Like most people here, I’m generally opposed to the current push for age and identity verification across the internet. I don’t particularly like the idea of handing over my personal information just to visit a website, participate in a discussion, or read something somebody considers inappropriate.
But I think there are two larger conversations we’re avoiding, and both are going to become increasingly important.
The first is something we complain about constantly: the toxicity of the internet.
How often do we hear people complain about trolls, harassment, misinformation, and the general hostility of online discussions? One of the explanations that comes up repeatedly is anonymity.
People can say things online that they would never dream of saying to someone standing in front of them. They can be deliberately cruel, spread nonsense, or spend their evenings antagonizing strangers with relatively little fear of consequences reaching their everyday lives.
There’s an old expression about people behaving differently when there’s a chance they might get punched in the mouth. I’m certainly not advocating violence, but there’s a legitimate observation buried in that expression. Social consequences influence how people behave.
And online, we’ve removed quite a few of those traditional consequences.
Yet when someone suggests introducing greater accountability through identity verification, many of the same people who complain about online toxicity immediately object.
And I understand why. I’m one of them.
But it does present an interesting contradiction. We recognize the problems associated with anonymous behavior while fiercely defending the conditions that can sometimes enable it.
Of course, anonymity isn’t the only reason people behave badly online. Plenty of people spread misinformation and harass others under their real names. And anonymity protects whistleblowers, vulnerable people, and those expressing unpopular opinions just as much as it protects trolls.
Which makes me wonder whether we’ve been framing this whole discussion incorrectly.
Maybe anonymity and accountability don’t actually have to be opposites.
There’s a considerable difference between being anonymous to the general public and being completely unaccountable for your actions. A person could maintain a persistent pseudonymous identity, build a reputation, and face meaningful community consequences without ever publishing their legal name.
The second conversation is about where technology is taking us.
For most of human history, knowledge and capability have been separated by practical barriers.
You could learn everything available about nuclear physics, but that didn’t mean you could walk down to the corner store and pick up two pounds of plutonium.
Actually doing something dangerous generally required specialized equipment, materials, training, or substantial institutional resources.
But we’re entering an era of increasingly capable AI, biotechnology, advanced manufacturing, and automation. Technology is steadily reducing some of those barriers.
What happens when someone with very little specialized knowledge can use advanced systems to accomplish something that previously required an entire team of experts?
At some point, unrestricted access to certain capabilities may become a genuine public safety concern.
And this is where I think we’re making a fundamental mistake with the current identity-verification debate.
We’re treating three very different questions as though they’re interchangeable:
- Are you old enough to access something?
- Who are you?
- Should you be authorized to perform a particular action?
Knowing someone’s age doesn’t establish their competence or intentions. Knowing their legal identity doesn’t necessarily make them responsible. And neither question necessarily determines whether they should have access to a potentially dangerous capability.
More importantly, reading about something isn’t the same as being able to do it.
I don’t think we should be constructing a universal identification system just because certain corners of the internet have problems with behavior, or because future technologies might introduce serious risks.
But I also don’t think we can assume that unrestricted, completely unaccountable access to every future capability will always be sustainable.
We need to start separating privacy from impunity, knowledge from capability, and identity from authorization.
Maybe that means persistent anonymous identities with meaningful reputations and community accountability. Maybe it means privacy-preserving credentials that establish qualifications without revealing personal information. Maybe genuinely dangerous capabilities eventually require narrowly defined authorization and independent oversight.
Any such system would also need safeguards against abuse, because whoever controls the authorization process gains considerable power over everyone else.
I don’t pretend to have a complete answer.
What concerns me is that we’re currently arguing over whether everyone should have to identify themselves, when the more important questions are what information is actually necessary, who gets access to it, what behaviors require accountability, and who has the authority to impose restrictions.
We shouldn’t have to choose between an internet where nobody can be held accountable and one where everybody has to surrender their privacy.
So I’m curious what other people think.
Can we preserve meaningful anonymity while still creating meaningful accountability? And as technology makes increasingly powerful capabilities available to ordinary people, where should we draw the line between the freedom to learn and the authorization to act?
If a system could make a person accountable for specific harmful actions without revealing their identity to the public, would that address your concerns, or is even that degree of traceability unacceptable?
