Who Are You Online?

How Much Does the Net Really Need to 'Know' About You To Be Sure of Who You Are?

Angela Gunn Consumer Reports WebWatch Web Ethics Columnist

The Net is, as you might have noticed, a great place to get information. That means it's also a dandy place for personal information to range far more widely than its owners may have intended. We've all heard what happens when sensitive personal information (Social Security data, credit card numbers, etc.) gets into the wrong hands. However, there's a whole other class of personal information often requested online, and it has little to do with your bank account.

This week, let's talk about the ethics of information-sharing for Internet users in a non-economic context — specifically in online discussions, where anecdotal information rules the day.

Most of us, twitchy after years of screaming headlines (Are Hackers Stealing Your Credit Cards On The Internet?!), think about personal information online in terms of banking and other financial issues. The information in question is something the other party already knows. Your task is to provide data that matches your online identity to your offline identity — your name, passwords, and the like. Knowing the information proves you are the person you claim to be. Let's call this a name-based identity.

In contrast, we mean something different when we talk about identity in an online gathering such as a mailing list or a discussion group. In those environments, it's less important that your dealings be connected to the person with your name and Social Security number than that they be connected to the person with the qualities and knowledge you claim to have. Discussion groups devoted to specific concerns —professional or personal — rely on your actions and the biographical information you provide about yourself to decide whether you are the person you say you are. Let's call this a knowledge-based identity; this is the type of identity we'll be focusing on for the rest of this article.

There's no opting out of the system; the very act of joining some groups produces a certain amount of information. For instance, if you start participating in a discussion group for survivors of prostate cancer and claim to have been diagnosed with the disease, other group participants have good reason to assume you're male. Over time, your participation in the group will tell its members more about who you are: A reference to your service years in Korea will help them guess your age, while talking about seeing the Pacific Ocean from your window will tell them that you probably live on the West Coast. Other group participants might never know your name, but they recognize survivor@someaddress.com as the sum of the information he's provided: He's the guy who lives by the beach, served at Yechon Air Base in South Korea, and is in his 18th week of chemotherapy. If you are instead a 20-year-old woman pretending to have done all these things, you may fool the group — maybe even for a long time. But you're ethically reprehensible.

Again, identity establishes the user's bona fides. Just as your e-mail address is your identifier to purchase things with your credit card at certain sites, identity clarifies that, for example, Suzy on the TeachersChat mailing list is truly a sixth-grade teacher in North Carolina.
The information Suzy provides about her offline identity serves to support the identity and relationships she's building online. The bulk of that identity, and the foundation of those relationships, will be the quality of the contributions she makes to this group. Offline information is useful to add context and credence to whatever Suzy says in the Net context. It's quite likely that if Suzy appears to be a reasonable, knowledgeable person, her self-presented credentials will be taken at face value.

What happens when Suzy's knowledge-based identity is in doubt — that is, when group participants suspect that Suzy isn't who she's presented herself as being? When something seems wrong with one's name-based identity during a financial transaction, usually it's terminated or put on hold until your ID can be confirmed. With less weight placed on traditional data in knowledge-based identities and without the checks and balances established in financial transactions, the process of confirming Suzy's identity is an ethical challenge for both Suzy and her skeptics.

Suzy has the right in the TeachersChat list to refrain from giving out information that doesn't directly concern the group (her address, her age, the name of the school at which she teaches) and the responsibility to refrain from giving out information that identifies other people who haven't explicitly agreed to be part of this particular public record (names or close descriptions of her family members or students). That information isn't vital to the function of the group, and Suzy and the non-participants in her world stand to lose more by releasing it than the group stands to gain. If for some reason Suzy's credentials are challenged, she might choose to provide such information, but only to further establish her right to speak to the topic at hand — and even then only to the extent that her reputation in the group is, to her, worth the release of that offline information.

Were you a TeachersChat member and had cause to doubt that Suzy is who she says she is, you'd have the ethical right to ask her (alone or with others from the group, if this is a suspicion held held by other group members as well) for further proof of identity — where and when she graduated, for instance, or how many students she currently teaches if she's mentioned her classroom work. You'd have the responsibility to do this only when it's important to the function of the group — impostors can be truly dangerous to the welfare of an online group that relies on mutual respect and trust. If, for instance, Suzy's making inaccurate or extreme claims about what's happening in her classroom, or giving out bad information, a little skepticism might save the group from harmful misinformation.

If she doesn't come forward and you still have cause to doubt her, the ethical course of action is one that the Amish would call "shunning" and what many Internet users would call "killfiling" — simply ignore her, and consider creating a filter in your e-mail program that quietly routes Suzy's messages into the garbage. Calmly encourage others to do the same, explaining why you've chosen this course of action and why you doubt that Suzy is who she claims to be and why that, in turn, harms the group. (Managed lists, which operate under the control of a human list manager, are another matter; the group leader can terminate Suzy's membership, though a responsible manager only takes such a drastic step as a last resort.) Suzy can then choose either to provide more verification or to leave for a group with different standards.

It should go without saying that truth has ethical value, even online. As online discussion groups continue to grow in sophistication and importance, standards for ethical behavior in them should be very high, and participants should strive to represent themselves with scrupulous accuracy, even while withholding information to which the group isn't entitled.

Meanwhile, it has not escaped this columnist's notice that certain quadrants of the Net tend to contain approximately the amount of truthful information one might uncover at a particularly adept game of liar's poker. Though this ethicist is not condoning the practice of making up entire alternate autobiographies online even in more casual sectors of the Net, she is aware that certain chat areas, particularly those oriented to dating and mating, lend themselves to a certain amount of exaggeration, fibbing, and outright fabrications. She suggests that the wise surfer practice a certain amount of common sense when he finds himself in the "Bored On Saturday Night" chatroom with a correspondent who claims to be a 17-year-old multimillionaire supermodel. It's not happening, my friend. And do try to avoid misrepresenting yourself even in chats like these. Raising someone's romantic hopes with a scaffolding of lies isn't illegal, but it's cruel — and, yes, unethical.

***

Gunn is the co-founder of, and former Internet ethics columnist for, Yahoo! Internet Life and is currently the technology editor for Time Out New York weekly magazine. She has written hundreds of articles for PC Magazine, MSNBC.com, The Industry Standard, Business 2.0, CNN.com, Seattle Weekly, LA Weekly, and other publications.