Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Austrian government seeks to eliminate internet anonymity, with severe penalties

derstandard.at

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 292 posts

Re: Austrian government seeks to eliminate internet anonymity, with severe penalties

#141

Post by rhn_mk1 »

carnagii wrote: post #136

Laws like this are long past due. This particular law may not be the best implementation but governments do need to take action to provide their citizens with a real public square online. Excluding fake and paid users (without a declaration of who is paying them) from that space and protecting free speech in that space is essential to having a public policy discussion. Private corporations have not done this, and pro…

The government may and should provide their citizens with a public square online, but neither do they need to take away anonymity on existing squares, nor does the public square need to be non-anonymous. The concept of being able to go out on the streets, make mistakes, and have them be forgotten is old and integral to public spaces IMO.

Re: Austrian government seeks to eliminate internet anonymity, with severe penalties

#142

Post by abrowne »

rmu09 wrote: post #72
starbugs wrote: post #8

Could anyone shed some light on which problem this is supposed to solve exactly and what triggered it in the first place in Austria right now? Have there been any issues caused by anonymous posts recently? Maybe I'm just living under a rock, but my feeling was that the main issues we're currently facing stem from political distortion caused by populism misusing platform mechanisms to spread misinformation. I don't se…

This was triggered by a defamation lawsuit where a former female MP was being harrassed via facebook, made the harassement public via twitter, and subsequently sued by the owner of the facebook account. She lost the lawsuit and was ordered to pay damages. The court found that the owner of the facebook account is not necessarily the harasser, so making the harassement public is libel. Of course this case was only a we…

Maybe they were inspired by her case, but the former MP does not support it:

> Criticism also came from the former Green Party politician Sigi Maurer, whose fight against sexist posts was cited by the government as proof that the law was needed. "The government abused my case to propose this censorship law," Maurer wrote in a tweet last week. "Not in my name."

https://derstandard.at/2000101677286/Government-Seeks-to-Eli...

Re: Austrian government seeks to eliminate internet anonymity, with severe penalties

#143

Post by lazyjones »

jeena wrote: post #9

"Results show that in the context of online firestorms, non-anonymous individuals are more aggressive compared to anonymous individuals" https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

This legislation is not about "aggressive behaviour", it's about criminal conduct. While I can't comment professionally on the validity / reproducibility of this research (looks bogus to me, they only examined comments on an online petition platform, not FB and news sites where all the crazy people are[1]), anyone who'd claim that criminals don't prefer to be anonymous or that perceived anonymity has a negative effect on criminal behaviour, would surely be laughed out of academia.

Besides, the anonymity vs. other users will not be changed, we're not talking about a "visible real names" policy here. You can still use nicknames, just the forum operator has to store your real name.

[1] The final dataset includes 532,197 comments on 1,612 online petitions. There were a total of 3,858,131 signatures over the 1,612 petitions between 2010 and 2013, with detailed information about the wording of the comment, the commenters, the signers and the petition.

Re: Austrian government seeks to eliminate internet anonymity, with severe penalties

#144

Post by 127 »

carnagii wrote: post #136

Laws like this are long past due. This particular law may not be the best implementation but governments do need to take action to provide their citizens with a real public square online. Excluding fake and paid users (without a declaration of who is paying them) from that space and protecting free speech in that space is essential to having a public policy discussion. Private corporations have not done this, and pro…

The government isn't providing a public square. Internet is already that and more. The government is enforcing everyone to wear visible name tags by threatening violence on those who disobey.

Re: Austrian government seeks to eliminate internet anonymity, with severe penalties

#145

Post by carnagii »

rhn_mk1 wrote: post #141
carnagii wrote: post #136

Laws like this are long past due. This particular law may not be the best implementation but governments do need to take action to provide their citizens with a real public square online. Excluding fake and paid users (without a declaration of who is paying them) from that space and protecting free speech in that space is essential to having a public policy discussion. Private corporations have not done this, and pro…

The government may and should provide their citizens with a public square online, but neither do they need to take away anonymity on existing squares, nor does the public square need to be non-anonymous. The concept of being able to go out on the streets, make mistakes, and have them be forgotten is old and integral to public spaces IMO.

Yes, I agree with this.

I think that governments should provide a verifiable digital ID the same way they provide physical IDs and that they should provide communications platforms that allow people to communicate with these digital IDs in a way that protects their rights the same way that they provide mail service.

I do not think that governments should be regulating/banning activity on private platforms but should be offering an alternative where private platforms fall short. This is really nothing more than bringing existing government services (ID, mail, voting, parliaments) fully up to date with digital technology.

There is a big gap right now where governments don't understand what they should be doing or are incapable of doing it. They recognize the need for action because they see that things are going wrong but are not proposing or implementing the correct solutions yet.

Re: Austrian government seeks to eliminate internet anonymity, with severe penalties

#146

Post by lessname »

It's not the only attempt of the current government of Austria to do something against privacy on the internet.

- There is the idea of a tax called "Digitalsteuer": A tax for internet companies which didn't pay taxes for some reason. However, it is estimated this would make only some million dollars (~25 to 30/year). At the same time, it could lead to too much surveillance because somebody would have to save the address and location data of Austrian users somewhere. https://derstandard.at/2000100880156/Kritiker-befuerchten-du...

- And the "Überwachungspaket":

-> you need to register prepaid sim cards

-> limitation of the secrecy of letters

-> data retention by ISPs etc https://epicenter.works/thema/ueberwachungspaket

Re: Austrian government seeks to eliminate internet anonymity, with severe penalties

#147

Post by jeltz »

rum3 wrote: post #109
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can buy sim cards on amazon from other EU countries.

If it is like in Spain then the non-registered sim cards from other EU countries will simply not work if I remember correctly. However I have heard that in Spain you could anyway buy unregistered sim cards from certain stores if you asked around and paid a bit more.

Sounds unlikely. I know quite many in Sweden who have unregistered SIM cards and I think I would have heard of if they did not work in Spain.

Re: Austrian government seeks to eliminate internet anonymity, with severe penalties

#148

Post by carnagii »

peletiah wrote: post #137
carnagii wrote: post #136

Laws like this are long past due. This particular law may not be the best implementation but governments do need to take action to provide their citizens with a real public square online. Excluding fake and paid users (without a declaration of who is paying them) from that space and protecting free speech in that space is essential to having a public policy discussion. Private corporations have not done this, and pro…

This law is like having to provide and record ID when entering a concert, restaurant or other public places. It's an authoritarian dream, but will be shot down by courts, that's for sure.

> having to provide and record ID when entering a concert, restaurant or other public places

What do you think cell phones and credit cards are? In all of your examples you do have to provide an ID.

Re: Austrian government seeks to eliminate internet anonymity, with severe penalties

#149

Post by Kim_Bruning »

carnagii wrote: post #136

Laws like this are long past due. This particular law may not be the best implementation but governments do need to take action to provide their citizens with a real public square online. Excluding fake and paid users (without a declaration of who is paying them) from that space and protecting free speech in that space is essential to having a public policy discussion. Private corporations have not done this, and pro…

While de-anonymising users may or may not work to stop individual trolling and other abuse (the jury is still out); it most definitely enables organized troll groups. Therefore it's actually not a good idea at all.

Re: Austrian government seeks to eliminate internet anonymity, with severe penalties

#150

Post by arrozconcosas »

lazyjones wrote: post #143
jeena wrote: post #9

"Results show that in the context of online firestorms, non-anonymous individuals are more aggressive compared to anonymous individuals" https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

This legislation is not about "aggressive behaviour", it's about criminal conduct. While I can't comment professionally on the validity / reproducibility of this research (looks bogus to me, they only examined comments on an online petition platform, not FB and news sites where all the crazy people are[1]), anyone who'd claim that criminals don't prefer to be anonymous or that perceived anonymity has a negative effec…

Putting 2 innocent people through systems designed to assume they are guilty is worse than 1 guilty person being able to be anonymous. Look at what the TSA has done. They’ve wasted so much time and created a massive invasion of physical privacy (i.e. someone touching your private parts in public) and not only did they never catch anything, they fail 90% of penetration tests. There is some positive intent here but in the real world this is obvious to cause more harm than good. I don’t know if it is hubris or ignorance to not see how easily this will be manipulated and have negative externalities. You don’t jail your whole population because of 1 bad apple.
Post reply on HN