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Michael H. Sproule, a partner with the New York law firm of Akabas & Sproule, focuses his practice on intellectual property (particularly licensing, trademark and copyright practice) and corporate law. His experience includes work with both traditional and new economy clients in fields such as technology, the Internet, media and entertainment. A software programmer himself, Mike is interested in all aspects of technology and its impact on law and our society.

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The Alter Ego Advantage: Why Nom de Guerre by Populus Reduces Online Vulnerability

Written on
Sep 29, 2006 
Author
Michael H. Sproule  |
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The Alter Ego Advantage: Why Nom de Guerre by Populus Reduces Online Vulnerability

Eighteenth century America represents an earlier society so interconnected that anonymity was nearly impossible. Arranged around a society of small towns, little could be hidden from neighbors and acquaintenances. Strict defamation and sedition laws increased the risk, in particular, of publicly speaking or writing about controversial issues or public figures.

However, essayists adopted a classic work-around that allowed even well-known figures to separate their personal and public lives. Pennames were commonly used. We know, for example, that Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay penned The Federalist Papers under the name Publius. John Adams is thought to have used as many as 25 pseudonyms, including Populus and An American. Benjamin Franklin was partial to suggestive names, such as Silence Dogood, Alice Addertongue, and Obadiah Plainman.

Pennames allowed these revolutionary authors to create and control their public personas. Similarly, other revolutionaries, such as Che Guevara (Ernesto Guevara de la Serna, South American revolutionary) and Willy Brandt (Herbert Ernst Karl Frahm, German resistance fighter and later mayor of West Berlin) adopted noms de guerre to protect their lives and control their public identities.

Pseudonyms offer a model that could be used today to buffer between personal lives and public lives. A pseudonymous identity — a nom de guerre, if you will — makes an ideal way to interact in a networked world. A new service is needed that would allow individuals to easily adopt and control pseudonymous identities online and even in the real world.

Noms de guerre would allow individuals to take back their identities from the network, precisely controlling what is revealed in a way the law never will be able to do.





Reader Comments.

Mr. Sproule’s commentary is an excellent argument for the introduction of pseudonyms in order to protect either confidential or sensitive personal information on the public Internet.

No, the idea isn’t new, as Mr. Sproule points out, but the technology IS (relatively) new – and therein lies the dilemma.

Any reference to any person, once the information is posted anywhere on the PUBLIC Internet, will almost always get found by the likes of Google et-al.

A good example of this was Google’s CEO (too bad, so sad) whose home address got posted on the Web by none other than Google.

Nor is the use of single pseudonyms, or of multiple pseudonyms, say, with a free email service such as AOL or Hot Mail, do the trick BECAUSE the strategy of multiple identities for different online purposes, will tend to confuse even the persons who create their own pseudonyms in the first place.

What is required for Mr. Sproule’s particular purpose, since the “walled garden” concept is by now anachronism — is a private Internet for every person; and, this, happily, is rather handily done.

The way to do it is to construct a series of “purposeful” master channels, where a person can have multiple purposeful “identities”, all of which then redirect from personal pseudonyms inside level-three product, service and subject-related “domains”, such as, for example, , to a single “personal online domain” or “pod”.

The network to deal with exactly such an eventuality, meaning in effect an identity crisis for Internet end users, was constructed as far back as 1999 – and remains layered to this day across the public Internet.

Anyone who wants to know how “personal online domain services, or “pods” actually works, may contact me in care of my own personal online domain, or “pod”, which does exactly what Mr. Sproule evidently wants to see done: it protects my actual personal private information gleaned from multiple product, service and subject-specific activities on the public Internet — from the Googles of this world.

The Web address(es) for the purpose of this particular comment, even though one of my other Web addresses is posted at Adotas, can be either derick@adpods.com; or, to frustrate Google per se, derick@googlepod.com.

Try it for yourself and see how your query reaches me.

Posted by Derick Harris | 4:12 pm on September 29, 2006.

Privacy concerns are becoming a major social and legal issue these days.
Search engines play an important role in the whole equation.
The recent AOL Privacy Breach is just one example of what can happen if search engine user data are being stored.

 

Posted by Robert Beens | 7:16 pm on September 29, 2006.

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