Perceptions and Use of Anonymous Communication across Cultures

We use social networks to communicate, keep in touch and express our opinions in a manner that has become completely ubiquitous. However, this very ubiquity and ease of expression have exposed another, contentious side – one where nobody can remain completely anonymous for long and where every conversation is stored in perpetuity. Some fear that the ephemeral quality of a social interaction has been lost, which threatens our right to be forgotten and freedom of expression. In this paper, we look at why people engage in anonymous communication, and if there is a perceived need for legal protection of anonymous communication. Moreover, this paper attempts to identify cultural stratifications, if any, in the ways in which people of various cultures perceive the importance of anonymous communications. The primary cultural clusters we studied are Anglo (e.g. Australia, Canada, England, USA) and Eastern European (e.g. Albania, Bulgaria, Moldova, Russia). Our data set consists of 374 responses to our survey from people belonging to these cultures. We found that perceived freedom afforded by anonymous communication and propensity to trust are both positively related to use of anonymous communication, which in turn is positively related to perceived need for legal protection of anonymous communication. Moreover, we found that the relationship between propensity to trust and use of anonymous communication is stronger for respondents in the Eastern Europe cultural cluster than for respondents in non-Eastern Europe cultural clusters

Intrapersonal Groupthink and Online Disclosure: A Thematic Analysis of Reddit’s r/SuicideWatch

This paper examined the anonymous r/SuicideWatch subreddit, a part of the popular anonymous message board, Reddit, to better understand disclosure in anonymous online spaces. r/SuicideWatch takes an ambiguous stance on suicide, neither condoning nor condemning it, thus creating a space where users are often affirmed in pro-suicide beliefs. This study utilized a thematic analysis to consider the semantic, latent, and cultural themes of r/SuicideWatch to better understand what was taking place on the website as users processed ideas that are often culturally taboo. Analysis of dialogue that included phrases like “does anyone else” or “me too” suggests that users seek a shared human experience among other users to discuss suicide. However, the presence of groupthink (Janis, 1972) may indicate that users do not seek real dialogue but rather that they may utilize r/SuicideWatch as a safe space to explore these challenging ideas and engage in fantasy exploration where they will be validated. Also notable was the heavy presence of intrapersonal communication as posters failed to interact with one another even as they replied to posts; the dialogue they shared lacked interaction with other users and appeared to be primarily for their own benefit. This may suggest that users utilize r/SuicideWatch as a means to process their own experiences and ideas rather than to interact with the ideas of others. This in-depth look at r/SuicideWatch is an important part of a much larger conversation about anonymous online communication and the interaction that takes place there

A Better Understanding of College Students\u27 YouTube Behaviors

The purpose of this research study is to get a closer look into the behavior of college students towards the video streaming website YouTube. The objective is to understand whether the benefits of publishing videos on the site are positive for business organizations. The study looks at many variables that would help companies better understand what exactly publishing a video on YouTube would do for them. These variables include gender, hours of television watched, hours of Internet used, hours spent reading and whether a video is made by a regular user or a professional company. It was found that males are more likely to use YouTube then females, despite using the Internet much less. It was also shown that there are both pros and cons for implementing user and corporate developed videos

Quantum Anonymous Transmissions

We consider the problem of hiding sender and receiver of classical and quantum bits (qubits), even if all physical transmissions can be monitored. We present a quantum protocol for sending and receiving classical bits anonymously, which is completely traceless: it successfully prevents later reconstruction of the sender. We show that this is not possible classically. It appears that entangled quantum states are uniquely suited for traceless anonymous transmissions. We then extend this protocol to send and receive qubits anonymously. In the process we introduce a new primitive called anonymous entanglement, which may be useful in other contexts as well.Comment: 18 pages, LaTeX. Substantially updated version. To appear at ASIACRYPT '0

Shortest Path Computation with No Information Leakage

Shortest path computation is one of the most common queries in location-based services (LBSs). Although particularly useful, such queries raise serious privacy concerns. Exposing to a (potentially untrusted) LBS the client's position and her destination may reveal personal information, such as social habits, health condition, shopping preferences, lifestyle choices, etc. The only existing method for privacy-preserving shortest path computation follows the obfuscation paradigm; it prevents the LBS from inferring the source and destination of the query with a probability higher than a threshold. This implies, however, that the LBS still deduces some information (albeit not exact) about the client's location and her destination. In this paper we aim at strong privacy, where the adversary learns nothing about the shortest path query. We achieve this via established private information retrieval techniques, which we treat as black-box building blocks. Experiments on real, large-scale road networks assess the practicality of our schemes.Comment: VLDB201

When Is Employee Blogging Protected by Section 7 of the NLRA?

The National Labor Relations Act forbids employers from retaliating against certain types of employee speech or intimidating those who engage in it. This iBrief examines how blogging fits into the current statutory framework and recommends how the National Labor Relations Board and the courts should address the unique features of employee blogs

RoboCast: Asynchronous Communication in Robot Networks

This paper introduces the \emph{RoboCast} communication abstraction. The RoboCast allows a swarm of non oblivious, anonymous robots that are only endowed with visibility sensors and do not share a common coordinate system, to asynchronously exchange information. We propose a generic framework that covers a large class of asynchronous communication algorithms and show how our framework can be used to implement fundamental building blocks in robot networks such as gathering or stigmergy. In more details, we propose a RoboCast algorithm that allows robots to broadcast their local coordinate systems to each others. Our algorithm is further refined with a local collision avoidance scheme. Then, using the RoboCast primitive, we propose algorithms for deterministic asynchronous gathering and binary information exchange