Internets Anonymous

Jolie O’Dell just wrote a post on ReadWriteWeb called Open Thread: On Trolls, Anonymity & Making the Internet a Better Place, that you should check out. In the post, she questions the symbiotic relationship that anonymity has on the web, and whether or not social media is helping to extinguish trollish behavior on-line.

I happen to think that putting your name on your on-line communications is an important part of being a netizen. Unless of course you have the same name as a million other Chris Halls in the world… Then it’s ok to have your wife come up with a silly moniker for you to tie to your real name so that you can be distinguished from the fold.

E-mail Address Unique Identifier

This anonymity conversation with Jolie comes on the heals of a discussion I had with a colleague this morning. I’m currently wondering if any large organizations are bumping the E-mail addresses they collect from their customers/members up against Twitter’s database of 50M plus member accounts to follow and analyze their conversations. The possibility of abuse is probably moderate, but if we truly want a customized user experience, then privacy concerns need to be abated.

Speaking of databases, at one time I thought I could get my head around making relational databases, but no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t do it. What I do remember from the experience though is the concept of the unique identifier. A key that allows data to connect. I can’t help but think of this analogy within the realm of social media. Sure some people have a ton of E-mail addresses and they use different ones for different social networks, but others use a single E-mail address, or unique identifier, across networks.

Couldn’t this identifier be used to find people across networks and truly un-anonymize the internets?

Free Tool

While you chew on that one, I came across some free tools today called Maltego and Maltego Mesh thanks to Dan Morrill, and these tools provide you with a private investigator’s ability to identify people and their connections on-line. All you really need is an E-mail address or IP address and you’re on your way… I just started tooling around with it today, but thought it was pertinent to this post.

Let me know what you think of it all.