Nora McDonald
Benjamin Mako Hill
Andrea Forte
ABSTRACT
Anonymity can enable both healthy online interactions like support-seeking and toxic behaviors like hate speech. How do online service providers balance these threats and opportunities? This two-part qualitative study examines the challenges perceived by open collaboration service providers in allowing anonymous contributions to their projects. We interviewed eleven people familiar with organizational decisions related to privacy and security at five open collaboration projects and followed up with an analysis of public discussions about anonymous contribution to Wikipedia. We contrast our findings with prior work on threats perceived by project volunteers and explore misalignment between policies aiming to serve contributors and the privacy practices of contributors themselves.
- Irwin Altman. 1975. The Environment and Social Behavior: Privacy, Personal Space, Territory, Crowding (Clean & Tight Contents edition ed.). Brooks/Cole, Monterey, California.Google Scholar
- Irwin Altman. 1977. Privacy Regulation: Culturally Universal or Culturally Specifc? Journal of Social Issues 33, 3 (1977), 66--84.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Herbert Blumer. 1954. What is wrong with social theory. American Sociological Review 19, 1 (1954), 3--10.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Anne Bowser, Katie Shilton, Jenny Preece, and Elizabeth Warrick. 2017. Accounting for Privacy in Citizen Science: Ethical Research in a Context of Openness. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW '17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2124--2136. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Susan L. Bryant, Andrea Forte, and Amy Bruckman. 2005. Becoming Wikipedian: transformation of participation in a collaborative online encyclopedia. In Proceedings of the 2005 ACM International Conference on Supporting Groupwork (Group) (GROUP '05). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1--10. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Nicholas Diakopoulos and Mor Naaman. 2011. Towards Quality Discourse in Online News Comments. In Proceedings of the ACM 2011 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW '11). ACM, New York, New York, 133--142. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Roger Dingledine, Nick Mathewson, and Paul Syverson. 2004. Tor: The Second-generation Onion Router. In Proceedings of the 13th Conference on USENIX Security Symposium - Volume 13 (SSYM '04). USENIX Association, Berkeley, CA, USA, 21--21. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id= 1251375.1251396 Google ScholarDigital Library
- Judith S. Donath. 1998. Identity and deception in the virtual community (Peter Kollock and Marc Smith (eds.) ed.). Routledge, London, UK, 29--59. CHI 2019, May 4--9, 2019, Glasgow, Scotland UKGoogle Scholar
- Peter Eckersley. 2010. How Unique Is Your Web Browser?. In Privacy Enhancing Technologies (Lecture Notes in Computer Science). Springer, Berlin, Germany, 1--18. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Heather Ford and Judy Wajcman. 2017. 'Anyone can edit', not everyone does: Wikipedia's infrastructure and the gender gap. Social Studies of Science 47, 4 (Aug 2017), 511--527.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Andrea Forte, Nazanin Andalibi, and Rachel Greenstadt. 2017. Privacy, Anonymity, and Perceived Risk in Open Collaboration: A Study of Tor Users and Wikipedians. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW '17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1800--1811. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Andrea Forte and Clif Lampe. 2013. Defning, Understanding, and Supporting Open Collaboration: Lessons From the Literature. American Behavioral Scientist 57, 5 (May 2013), 535--547.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Gerald Friedland and Robin Sommer. 2010. Cybercasing the Joint: On the Privacy Implications of Geo-tagging. In Proceedings of the 5th USENIX Conference on Hot Topics in Security (HotSec '10). USENIX Association, Berkeley, CA, USA, 1--8. Google ScholarDigital Library
- James Paul Gee. 2000. Identity as an Analytic Lens for Research in Education. Review of Research in Education 25 (2000), 99--125.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss. 1967. The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research. Aldine Transaction, New Brunswick, NJ, USA.Google Scholar
- Erving Gofman. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Doubleday Anchor, Garden City, NY, USA.Google Scholar
- Aaron Halfaker, R Stuart Geiger, Jonathan T Morgan, and John Riedl. 2013. The rise and decline of an open collaboration system: How Wikipedia's reaction to popularity is causing its decline. American Behavioral Scientist 57, 5 (2013), 664--688.Google ScholarCross Ref
- R. Henry and I. Goldberg. 2011. Formalizing Anonymous Blacklisting Systems. In 2011 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. IEEE, New York, NY, USA, 81--95. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Daniel C. Howe and Helen Nissenbaum. 2009. TrackMeNot: Resisting surveillance in web search (ian kerr, carole lucock, and valier m. steeves ed.). Oxford, New York, NY, USA, 417--436.Google Scholar
- Corey Brian Jackson, Kevin Crowston, and Carsten Østerlund. 2018. Did they login?: Patterns of anonymous contributions in online communities. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 2 (Nov. 2018), 77:1--77:16. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Ruogu Kang, Stephanie Brown, and Sara Kiesler. 2013. Why Do People Seek Anonymity on the Internet?: Informing Policy and Design. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '13). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2657--2666. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Clif Lampe and Paul Resnick. 2004. Slash(Dot) and Burn: Distributed Moderation in a Large Online Conversation Space. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '04). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 543--550. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Robert S. Laufer and Maxine Wolfe. 1977. Privacy as a Concept and a Social Issue: A Multidimensional Developmental Theory. Journal of Social Issues 33, 3 (Jul 1977), 22--42.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Xiao Ma, Jef Hancock, and Mor Naaman. 2016. Anonymity, Intimacy and Self-Disclosure in Social Media. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 3857--3869. N. McDonald et al. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Gary T. Marx. 1999. What's in a Name? Some Refections on the Sociology of Anonymity. The Information Society 15, 2 (1999), 99--112.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Amanda Menking and Ingrid Erickson. 2015. The Heart Work of Wikipedia: Gendered, Emotional Labor in the World's Largest Online Encyclopedia. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 207--210. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Suvda Myagmar, Adam J. Lee, and William Yurcik. 2005. Threat modeling as a basis for security requirements. In StorageSS '05: Proceedings of the 2005 ACM workshop on Storage security and survivability. ACM, New York, NY, USA.Google Scholar
- Dawn Nafus. 2012. 'Patches don't have gender': What is not open in open source software. New Media & Society 14, 4 (Jun 2012), 669--683.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Arvind Narayanan and Vitaly Shmatikov. 2009. De-anonymizing Social Networks. In Proceedings of the 2009 30th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP '09). IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA, 173--187. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Helen Nissenbaum. 2010. Privacy in context: technology, policy, and the integrity of social life. Stanford Law Books, Stanford, Calif. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Michael Patton. 2001. Qualitative Research & Evaluation Methods (3rd edition ed.). SAGE Publications, Inc, Thousand Oaks, CA, USA.Google Scholar
- Tom Postmes, Russel Spears, and Martin Lea. 1998. Breaching or Building Social Boundaries?: SIDE-Efects of Computer-Mediated Communication. Communication Research 25, 6 (Dec 1998), 689--715.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Lee Rainie, Sara Kiesler, Ruogu Kang, and Mary Madden. 2013. Anonymity, Privacy, and Security Online. Pew Research Center, Washington, DC, USA. http://www.pewinternet.org/2013/09/05/ anonymity-privacy-and-security-online/Google Scholar
- Rebecca Rogers, Elizabeth Malancharuvil-Berkes, Melissa Mosley, Diane Hui, and Glynis O'Garro Joseph. 2005. Critical Discourse Analysis in Education: A Review of the Literature. Review of Educational Research 75, 3 (2005), 365--416.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Sarita Yardi Schoenebeck. 2013. The Secret Life of Online Moms: Anonymity and Disinhibition on Youbemom.Com. In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, ICWSM 2013 (ICWSM '13). AAAI, Palo Alto, CA, USA, 555--562. https://www. aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM13/paper/view/5973Google Scholar
- Alfred Schutz. 1967. The Phenomenology of the Social World. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, USA.Google Scholar
- Daniel J. Solove. 2006. A Taxonomy of Privacy. University of Pennsylvania Law Review 154, 3 (2006), 477--564.Google ScholarCross Ref
- John Suler. 2004. The online disinhibition efect. Cyberpsychology & Behavior: The Impact of the Internet, Multimedia and Virtual Reality on Behavior and Society 7, 3 (Jun 2004), 321--326.Google ScholarCross Ref
- John R. Suler and Wende L. Phillips. 1998. The Bad Boys of Cyberspace: Deviant Behavior in a Multimedia Chat Community. CyberPsychology & Behavior 1, 3 (Jan 1998), 275--294.Google ScholarCross Ref
- P. P. Tsang, A. Kapadia, C. Cornelius, and S. W. Smith. 2011. Nymble: Blocking Misbehaving Users in Anonymizing Networks. IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing 8, 2 (Mar 2011), 256--269. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Samuel D Warren and Louis D Brandeis. 1890. The Right to Privacy. Harvard Law Review 4, 5 (15 Dec 1890), 193--220.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Alan F. Westin. 2003. Social and Political Dimensions of Privacy. Journal of Social Issues 59, 2 (Jul 2003), 431--453.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Pamela Wisniewski, A.K.M. Najmul Islam, Bart P. Knijnenburg, and Sameer Patil. 2015. Give Social Network Users the Privacy They Want. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW '15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1427--1441. Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- Privacy, Anonymity, and Perceived Risk in Open Collaboration: A Study of Service Providers
Recommendations
A Forensic Qualitative Analysis of Contributions to Wikipedia from Anonymity Seeking Users
By choice or by necessity, some contributors to commons-based peer production sites use privacy-protecting services to remain anonymous. As anonymity seekers, users of the Tor network have been cast both as ill-intentioned vandals and as vulnerable ...
Privacy, Anonymity, and Perceived Risk in Open Collaboration: A Study of Tor Users and Wikipedians
CSCW '17: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social ComputingThis qualitative study examines privacy practices and concerns among contributors to open collaboration projects. We collected interview data from people who use the anonymity network Tor who also contribute to online projects and from Wikipedia editors ...
Investigating the Motivational Paths of Peer Production Newcomers
CHI '17: Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsMaintaining participation beyond the initial period of engagement is critical for peer production systems. Theory suggests that an increase in motivation is expected with contributors' movement from the community periphery to the core. Less is known, ...
Comments