Anonymity

Historically, the concept of anonymity was associated with a state of nameless-ness. Being an anonym afforded certain advantages. It enabled the nameless to speak without fear of reprisal, or to engage in acts of charity or other forms of benevolence. At the same time, it made possible wrongdoing without accountability.
With the advent of computer-based communications networks, there has been a resurgence of interest in the nature and value of certain types of anonymity. The range of techniques by which individuals are able to operate incognito creates a virtual laboratory for experimenting with the social construction of identity. However, as the Internet’s surveillance potential becomes better understood and exploited, the measure of anonymity shifts from its historical focus on names to a broader investigation of a range of personal identifiers that can be linked to an individual. These include date of birth, marital status, Social Security number, passport information, property ownership, vehicle registration, driver’s license number, facial characteristics, height, e-mail address, place of business, phone number, credit card history, iris shape, fingerprints, retinal image, employment record, blood chemistry, roadway usage, gait pattern, consumer purchases, Internet search history, Internet protocol address, and other identifiers. Unbeknownst to many, the increasing ability to link these identifiers to an individual has resulted in a diminished ability to maintain anonymity, resulting in applications for subpoenas and court orders requiring third parties to disclose identifying information for the purposes of private lawsuits or police investigation. In light of the numerous possible identifiers in an information age, anonymity is perhaps best understood as a state of disconnection between one’s self and one’s identifiers; a state in which data cannot be associated with a particular individual, either from the data itself, or by combining it with other data. The value of anonymity, as philosopher Helen Nis-senbaum observes, lies not in the capacity to be unnamed, but in the possibility of acting or participating while remaining unreachable.
Anonymity’s characteristic of “unreachability” provides one means of achieving what legal scholar Alan Westin has defined as self-directed informational privacy: people who are able to disconnect their identities from their actions are better able to determine for themselves when, how, and to what extent information about them is communicated to others. Although it does not offer seclusion in the usual spatial sense, being anonymous affords a kind of isolation. Whereas credit card payments create traceable transactions, allowing a consumer’s activities to be tracked and a data profile to be created, anonymous payments preserve privacy.
Historically, the value of anonymity has had less to do with its privacy-enhancing potential than its political purpose. Anonymity has always been a crucial thread in the fabric of democracy. Anonymous voting ensured that citizens were free actors, that their political participation would remain uninfluenced by the tyranny of the majority or by undue pressure from other powerful groups. The Federalist Papers, a series of newspaper articles that became a bedrock of U.S. constitutional thought, although not truly anonymous, were written pseudonymously, using a fabricated name to cloak the identities of their authors while still allowing a mediated form of attribution. The same strategy was later employed by nineteenth-century female novelists to prevent gender discrimination from influencing how their work was received.
Now, as then, anonymity enables people to discuss taboo subjects with others. Whether face-to-face in a self-help group, or peer-to-peer in an online chat, sexual abuse, addiction, and disease are regularly confronted and sometimes overcome anonymously. For many persons, the mere assurance of anonymity is what emboldens them to participate in the first place. Alternatively, anonymity also enables unlawful associations and antisocial behavior, causing one U.S. Supreme Court justice to refer to anonymity as the “refuge of scoundrels.”
Because anonymity can yield good or bad outcomes, some perceive a conflict regarding its value and role in democratic societies. In the United States, political anonymity is a constitutional entitlement flowing from the right to freedom of expression and freedom of association. But the right to anonymous communication is not immutable; it must be balanced against state interests in protecting people’s reputations, in fighting fraud and crime, and in safeguarding national security. Whereas few would disagree that anonymous voting is desirable and anonymous criminal activity is undesirable, between these extremes lies a sea of uncertainty.
As the Internet continues to evolve, anonymity’s future abounds with question marks. The information trade has turned “dataveillance” into big business. Cybercrime legislation and the expanding ability of law enforcement agencies to collect personal information and intercept electronic communications has been proposed or enacted in many jurisdictions, and the demands for identification for everything from air travel to building entry are on the rise. At the same time, blogs, chat rooms, instant messaging and a number of other online environments provide exciting new venues for social and political participation that permit and even encourage individuals to conceal their actual identities. Millions of people using them have made clear their desire to withhold disclosure of their identities for a variety of legitimate social purposes, inspiring a number of cryptographers to develop systems of provable anonymity. The extent to which such applications will be permitted or adopted by governments or markets in the twenty-first century remains uncertain. Their potential uses and broader questions concerning the importance and impact of anonymity in a networked society are under investigation by a growing number of academics and privacy advocates.