changed over the years. You know, almost, I don't know, 1937, that's 80, 90 years, something like that. And the second reason is because it shows how technology has influenced our relationship with identity. And there's a whole bunch of different things like you could see the photo and no photo and all kinds of other things like that. But it's just worth thinking about. And speaking of technology, I do have to recognize that Google did retract their names policy in full. This is the announcement they made. Today we're taking the last step. There are no more restrictions on what names you can use than a lot of people rejoiced. It was super happy. Not everyone, though. My friend Jason Scott on Twitter. So let's be clear, Google. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. And then this is actually something I thought was really profound. My friend Skud, who was also deeply involved in memoirs, she actually wound up losing her job at Google partly over this. She wrote what she thought Google should have said as an apology to basically people whose identities were treated as lesser. There's a whole slew of things. But I thought that that kind of showed a really interesting take on it all. But Google's not the only one that had the real names policy. Quora, who I got into a fight with them over this. But long story short, Quora is effectively a question, answer, and type website. And they recently, like in the last couple of years, adopted a quote unquote real names policy site in that, well, Facebook does it and it works for them. Actually, a lot of people are citing Facebook. And I got into an argument, and this guy's kind of a fucking douchebag, actually. But anyways, real names make people accountable, keep an anonymous, under mitigated control, less moderation resultant. So the effective argument here is using quote unquote real names, makes the quality standard higher, makes people more civil. Well, how about that? And this article came out a couple months later. Quora's misogyny problem, a cautionary tale. So the question is, if this is what results from the standard that Quora is using, what does that say about what Quora wants? So I'll just leave it at that. You didn't think. It seemed like they made a big economy because the middle ground, which was like doing the forum that I'm moderating other places, is that you have to have a pseudonym. You can't be anonymous. You have to pick a pseudonym and keep using it. And I don't know how you feel about that. But that's a solution I often see to the public. Well, then you get a validation question that comes up. How do I prove I'm using a pseudonym? It's more a matter of that you have to actually create an account and use that and not be a different person every time. OK, well, that gets into a couple of things. Bring that up in the questions because I want to address that. But yeah, thank you. So anyways, Quora is not the only place that's doing this. You guys all familiar with Airbnb? Oh, good. OK. What was the problem? What's what? The Quora problem. With Quora? Yeah, the misogyny link, I didn't follow. Oh, basically it's an accusation of people being mistreated for whatever reasons. And the idea was that Quora thought that by forcing people to use their legal names that issues like that would go away, and it clearly hasn't worked. So that's kind of what I was getting at. So OK, everyone here has heard of Airbnb it sounds like. So they introduced this thing a while ago, maybe a couple of years ago, which I thought was really interesting. So they have offline ID, which is you verify your identity by scanning in a driver's license and email it to them, although they don't really touch on how they do encryption and data retention and so on. They also have what they call online ID, which I thought was really interesting. You can verify your identity by linking it to Google, or was it Facebook or LinkedIn, which I guess means that we're supposed to trust Google and Facebook. And the interesting, if you don't have a profile in any of those sites, they allow you to make a video and upload the video of you saying, hi, this is me. Because a video is also a good, yeah. So it's all kinds of confused. And Doc Searles, who's in the identity community, got hit by this. And he wrote a really interesting blog piece, basically, has a reaction to this. And well, how do we make this better? And it's been this constant struggle. And even more recently, Airbnb ran into a problem. This gets into another topic, too. They had an agreement with New York. So New York has been cracking down on illegal hotels and whatnot. I guess some of the lawyers know about this stuff. So they suspected that Airbnb was enabling people to illegally rent out their places. So the attorney general of New York subpoenaed Airbnb to get the identities of people that were doing this. And they had a big back and forth, a whole lot of discussion, and they came to an agreement on a data minimization, effectively anonymizing it. They redacted things like their name, their email address, and so on. There's one thing they didn't anonymize, though. There's one thing they didn't leave out, the IP address. So that says a lot of things. Maybe the standards are not there. Maybe the people that were doing this were not technical. I'm not sure. But it helps to illustrate one of the problems. There's a lot of problems with this anonymity thing. So on the left here we have Netflix, if you guys saw this at all. So what happened with the Netflix data set that they released, I guess, people's video history. And people were able to take this data set and compare it to things like IMDb, and IMDb reviews, and ratings, and so on. And were able to effectively de-anonymize the people that were using Netflix. And on the right you have the AOL search history. This was a fiasco. And this came out, they anonymized by basically taking people's names off, but by looking at the search patterns that people were searching for, they were pretty accurately able to de-identify some of the people, or de-anonymize, I should say. So the other thing I want to touch on it with anonymity, by the way, because this gets really, really important, there are a lot of companies that are adopting the stance that if I anonymize the data set, I can sell it. And I can therefore become a data broker. Like there are DMVs doing this. There's one in Florida that I saw news about recently. But the question is, well, here's an example. Let's say that I go to the hospital and get a surgery or have an operation or something, right? And the hospital is like, well, we can make money if we just chop his name off and sell this. Well, that works great if somebody buys that. They can't find out who I am unless they also get the data set from the Walgreens that happens to be next door to the hospital where I went right after I was there. And the compare and contrast, and there we go. No more data security. So that's pretty much what I got for you. I think I've stayed within my time allocation. And by the way, for the questions, I have Nimrite stickers and anybody who asks a question gets a sticker. So thank you. Do we have any in-room questions to start off? Yeah. So I completely agree with what you said about how people should have the right to be anonymous or use a pseudonym when they want to. I'm wondering in the world of medicine, could you see a reason why, for example, a hospital would want to know someone's identity for the purposes of giving them the best medical treatment? In other words, identity equals your history. And knowing your medical history can help. So there's two things that come up with this. And that's a really good question. First, and this is something I often say I didn't say it here though, if you're using a legal name, it makes sense with medical stuff, with HIPAA and other things, that there are laws regarding how the data is used. Whereas some of these startups that are asking for your ID, there's no legal protection about that. So medicine is a bit different, just like financial data, because there are laws regarding it. So legal document, legal practice, there you go. The other thing that I think is worth noting is that a patient owns their data, right? That's one of the tenets of HIPAA, is that the patient has to give consent and all that. Only in the US. What? Oh yeah, only in the US. Well, Europe has so much better data protection than we do, it's not even funny. But one of the interesting things is, and I think this may be one of the things you're hinting at, can a patient withhold some of the medical history? So for example, let's say that they had a sexual history they don't want their doctor to know about. And that's something we still don't know. Like I said, there aren't full answers to these things yet. It's just open for discussion. So does that help the question at all? This is my area of specialty, being patient privacy rights. And there are what aesthetics said is the situation. First of all, what HIPAA says is that you have a right to be treated if you are known to the practice. So the right to not be identified is written into HIPAA. Second of all, if you do the research or to the extent the research has been done, I should say, enforcing a real names policy actually causes people to hide information, causes more damage than the problems that it solves in terms of. So those are sort of the two pieces of the puzzle in health care. How do you become known to the practice without having identified yourself at some point? You go to the doctor, and the doctor takes your picture, sticks it in the medical record, never shares that with anybody. If you want to access it online, they give you a one-time password, which now associates you with that health record. And everything works, including the electronic access. If I could touch on that, by the way, the process of identification is really interesting. One of the examples that I use is, if you go to a bar, the bouncer asks for your ID. The law doesn't state that you must show ID. The law states that you have to be of a certain age. And the question is, why is it that they ask for your ID rather than just asking you the question? So identification is a really interesting process. We had a comment that was going to make. Well, this wasn't a question I was going to ask later. People often use the medical system in bars both as a means of obtaining legal drugs, because prescription drug abuse is a major concern. One of the concerns they may have is people may be saying, taking certain symptoms or overemphasizing certain symptoms in the hope of getting the drugs that they want, because that's it. And that, of course, I would also explain with alcohol. Kids are coming in the bar who aren't 21 because they want the foods. You got a sticker on it? Yes, thank you. OK, cool. OK, I think you got one already, but go ahead. I just want you didn't raise identity brokers, a new thing on the scene. And since you wanted technical questions, please. Do you mean identity brokers or data brokers? Identity brokers, as in F6, the project, and in England they have them. These are. So that gets into a word that I have deliberately left out. I raised it because of this question. And your point about are you 18? Yep, that gets into a word I've deliberately left out of this talk, which is trust. And the question also is, is identity something which is granted to you? And if so, by whom? Could it be by yourself? Could it be by a government and so on? And why should that grant in have any sort of credibility to it? So do you mean like federated identity or? No, I mean literally the question that you, the point you brought up about the bar only needs to know you're over 18. They don't need to know your identity. A lot of the other questions around identity are now a lot of attention is focused on the governance or the trust governance around the technology of identity brokers. We have examples in England. We have examples in the US now. And I'm sure a few other countries at a federal level at an official level. So there's a couple of things about that. There's what's known as the limited liability persona that my friend Kalia has been working on. Basically, the idea is this person, I need to know some attribute about them without knowing anything else. And why should I trust that entity or that processor whatnot is valid? That's a hard question. That gets into the whole web of trust thing. Like why should I trust this corporation? So Facebook, why should I trust what I see on Facebook, for example? And I don't have a really good answer to that. I'm sorry. It's a hard question. We have a question from the hashtag that I'm going to intersect in, and then we have some on the side of the room. I'm going to give two. So from the hashtag stream we have, could you talk a bit more about identifiers versus identity? Is correlation and completion of the two a core risk here? A risk to what? That's my answer to that. It depends on the context. And oh, by the way, something else I just realized I thought about with this whole attributes and whatnot. I think David Chom has a paper on blind. David Chom wrote a whole lot of cryptography papers on what's it called? It's not blind trust. It's basically anonymized currency and how to pay for something without being attributed. So that might be an angle to take, if that makes sense. And then Saul, and then back over here. Next. This certainly needs to be a rabbit hole question. I mean, why just one identity? I mean, surveillance theory says that its effect is social sorting. And I don't want to be sorted, or I want to be sorted in different ways, in different contexts. So why was there simply an assumption of one identity? And this is sort of the ultimate question, is it really part of the need of this, is how siloed all the nins are, that it doesn't really matter how many nins there are if it's permeable in between? So the two things I can think of immediately, sometimes people use different names for really good reasons. Maybe somebody is a sex worker, and they don't want to influence their job as a teacher. Or less loaded, somebody is a political dissident and doesn't have tenure yet. Or to interject with the mundane example, I will fully own to having two online names that I've used for 15 years. Well, I mean, the one that actually matches my wallet is much newer. And I just have that these, A, I'm a woman, and B, I'm kind of an academic. The end. I'm going to be judged so much more harshly for really normal things that are really OK, just because of gender. And so I maintain separate online identities because my students, when I have them, never need to know what I look like when I go clubbing. The end. So we had a question back here. And then we'll see if there's something that's hot in here. Sure, yeah, I mean, this kind of gets into what's been asked already. But there is, you mentioned, there's a public interest in attaching information to an identity. And there's also a private interest in animizing that, keeping that private. So I mean, where do you see the balance between those? Do you see a balance? Do you just see the private interest completely out of the way? This sort of reputational, this public interest in reputation. It gets into reputation. It gets into reputation, which actually starts to get into the answer to your question, too. And this is where national security keeps coming up over and over again. And I fucking hate that term. I think it's one of the reasons DC is so completely broken right now. Well, not even from a national security perspective, and certainly from public safety, just public knowledge. And you're increasing information signature, you're increasing the prevalence of accurate information by, however unfairly maybe, bringing people into these single silos, like you said. That's one of the places where it's, this is a really complicated question. I think there's a couple of things there. One of them is a scale-in problem, because when you scale to much larger community sizes, having some kind of inherent trust is way more difficult. And you have to come up with measures like reputation, like the credit system, to begin to keep track of that. Because instead of having credit at the local store, you have a credit card, which has some kind of an algorithm which determines whether you get approved for the loan or not. It's hard. And I mean, this is one of the things I think that identity just doesn't scale very well. Yes? I'd like to make a comment on that. I think the role of law enforcement and government as separate from Facebook and other sort of non-governmental is being called into question here. Not just by you, but I think in general. And part of that is due to Bitcoin and the blockchain. And we've had the lecture here about Ethereum and what happens when you sort of take the governance models and remove any sort of centralized things. And when Aesthetics talks about N-Stick, I think this is the part that N-Stick is really struggling with. As a public-private partnership, what is the role of government? And it's completely not worked out. Yeah. And to touch on that, I think you made a really, really important point. One of the reasons that this difference is important to recognize between, say, Facebook and Google versus the government is that I can vote, but I can't vote for Facebook. And this notion of self-regulation and whatnot could also be just the social contract with or so. I'll give you another quick example. The question that came up before about doctor shopping for controlled substances. One of the things that, again, is happening now and hasn't seen God happen, is that people are trying to take the law enforcement database that was used to go after the doctors that were overriding prescriptions and the patients that were doctor shopping and combine them, make them accessible as part of the electronic health record, which is a non-law enforcement thing by HIPAA definition or anything else. And so we are seeing the breakdown of the coercive aspects of identity and the sort of functional aspects, if you would, in many cases. And one of the challenges that we run into, especially with the identity and data brokers, is, I guess, memory and data retention issues. And the question is, so to give a fairly mundane example, I send a government ID to Google to verify my account. What happens to that after I do that? And is it verified? If so, what do they store for how long? This is why with the legal identity, I'm OK given it to, say, a medical provider because there are strict laws about that stuff. At least with HIPAA, you have to have encryption at rest and encryption and transit and so on. Yes? Yes, I was thinking, oh, this is sort of an antiquated backwater technology world. But in second life, there are several levers to it because you get, just to be honest, Linden Lab, the company that operates the grid needs to know your real life identity and then to, if you want to transfer money to buy game currency or access to adult areas, there's even more verification. But the, and you can have multiple avatars who can have a, you know, their basic avatar name, what they call a display name, which is a nickname you can change, but also the revealing, the real identity of another avatar without vision is considered, you know, is one of the things that's very much against the rules of the game and that sometimes leads to some interesting consequences, especially since sometimes the avatar, the person behind the avatar will reveal his or her identity in some contexts, but doesn't necessarily want to have identified it, others or something. One of the interesting things I wanna point out also, the word real is up for a lot of debate. One of the interpretations I have of it is the name you're known by in real life and when you use it that way, well, the purpose of having the financial things tied to a legal name is more, or a real name is so that somebody who is real entity can be held accountable and within the names you want. Basically, there's this whole field of study attribution in which you have accountability and then reputation, which gets into some of the stuff the gentleman was talking about. Okay, an other case where somebody's, you know, fake, second life name becomes a real name, like for example, there's a person who's, I think, been affiliated with Harvard name, John Lester, who's now better known as Pathfinder, because that was Pathfinder, Lyndon was his identity, he was working for Lyndon Lab. So the Europeans have a different kind of problem than we've talked today, that even they have stronger data protection laws, but I've looked at them for a while, but I imagine they're written about the person, the individual, who I think is a viable person. And if it was an identity which is a pseudonym, it actually may not even be a person. Yep, it may be a collective pseudonym. Right, one of the examples I have is in the close for Bach, even in our petition group, so yeah. Yeah, so if it's not a person, are they getting in trouble not knowing how data protection laws apply to that? I'm not an expert on European laws, but what I will say is this, so there's two things. First off, Americans, there is no national ID in the United States and there's a number of reasons for that one of which is Americans are inherently paranoid of authority. I mean, the country was founded as an act of rebellion against the British. The other thing is that America is a much larger country than say Germany and Sweden and other countries which do have a national ID and an EID and I think it's a scaling problem there where when you have a smaller country, having some kind of national ID is much more manageable. Does that start to answer any of that? Doesn't seem to be a problem, but I don't think it's a question. Okay, I was just saying, if you've got data on connected to identifiers and some of those are clearly identifiers for a real person, it's clear how laws about personal privacy apply. Right. If it's an identifier, it's linked to, not as far as you can tell, not a person. So like, probably it's a word like, is it still fall under the law if it's not personal data? It's fictional data. I don't know. That's an interesting legal question. I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know the implications of it, yes? It seemed to me that the purpose, the purpose as opposed to what it actually did, of the real name policy in Facebook, because Quora, whatever else, was to try to ensure some sort of accountability from the people who were participating in it, so basically, and then if you don't do that, you end up with something that looks like poor channel, looks like the Boston Herald comment section. Or Quora. I haven't used Quora actually, so I don't, I only, but question is, is that a goal you could, that's better achieved in some other way? I mean, the form that I help run, we have a required pseudonym policy. I mean, your pseudonym can be your real name, or it can be a pseudonym, but you have to be registered, you have to have some consistent presence and not be somebody else every time you log in. Well, that gets into consistency, we're using the same name over time, and names can change, maybe you are using a pseudonym and eventually it becomes a base name for yourself. I don't really buy that argument, because for example, a lot of the issues that we saw, I can't remember her name, but there was a girl a few years ago who committed suicide over being bullied on Facebook, which has a name as policy, and the way that I put it, what's that? I have quite a few of them. Amandita is probably just one, but there have been several. And the way that I put it, two things. First off, we had bullies before we had cyberbullies, and the second is that technology doesn't replace humanity, it magnifies it, so a lot of the issues that we're having right now, forcing somebody to use a certain kind of name doesn't really do much except force them to use that name. Now, they might be held accountable to a different standard by which I mean, if you're using, so if you're using a legal name that somebody can do a Google search and find you by, then you may change things that you do and say, and it actually turns into an act of censorship. On the other hand, whether it's held within that community and the attribution isn't there as much, it's kind of questionable. So I would argue that I haven't seen any real evidence that it works that way. I would certainly say I've seen evidence that if you allow totally anonymous comments, you get a mess, and if you require pseudonyms, you get something that people actually want to participate in. Right, but I mean, I see a lot of people be in dicks on Facebook too, so by curiously, I don't know if Facebook can't put it. Do you have real human moderators and do you have an active moderation as part of that community? That just to me. Yeah, yeah. Therefore, the community I'm talking about, we have four moderators and they do not pre-approve things that come in, they may occasionally ask somebody to remove something or take something down that's very rare, it's basically, it's very light moderation. Okay, from the experience that I've had with watching how Boing Boing's comment threads, I'm the science editor at Boing Boing, and Boing Boing's comments have always had a pretty good community, at least as far as I've, as long as I've been around with them. And they've gone back and forth through different times when you've had to have some kind of name, whether it's your real name or pseudonym or whatever attached to it, and when you can make anonymous comments. And I don't think it was the name that made as much of a difference to us having a good community as much as it was the moderation and the fact that the moderation had instilled community norms so that when you did have somebody come in and act like a dick, it wasn't just the moderator who was enforcing it, it was the rest of the community coming in enforcing it. And I don't think you need necessarily names for that. I think you need real human people doing moderation. Like the reason the Boston Globe comments look like they do is because most newspapers try to like lays out and just do it with bots. And you can't moderate a community with bots. There's a border between moderation and censorship. Absolutely. And I want to touch on that. Part of the more of a heavier touch of moderation, I think, than we like to have about the trade-off, I think, is that we basically had to say, no, no, I don't know. No total I don't ever need because then you get sock buckets, you get trolls, you get spam. Right. So I mean, I think it's different ways of doing it, but like different kinds of trade-offs, you could have a little bit heavier hand but whatever people want to call themselves. Yeah. You guys all look so deflated. I'm sorry to bring you pessimism. Oh, by the way, one thing I want to touch on, Carnegie Mellon did a study on, God, I think it was Korea because Korea had a forum for political discussion. I can't remember, like this is a few years old knowledge. Carnegie Mellon did a study on it and they found basically, I think it was South Korea forced legal names on their web forum, which there are a number of legal reasons as they were able to do that for. And I think they found like a 0.5% change in the way that people operated and they determined equality by a list of curse words and then what they called anti-normative behavior. What in South Korea, was there some form in South Korea? It was, oh God, I can't remember. It was a, it passed a law where if your site had over 100,000 registered users and commenters, then they had to register with a real name. And what actually, and then there ended up being a massive data breach that resulted in them reversing the legislation. Oh, it's because of a data breach? I didn't know that. Yeah, like maybe two years later? It was around for a little while and then it... Okay, I thought they'd reverted it because they found it didn't have a change off the look of the data breach. Yes. I mentioned the medical system and the financial system and I was puzzled thinking that right now countries are fighting against anonymity in banking systems against countries that allow numbered accounts and we have the same problem online as well. Poker Stars was forbidden to operate in the United States because people were moving fortunes around without being accountable to it somehow. And I would like to ask you, considering that people have different reasons for having a name, how would you frame regulations or would you frame regulations limiting the rights of people to use names for different reasons? How would you frame that if you would frame them? This is where I have to say that I'm not a lawyer and policy is hard for me. It's tricky, I would say, like within medicine or something in which you do something which could either adversely affect you or somebody else, then it gets really tricky. The question is, is there appropriate accountability and does that accountability depend on the name that you're using? Yes. Just to make here. Oh. Yes, Ellarie and then Ben. So well, I guess just in connection with that. I had an experience recently that made me think about this. I was going to visit an Iranian journalist, Kali, who lives in Prague and I realized on my way to his house we'd only ever known each other online and that I realized I didn't know what name I would find on the buzzer. Like I knew him as three different names and so, and I was like, gosh, this is interesting. And so I got there and it was like, it turned out just to be the initials and that was kind of enough. I was like, pretty sure that's him. It was, but it was kind of an interesting moment because I realized that he had sort of invited me into this other sphere of identity that I hadn't been in before, but he had welcomed me. So it was like, okay. But then I guess it made me think about like, what are the needs for linking different identities and where, like when I sort of crossed that line between just knowing him in the internet and actually getting off this train and like walking to his house, what was sort of going on and when it comes down to legal issues, or if you're trying to sort of gain trust in a person, you might want to look at what they've written online, but if you can't connect that to the other identity that you're, you know what I'm saying? I don't know, I'm just, I'm curious what you think about those links. It's really hard. Yeah, that gets tricky. There's the consent issue that comes into play and God, that's a hard question. It's like, I thought of all this stuff but I don't have any good answers yet. Can you talk a little bit about the, like danger of a false sense of security? Like I feel like online, given the levels of surveillance, it's pretty difficult to keep identities separate and offline increasing the cameras and visual recognition. So like, I don't have confidence in myself to keep things separate and I can see myself getting into a lot of trouble trying to, you know, so. So man, that one gets tricky because like the difference between, say a surveillance camera and people's eyeballs is among other things, there's memory and there's also accessibility. If you have a street that has a whole bunch of cameras around the question, it's basically a matter of disclosure and this is one of the issues that technology has brought to us is that we're dealing with issues we've never really had before. Traditionally, somebody does something and they might forget about it or it just doesn't, nobody cares, but now that it's captured in real time. So just to drop the mic. Just, okay, I'm gonna read about how the CIA is very worried that they can't create fake identities anymore for their agents. Right, right, right. And they hate Apple right now too. I mean, one of the questions that falls into, and this, that gets into the privacy thing wherein privacy is, there's no such thing as just privacy, you have to have something be private to or from another entity, therefore, it's a sum of relationships and there's then the question about privacy and security and what's appropriate security and what are appropriate levels of privacy to have. So just like the person who decides they don't want to disclose their sexual history, their doctor, and then they get misdiagnosed. It's tricky, there's a lot of ripple effects that come with it. So there's many different answers to that. I don't know which one I agree with, if any, there's the libertarian one that says, fuck off, I'm gonna shoot you in the head. There is the one that says, I'm gonna, I'll let you in maybe, I'll let you in if you have a warrant and so on. I think a lot of that is up to the individual or the community agreements that they have made. Part of my question, I kind of feel like the internet comes in with a veil of novelty. I feel as though some of these issues we're running to on the internet are something that we can kind of get clues to solving with respect to reality. In real life, for instance, we spoke about how names are associated with identities. You talked about how in real life, your name comes down with a lot of things attached to it such as your maybe age, your parents, where you came from, so on and so forth. But even in real life, you're able to hide that. You're able to go into different atmospheres, different contexts, and hide certain parts of yourself and only reveal that part of yourself when you want to. However, the law seems to have a way of dealing with that. The parts of yourself that needs to be revealed are in context, depending on the purpose of that context. So if you're trying to get into a contract, you might have to reveal certain information so both parties can know you have an equal argument. And I was thinking in cyberspace then, so adding on that linkability point, could you regulate synonyms with respect to the purpose of form? So if you have a form in which people should be trading out of money, then maybe you want to have more accountability as opposed to a form in which you're just talking about intellectual ideas. We already do that. Like in the courts, you have people as a John Doe plaintiff and so on, so absolutely. And so then that kind of touches on to her point as well. How reasonable it is for a person to respect some of the ability of real identity on the web to depend on what form they're in. And maybe that, do you think that would be a way of addressing the issue of synonyms? A lot of that boils down to trust. And the question, oh, here's an example I've given. You got a group of friends and you introduced somebody new into the group. The trust that your friends have with that person is effectively based on your relationship with them and over time they develop their own. I don't believe that trust is something that can translate from one group to another unless you have a bridge like that. Does that help to answer it all? Okay, it's hard. I mean, to say hi, I'm new in this system unless there are people there who already know who you are in whatever form. So like Ello, this new social network insight thing, a lot of people are moving to Ello from Twitter. And the reason that I basically know who they are is because a lot of them are using the same name or maybe the things that they're reporting on are similar. So it's basically pattern recognition. And the question of that case is who bears liability if that trust again, the next person breaks or something happens in that mix. So who bears liability with that? I think that's up to the group. I mean, you bring somebody, like, okay, I go to a party and I bring my friend and my friend gets drunk and pukes on the couch. Well, he's not coming back, right? But that reflects badly on me, not on him. Whereas if he's been in the group for a while, it reflects on him. So relationships are hard. Yes. Should there be some sort of limit to the number of identities people can have? I mean, is it sort of like a different, is there, do you see any sort of difference between somebody who's like, well, okay, I have my sort of legal name identity. I have my sort of identity on one form versus somebody who's like, well, I want to have like 10 different IDs on Google Plus. Is that different than someone who says I want to have two or one or Ello? So there's two things to that. One of them is that we're kind of limited as humans. Are you guys all familiar with Dunbar's number, for example? Yeah. Okay, half yes, half no. What? Tell us a bit about it. I'll summarize it. A sociologist, I think, Dunbar did a study found, studying primates found that basically human beings can have a social network of around 150. It's based on an algorithm. It's not entirely accurate, but so we're actually limited in our capacity to have relationships to begin with. So the more, quote unquote, identities you have, you're also limited by time. So the more relationships you have, the harder it is to manage all of them in the shallower each of them becomes. So it's hard. Identities will have their sort of, their troll identity and their sort of more, yeah, I don't know. I just think there's, do you think there's use cases for a lot of people? I don't know if I called it a danger, it's a possibility, but it depends what you're into. Yes. Here's sort of the counter example to this. And it's a really hard case. It's sort of flipping the Iranian journalist question around. Barton Gilman, who got, one of the people who got leaks from Edward Snowden talks about the problem he had going to Russia to interview Snowden. And, you know, part of that was physical surveillance, but part of it was, was effectively a problem of how do you drop your electronic identity sufficiently so that you can acquire the audio tapes and then transport them back, you know, to the United States so that you can listen to them, you know, without them, you know, getting intercepted. And that's sort of an unsolved problem. I mean, if he could solve it with, you know, a secure 11th identity and he already has 10, would you stop that? So if I could jump off of that, there's two terms that come to mind here. One is dataminization and the other is data leakage. Anybody who has tried to use encryption has run into problems like this. So as a technical example, let's say that I want to send somebody an encrypted PGP email. Well, first I have to contact the key server and get their key. So suddenly the key server has a log that I've accessed it. So there's data leakage right there. And it's tricky. So contrary to popular, I don't think there's anything as full anonymity. There's always going to be observability and linkability to some extent. And I mean, that's a philosophical question, but it's really hard. And so for example, if I basically strip Nick and have no electronics, you still have a heat signature. And I mean, you get things like this, when you're trying to do security, you have like the Van Eck Freakin' and so on where you can read. Basically, you can capture the electrons going into the, what's that? Oh, okay. I just realized I don't have to take this question from hashtag because I have the questionnaire in the room. Oh, okay. Like Van Eck Freakin' and the concept being that you can re-instantiate what shows up on somebody's computer screen without like being in the room with them and so on. There's actually a recent discussion about being able to infer somebody's computer screen by scanning the data that's on their eyeballs. So there's, I don't think there's a proof of concept on that yet, but it's an interesting idea. But in that case, that's data leakage right there. Right. And I mean, Barton Gullin was able to do it, so it's possible, but it was hard. It depends on who it is that's trying to, like you're leaking data, right? Well, can the person read it? Like if I write a book, it's useless unless people can read it. Likewise, if I leak data, unless the person who sees the data knows how to interpret it, then it's useless. I mean, this is all about code breaking and so on. Erin. This isn't exactly a question, but it seems like we've been talking a lot about how to enable privacy and enable individuals to choose non-standard names, or names that we don't usually recognize as names. But I just kind of wanted to bring up the fact that Facebook's name policy and all these other policies also really impact people who's offline names don't match their legal identity, like transfers. Yep. I don't know if you have anything to add on that. Like what? But like it was, Transfals, right? Yeah. People whose names don't match their real names don't match their legal names. Like the Facebook case that's going on right now? Yeah. That's a fucking travesty. For those who don't know, there's a group in San Francisco called the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence who, they're fabulous people. They're drag queens and they've been around for many decades and they were one of the first groups, for example, to do HIV awareness and fundraise and then so on. They do a lot of really good things and then Facebook decided to suspend a whole bunch of them at once. Because they weren't using their legal names, they were using names like Sister Roma. So, the, are you? That's what caused this sudden, everybody wants to find out about LO. Yeah, this is why that happened, yeah. And the thing is, there's a question as to why it was that Facebook seemed to target the transgendered and like drag queens, but yeah. Yeah, also they got really angry about it and just online and Facebook was like, okay, we'll work with you and then out with Facebook. Right. Facebook was like, we'll give you two weeks to use your real names. Well, we're going to see your account, so you can have two weeks to change your real names and then we'll be in you all again. It's pretty hard to know what the situation is. Yeah, I think some people are calling it SisterGate. I think they, so yeah, they had a meeting with Facebook which it was inconclusive because the people from Facebook that showed up to the meeting were from their customer experience team or something like that. And not any actual legal people or policy people. So I think they're having another, it might be a day or tomorrow actually. So that's one of the ongoing cases. Yes. So I guess I'm just curious as a kind of novice to this topic, what explains from your perspective or anybody else in the room's perspective, why Facebook or other companies that have this policy persist? Okay, so every, I have a couple of answers to this. Every answer that I've heard from them is bullshit. The quality thing I don't think works. Like the Carnegie Mellon study and the career thing. The answer that I think it is either a naive sense that it somehow improves quote unquote quality and creates a better product. What I actually think it is is for data brokers. Because the thing is, if say Experian goes to Axiom, like the data brokers and then they contact Facebook and they say, hey, I have this person's name and I have X, Y, I have their name and X, Y about them. Can you give me Z? Facebook can use that to basically match up and then sell the data without actually just wholesale selling the data, so. I mean I'll add to that, I mean there's a, I mean, one there's a simplicity. I mean it's just, it may, as a systems administrator in the larger sense, it's much simpler to think about if you're one identity, one name. The other thing in Facebook's case is, and I think they really want to find ways of being an extension of government. Organ donation and linkages to the DMV to get your organ donation status set through Facebook and reflected on your driver's license. They talk about being able to do the DMV stuff better than the DMV and there are other sorts of things which if they're using the same name as the legal name facilitates that sort of interdigitation with your life. It's much simpler than that. It is sold to the masses. If you want to find your kindergarten classmate, you look for their names, you don't credit track them, what they might be called. But that's not the value so much and it's not the governmental thing. They're in the business of selling data about individuals. So to the extent that you use your Facebook identity as a credential to log into other things and those other things insist on having a traceable government-issued name for whatever. KYC, your customer are anti-money laundering or other policy purposes. That represents increased value for the information that Facebook can offer to its customers. So you go Nathan and Sarah and then I'm gonna hijack the last question. I'm tripping up on three more spawns. So I'm curious about your reaction to a proposal that would distinguish between all of these kind of data selling privacy questions from the using names in social context. What would your reaction to be to something that required you to register your official government ID or your bank account with Facebook or Cora so that they could give your information to the police and sell it to third parties while still using however many pseudonyms or other identifiers you want to use in a variety of social contexts? So two things immediately come to mind. One of them is a free speech issue and the lawyers will probably know McIntyre versus Ohio Elections Commission is one that's commonly cited in the anonymous cases. The other one is that I'm actually more okay with that because if there is a legal agreement that means that there's also legal accountability at the moment Facebook has no legal accountability as far as I can tell. So it's not good but it's better than what we have. I don't want it but I want it more. Does that make sense? It's like the lesser of two really horrible evils. Thank you. So I wanted to add something to the Facebook aspect of things especially in the context of Google finally changing their policy but Facebook kind of doubling down at the same time and so Facebook this past Monday I think launched Atlas which is their new data broker way of collecting information about individuals across devices and so the jump for them now is it's not cookie based it's Ivy based and so it's a private ID but it's Facebook controlled, Facebook walled garden. They're not going to be selling it to third parties but it's the way that they're consolidating the view of the consumer in the same way that a data broker would try to resolve the activity of any individual in a profile and so but that's also connecting to offline context including credit card purchase history. And also the thing that Facebook is also doing instead of being a data broker and just selling data out they are becoming a data beacon and allowing advertisers of access to the so they have ownership and control but they can grant access based on money so yes. Did I ask a question to the group? How many people are migrating away from Facebook and Twitter to LO? Well after this. What do you mean by migrating? There's a difference between migrating away and migrating to you could be staying in one place and also going to the other. Who here is on LO or wants to be on LO? Let's do that. All right. Who needs? Who needs? I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Who needs? Doesn't want to be on Facebook. Who is using Facebook less because you're on LO? Who's not using Facebook at all? Who's not using LO? Well, I'm choosing not to use LO. Well, so it was just having chosen. The reason I actually like LO is because I am able to do long form posts on it. Like I use Twitter. And by the way, the Twitter verified idea is really interesting. It's only done for, at least this is what, the head of policy at Twitter told me, like asked him directly about it and he basically said that it's surely to prevent impersonation attempts. So somebody says, I'm Tom Cruise and then they post all this thing about how they, like eating babies or something. Unless it's protected under satire, but if it's directly inflammatory and so on. But. So I'm gonna hijack. Looks like you haven't spoken at all. And then I'll hijack. Last question. Okay, cool. Cause I want a sticker. So I want to squeeze in my question. No, also cause I want to ask a question. It seemed to me that you were making a correlation between NIMS and creativity. Sure. Yeah. There's tons of examples from art and literature of people, right? Over history using NIMS. And their work is fundamentally possible because of that. So I'm wondering if there is kind of one example that you give of how in the multiplicity of net cultures that are made possible by NIMS, something really awesomely creative is made possible. Yes. Let me flip back to that slide where I skipped over. Do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do. Yes, all of those. Okay. But there's also a lot of women who published under male names back in the day. Yeah, there's actually wikipedia about that. Right, right. Yeah, George Eliot and the Bronte sisters fall under that. Yeah. There's a book called Nanda Plume which actually addresses some of those questions. It gets into history. There's also Richard Bachman, Stephen King, Nate Throat, Voltaire and so on. So there's a lot of different reasons. So my background is in sociology. And speaking with a huge overgeneral brush for my entire discipline, we really understand identity to be fluid as something that's kind of performed, that's contextual. And the example that I really love to bring up all the time is Mark Zuckerberg's famous slash infamous quote about having more than one identity is like, it makes you a terrible person, untrustworthy, whatever. And I like to, of course, do the cliche social thing and point right back to Irving Goffman for whom basically not having multiple identities, not performing different selves in different contexts is the antisocial behavior. It makes you, you're throwing off the scene. You're not playing along and facilitating everyone else's social dynamic. If I were to be the same way interacting with my peers as I am with my parents, even that would be very off-putting and we kind of throw the rhythm of social interaction. So I feel like there aren't quiet corners of the world where we know that identity is supposed to be multiple and contextual and fluid, especially if you care anything about social justice, which I happen to quite a lot. Are there any examples where you see that kind of orientation that academics are getting into policy or where policy is starting to take into account a lot of the established scholarship on not being able to construct? A lot of religions are like that, actually, where your name changes based on your role in the society. I didn't put the slide in here because I didn't know it at the time, but there are a couple of interesting conditions like New Guinea tribes. There's one tribe, I can't remember the name, where they actually, none of them have any names, they just have a community name for the tribe. There's another one where as you go through rights of the stages of your life, effectively kind of a hero's journey, the name that you have changes. So the name is more, rather a reflection of the individual, it's more a reflection of who you are and what is your place within the society in general. So those are some, here's an example, I can do the Catholic Church. There's a rite of confirmation in which you adopt the name of, I think you adopt the name of a saint that you aspire towards to be with and so on. And that's Pope Francis' same thing. Dalai Lama, there you go. And there's a question of titles versus names and so on. So I'd say the Pope is a title, Francis is a name. There's a lot of different cultures where this happens. Yes. I don't have children of my own, but for children, and this is an opinion, there's no right or wrong answer, but would you say the best thing then to allow people to have pseudonyms and protect their nim rights is that if you have a child and you don't want that child to be harassed, keep your child away from those kinds of, maybe say to your kid, don't get on Facebook until you've grown up and you can handle it. I would tell it to everyone, but yeah. Oh, well, yes, yes. Or don't get on a sort of, a political forum or something. Do you know what I mean? Yes. If you're not sort of grown up enough that you can handle, I mean, harassment is wrong, of course. Cyberbullying is wrong, you know? I thought you were gonna go to the pedophile route. There's always a pedophile question. No, I was more like just thinking about, someone just being harassed for having a different point of view and, you know. It's gonna happen regardless. And like I said, we had bullies before cyberbullies and so on, although I'll point out that kids already have multiple names. Like you might have a kid whose name is William and everyone calls him Billy. So they're used to it. It's just in a context in which it's socially assumed already. That happened between kids that adults can't see. Right. And then the adults are listening to every playground conversation. Right. My daughter thinks her name is Bear. She thinks her name is Bear, it's Althea, but she thinks her name is Bear. She reminds me of Calvin and Hobbes. So right, so like, you know, would we want to protect our kids by having cameras on the playgrounds, watching them all the time and then the adults listening to every conversation, you know, you could argue about whether or not. Like I wouldn't, right? But, so I guess that was kind of what was going with that. God, I, yeah. Unfortunately, we are at a time, so I have to cut everyone off. Okay. It's been a really great discussion, I would say. I will, here's how they contact me. Do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do. Ah, above the golden apple. Yep. It's an homage to Discordians, if anyone. What, so contact you, that's Twitter. It's Twitter and LO, and it's also aesthetics at aesthetics.com, so. Oh, cool. Okay. Okay. Thank you for coming. Here, have stickers.