= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Viliam_Bur comments on Open thread, Feb. 9 - Feb. 15, 2015 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (321)
I am thinking about having a small side income, but without advertising to anyone who types my name in Google. The plan is roughly the following:
I will make computer games and publish them on Google Play and/or Steam. To increase visibility, I will also have a Facebook page, and write a blog about making these games. Just for the sake of experiment, I will also make a Patreon and/or Gratipay account and ask for donations. For these purposes, I will use a pseudonym; the same one for all the platforms, to build brand awareness. I will also use this pseudonym for debating programming and games on Stack Exchange, Reddit, and/or Twitter. I will keep this aspect of my life separated from everything else, because I want this identity to appear as a more or less one-dimensional personality: a simple guy who makes games and has absolutely no controversial opinions (e.g. about politics or religion) ever.
The question is, if you have experience with the services I have mentioned, how much anonymity can I achieve while 100% following their terms of service?
To explain my intentions, following all the terms of services is my highest priority. Because, in a hypothetical chance of huge success, I would hate if suddenly one of those website would delete my account for violations of their rules. The anonymity does not have to be perfect; I would be satisfied with the level Scott Alexander has, although the more the better. (I wouldn't bother using Tor to hide my IP address or anything inconvenient.) I just don't want people who know me to realize that this is my project, unless I tell them; and I don't want people who will play my games to effortlessly find who I am and what other things I do online.
What I found so far: Creating a new GMail account is not a problem. It will not even be inconvenient, because it is easy to switch between multiple google accounts; and I can automatically forward mails from the pseudonymous address to my new address, so I will not miss anything. On the other hand, Google Play recently requires developers to publish their home address. Well, without my name there, I could still pretends it was some neighbor in the (unlikely, in my opinion) case someone would notice. Facebook requires real name when making a user account, but allows creating "business pages" which do not display the owner's name. I am not sure about the other services yet. To explain: I do not mind if the website owners know my real name; I just don't want them to display it to any other user.
Has anyone here tried something similar (building a pseudonymous identity using these websites following their terms of service)? Can you share your experience?
EDIT: Okay, thanks everyone for helping me think about it. Now I realize that "selling to people", "legal", "easy", and "anonymous" are not possible together. Usually one has to disclose their identity to people they do business with. There are ways to cheat here; and there are also complicated ways to do this legally. But since I want to stay within the legal framework, and I don't want to spend too much resources on this, then the anonymity will have to go.
I still have an option to use some pseudonym as a trademark, if I decide so -- there may be good reasons for doing so, for example the pseudonym may sound better, or be easier to remember -- but at the end of the day, my real name will be written somewhere in small letters. Most people will not care, most people may not notice it, but if anyone will want to know, they will know. Okay; I can live with that. Again, thanks everyone!
You need what's known in the industry as a "threat model". You want to be pseudonymous against whom?
Let me offer you examples of answers:
Uhm, probably a random person who has no specific suspicion; they are just curious and decided to spend 10 minutes on google trying to find everything about me. Not an investigative journalist, but let's say an average journalist who has a not very important interview with me on an unrelated topic, and is doing a general background check.
The old way is to employ someone to serve as a front man. Everything is in their name, but you run it and collect the paychecks.
For a more modern approach, you can find a country that's happy to host your business and won't ask questions. If you do it right you could obfuscate it enough that one would have to obtain warrants in three different countries to discover your involvement. But unless you're running a drug cartel or terrorist network, it's probably more trouble than its worth.
Let's flip this around:
Which sounds fine if you're publishing that software as open-source to people who can inspect it ... but not so great if you're publishing it to people who don't have any way of telling what that software is up to!
(Which isn't to say that you're up to anything bad; just that the market is such that a lot of people are up to something bad, and this leads to market operators taking some measures against eagerly supporting untraceable authors.)
This sounds like more anonymity than Scott Alexander has. Scott's real name is easy to work out from reading his blog. What you can't easily do is google his real name and find SSC.
(OTOH, I suspect it wouldn't be too difficult to go from SA levels of anonymity to the level you want. Someone who didn't know Alexander was a pseudonym could probably read much of SSC without ever realizing. Don't quote news articles about your brother, and don't link to other websites controlled by you, and you're probably safe unless you get a determined stalker.)
Google Play not only requires a home address but also a credit card for payment (you can't pay with Google Wallet). Credit cards are connected to identities by banks who in turn spend effort into people not having faux cards. There are also laws, that punish you for lying to banks to get credit cards under false names.
Why? App publishing is mostly anti-fragile against criticism. Scott jobs as a doctor on the other hand isn't anti-fragile, so he has to care about his job not getting messed up by blog articles he writes.
As long as Google Play will not display my name on the credit card to users, I am okay with that. Google probably already knows about me more than anyone including myself. The problem with the home address is that according to recent changes in the terms of service, the address is displayed to users. Quoting Google Play Developer Distribution Agreement:
Actually, now that I think about it, maybe "valid contact information" also includes my name (assuming I don't have a company). I could use a pseudonym, and write the pseudonym on my mailbox, so the post office would find me (and so would anyone who bothers to come personally to my home, which I don't care about), but if someone would send a registered letter to my pseudonym, I would not be able to take it. Damn.
Uhm, reading about GamerGate made me a bit cautious. I am libertarian-ish, and I really hate the authoritarian left. In case of achieving some success selling the games, I would hate to lose a Twitter or Patreon account just because I forgot to bite my tongue, criticized Z.Q. or A.S. somewhere on the internet, and invoked a wrath of their followers. Or anyone else, in a similar situation, five years later. (If I can trust online rumors, a few people have lost their accounts at these websites after stepping on wrong person's toes.) Other than this, I think that any controversy would probably only increase the sales. I don't want to use this strategy; just saying.
I think Google Play assumes that most developers will operate from behind the corporate veil: the front-page name and address will belong to a business (even if it has a single owner -- you, and a single employee -- you).
That's a useful idea in general: if you are selling goods to the public, being protected from unlimited liability is a good thing.
I don't think he can register a business in his country without attaching his identity to it.
Of course, but that's why we're talking about pseudonymity (and not true anonymity) and that's why the thread model comes into it.
The corporate veil is not a protection against e.g. law enforcement (unless you hire smart and expensive lawyers :-D) but is a pretty good protection against casual busybodies.
You can look up the ownership of a company on the internet. At least you can where I live.
I would be surprised if the people-search-engine's wouldn't include US corporate ownership.
It might be that living in Slovakia gives him advantages in that regard. A quick search shows:
Yep. Click here, enter the company name on the first line, click the first button... and you get a list of owners' names and addresses.
Unless the company is owned by another company, which is registered in another country, etc.
Sure. Did that, put in "ALBRECHT, a.s.", got the full documentation including the list of the executive officers of the company and their board of directors. Who owns it? Um, no idea.
Can you, now?
How about a couple of examples. Tell me who owns:
As far as the first instance goes I can see that the company was founded in JUNE 16, 1911 via the New York registry and it would cost 5$ to request the documents
As far as Moonlighting Apps goes, the domain is owned by someone in Argentina. I don't know the Spanish to navigate through that countries registry easily to find how the company is registered.
And how would that registration from 1911 help you? :-)
Google likely notices when the name on the address and the name on the credit card aren't the same.
I don't know the situation in your country but in my own, every website needs to include valid contact information and valid means that you have an address towards which legally binding court orders can be sent.
That's my point.
You are making trade-off. You lose something by separating identities. You can't promote your game out of your main identity.
I think that identity separation would only makes sense if you would sell controversial games. Maybe adult content ;)
What does "in my [country]" mean for a website? Do you mean physically hosted on German soil? That's... easy to overcome. Do you mean owned by a German citizen? How would they know?
I'm not sure to what extend courts are going to judge to which jurisdiction a website belongs but I think most websites owned by German citizens count.
Because you weren't careful about separating your identities. Any competitor can ask a lawyer to send you a cease and desist letter to comply with law of having a proper impressum and that lawyer can bill you for sending that letter.
The German wikipedia does provide a summary: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impressumspflicht
Forbidden by Google Play terms of service. ;)
Whatever pseudonym you choose, don't say it here.
Sure.
Okay, this helped me realize that pseudonyms also have a cost. There are people who like me, who would like to try a game made by me, and maybe even support me by showing the game to their friends. These are the customers I will lose. And LessWrong is an international website; it could be a vector to reach many countries, if I would announce the game in the bragging thread. I'll think about it.
(Alternatively, as a way of building plausible deniability, I might start randomly mentioning new indie developers from Slovakia. Here is my friend Vladoft.)
Bad idea. Then people will get suspicious about the new, great game designer who's conspicuously not being named here.
How do you know Vladoft isn't actually his alias?