The Mexican President doxes an NYT journalist and Marc Benioff surveils an NPR reporter.
Do we need "authentic pseudonyms" to operate online?
I tried to login to X the other day but I was blocked until I provided my phone number. I weighed the cost of losing access to the world’s most influential social media and quickly gave in. Elon Musk has my phone number.
Today my phone is full of spam text messages. Are these two things related? I can only guess.
A few related stories caught my attention this week when thinking about the right to privacy and how we navigate between the need for tech companies to make sure we are who we say we are and the flood of large scale AI impersonation. Should we share our personal information or should we have a right to anonymity?
If you write about drug cartels in Mexico, maybe you’d like to keep your phone number a secret to protect your personal safety and your ability to contact sources. This week the President of Mexico shockingly doxxed a New York Times reporter sharing their phone number in a speech. According to Axios, the reporter was looking into allegations that the President met with suspected cartel leaders for campaign money. The President denied the claim and responded to criticism by saying he was above Mexican law that protects against such sharing. He said his, “moral and political authority are above the privacy act.” Remind you of anyone we know closer to home?
An NPR reporter, Dara Kerr was looking into rumors about Marc Benioff, the Salesforce CEO buying up land in Hawaii. In Kerr’s deeply reported piece she writes that Benioff, “knew the exact area where I was staying. Unnerved, I asked how he knew, and he said, “It’s my job. You have a job and I have a job.” Benioff is also the owner of Time magazine.
Sometimes there is no choice at all about sharing your identity online. Did you know that by just going to a website, your email address can be collected even if you don't share it? I read about that shaddy digital marketing practice in a Thread this week by author Neil Patel, you can read it here.
You are also likely sharing location data without even being aware. Earlier this month, The FTC alleged that a company called X-Mode Social sold location data without the clear informed consent of users. Activist organization Free Press suggested that the firm, “agreed to provide location data to a clinical-research company. This included information about whether and for how long a given individual visited medical specialists and treatment facilities.”
Sebastian Hallensleben, is trying to help pin down an AI policy framework for the EU. Hallensleben believes we should all have access to a kind of pseudo identity that doesn’t share our real world details but is verified by non-governmental organizations like perhaps a bank.
He’s been looking at the idea of online identity in a much broader sense in the context of how AI is enabling anonymity and fake personhood for bad actors. Remember when Russia’s Internet Research Agency flooded social media with synthetic messages during the 2016 election? The University of Oxford has a deep dive on the extent to which those efforts intensified polarization. Back then Russia would have needed to pay people to create the messages, now foreign governments are operating at a much larger scale at a fraction of the cost thanks to AI.
“If you fake everything and now you can fake everyone and you can create arbitrary human beings then you have a whole new dimension to disinformation,” said Hallensleben. “It’s no longer a quality problem, it’s a quantity problem. You can push your own views just by the sheer quantity of bots you can launch.”
The New York Times has an interesting piece on former President Trump’s internet troll army and how it worked against rival Nikki Haley here.
Hallensleben’s concept, the Trusted Information and Identity Institute (TIIL), is looking at ideas to help create more trust in the digital space. He’s working with universities, corporations and government agencies to inform debate around AI and how we think about identity in the future.
“Opinion leadership or the perceived majority in the digital space, depends on who’s mobilizing the largest amount of bots and that’s a problem for democratic discourse. You are simulating a majority where there is no majority,” he says, adding these are also concerns for big business. “It’s a problem for the economy for doing business because so much online commerce relies on reviews.” Amazon is trying to stop AI generated fake reviews but losing the battle, according to a product called Fakespot.
I’m hoping that X is using my phone number as part of an effort to keep the bots at bay but I’m not holding my breath.
Commercial messages.
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