“Functional Anonymity” is something I’ve been very interested in lately. I define it as a way for a human to make an action that cannot be tied to them, but nonetheless the action is trusted as having come from a qualified person.
The easiest example of this are organized anonymous voting systems. People register to vote using qualified identification (ID card, proof of address, etc). On voting day they are checked in to a polling station by a trusted agent, but submit their votes anonymously. Though there are ways to beat this system it works very well and all legitimate democratic countries employ it to their benefit.
Early attempts on the web for functional anonymity were bound for failure as they relied on cookies, IP, user_agent strings, avatars and other methods that could not be tied to a person. Online trends moved away from these failures to public explicit reputation systems that tie a profile to a single presence on a site. Facebook became the winning example of this by connecting real name, photos, educational history, currrent employment, with a social graph of many other public profiles. Though there are ways to beat this system it works very well for what it is and thousands of Internet properties trust Facebook if it says a person is legitimate.
A new site launched recently called Unvarnished which I have been so interested in I have become an adviser. Unvarnished is where anyone can write a professional review of anyone anonymously. It sounds like it would be a giant slanderfest, but by employing functional anonymity tools it’s won’t. Yes, people’s post anonymously, but Unvarnished employs many tactics to determine the validity of that user and weight the reviews by the posters proven reputation. First off your Unvarnished account is automatically tied to your Facebook account and by seeing how legitimate you are on Facebook and how many friends of yours have good accounts on Unvarnished adds to your Unvarnished reputation. But if the Facebook account is brand new with only a handful of friends, that hurts your Unvarnished reputation. Then of course there is the reputation the poster builds with Unvarnished. If the user history only shows a single review with no comments not much is added to their reputation. If the user has a history of many reviews with varied ratings and added comments then that improves their reputation. There are dozens more methods to determine an account holders qualifications, authority and reputations I can’t go into, but the reality is that functional anonymity on the Internet is not an oxymoron, it’s not even something to be scared of, it something we are ready to explore again. Like any system there will be ways to beat it, but if managed both proactively and responsibly it should always be ways to ensure the overall trustworthiness of such a system.
A great benefit I’ve seen from actual usage of Unvarnished is that people who get negative reviews are able to respond to those reviews and if the criticism is constructive, they can use it to improve themselves.
I recently saw a review for Dave McClure where an entrepreneur said he had a great conversation with Dave, but never heard back from him. Dave replied with an apology that he had spread himself to thin. So the winner here is Dave. Without the anonymous shield provided to the original reviewer, Dave would probably never have heard this to his face, and stated it’s something he’s working on, and I’m sure he will which will be entirely to his professional gain.
Are there other examples you are seeing of functional anonymity that are redefining how we can trust a person is a person on the internet without have to click that we are friends or show a photo and name?
Also if you have an opinion you’d like to share about me, I’d be very happy for you to post it on Unvarnished. I’d say I’d gladly write you one back, but I’ll never know it was you who wrote it.