plural of the puppet
Over on his blog, Jon Lebkowsky discusses the new concept of the “sock mob.” In online parlance, a “sock-puppet” is a user-account created to post bogus messages of support or disagreement with another online author. For example, a blogger could create a sock-puppet account to rebut critical comments on a post. The fake account would make it appear that someone else is defending the blogger, while in reality it’s the same author. “Sock mobs” are teams of users who advocate a particular viewpoint in a similarly dishonest way.
Jon says, “This is why we need a netwide standard identity framework with strong and meaningful authentication.” While I agree that sock mobs are a nascent problem and a standardized identity system would be usefule, I disagree with Jon. In order for a standardized identity system to be effective against a problem like sock mobs it would first need to be mandatory (either at the blog level or across the Internet) and, secondly, it would need to be verified through some kind of governmental identification system like driver’s licenses or social-security numbers. (I imagine that you could use credit-reporting agencies, but that would be even worse.) A universal identity system would introduce privacy problems that would exceed the value of eliminating sock mobs. There are privacy problems on a high level, where social institutions could store, share, and retrieve comments and content posted by an individual, but the lower-level privacy problems would be worse. Do we want prospective employers or dates to be able access and verify everything we post online? Most users post different information about themselves on a site like MySpace than they would on LinkedIn, would we want these tied together? Do you want a troll to be able to see each comment you leave to a blog? I don’t think so. Identity systems would allow society to police mass actions like sock mobs, but they would also police users at an individual level.
a few ideas…lessig taught us there are 4 ways to shape behavior: laws, economic incentives, architecture and social norms. only laws are mandatory and we could have a robust identity system without law. an identity architecture and then a social norm could emerge that a message without a verified identity would be considered fraudulent. the government nor credit agencies nor other social institutions need not be involved.
also, when jon says “a netwide standard identity framework with strong and meaningful authentication”, i believe he means how ebay does it but in a netwide way. authentication does not necessarily mean identification (which is generally through biometric means, even face to face). with an identifier, you can have identity (what others perceive about your identifier) without necessarily having identification.
Identity standards = police state?…
McChris at infobong.com responds to my “sock mob” post, where I suggest “a standard identity framework with strong and meaningful authentication” as a solution to sock mobbery and other pollution of the commons by astroturfers and worse, who take a…