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I'm thinking Eric's right, and in my lifetime I think the web will become a place where you basically have a license/registration to access Internet from any 'terminal'. Failure to use the appropriate license(username/password?, perhaps biometrics) will be illegal. Oh who knows, maybe it'll be 1984-style where the monitors all have built-in cameras and it'll just autodetect(Plug n Play supported?) who's on it.
Obligatory: http://www.networkworld.com/communit...ity-future-web
All your base are belong to us.
Orwell missed the boat though, thinking it was about government takeovers of our lives. I suspect the real hand in the death of privacy will be the multinational corporations.
Although, I heard a couple of days ago that there are a lot of those anonymous email, etc sites popping up that idiots use to annoy their victims.
There are strong forces pushing anonymity, too. We probably will give up privacy before we give up anonymity, and largely because of the market, not the government.
This is all happening because of me and people like me. I have nothing to hide, and more importantly I don't care.
Privacy is overrated anyway.
Privacy and Anonymity aren't the same thing... and yet that article waffled back and forth between the two, and in the end, didn't tell me anything new.
The web isn't 100% anonymous... and never will be and probably shouldn't be. As for the license/registration ... I only see that happening in Arizona... as it is, when I connect to the web, it wouldn't be hard to find me. This site has tracked my IP... the company I work for knows who I am, and I have a static IP inside the network... all that's needed is a court order. I have absolutely no expectation of anonymity on the web.
Privacy is another issue all together. That's more about protecting the information about me rather than who I am (if that can even make sense). When I purchase something online, I think I should have a reasonable expectation that my cc information isn't going to get picked up by someone.
besides, even if we were to go to some sort of licensing/registration for online identities... it just opens up a new realm of black market of fake identities.
-tg
Absolutely, just another example of "every lock has it's locksmith".
Besides, anonymity is easy when married with plausible deniability. "I'm sorry sir, I didn't even know the system was relaying all web traffic through an anonymous proxy in Indonesia... must be those dang viruses mucking things up!"