Anonymity and accountability in self-organizing electronic communities

In this paper we study the problem of anonymity versus accountability in electronic communities. We argue that full anonymity may present a security risk that is unacceptable in certain applications; therefore, anonymity and accountability are both needed. To resolve the inherent contradiction between anonymity and accountability in a flexible manner, we introduce the concepts of internal and external accountabilities. Intuitively, internal accountability applies to virtual users only, and is governed by the policy of a group (a community). In contrast, external accountability is needed to address issues related to misuse if the activity is to be penalized in real life according to internal rules or external laws. We provide a set of protocols to ensure that users' virtual and real identities cannot be disclosed unnecessarily, and allow users to monitor the data collected about them as well as to terminate their membership (both real and virtual) under certain conditions. We develop a general conceptual model of electronic Editorial Board (e-EB). In our thinking, there are deep connections between anonymity and self-organization. In turn, the concept of self-organizing e-EB (SO-eEB) is introduced here, and a robotic example is provided. Finally, SO-eEB is specialized to Anonymous and Accountable Self-Organizing Communities (A2SOCs), that fully supports internal and external accountability while providing anonymity.