Who are you? Non? Anon?

"The Caterpillar and Alice looked at each other for some time in silence: At last the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth and addressed her in a languid, sleepy voice. "Who are YOU?" said the Caterpillar. This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation." -- "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" by Lewis Carroll

Indeed ... what a good question: Who are you?

And for that matter, who am I?

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"The Caterpillar and Alice looked at each other for some time in silence: At last the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth and addressed her in a languid, sleepy voice. "Who are YOU?" said the Caterpillar. This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation." -- "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" by Lewis Carroll

Indeed ... what a good question: Who are you?

And for that matter, who am I?

Last week I began a discussion on privacy and distinguished factual privacy ("static" facts about you like the color of your hair) from "lifestream" privacy (information about what you do, where you go and who you communicate with).

IN THE NEWS: LinkedIn hurries to address privacy spat

Before I follow up, as threatened, by discussing how businesses abuse their knowledge of your lifestream data, this week we need expand on our discussion of privacy by delving into the issue of identity.

Identity is always a tricky issue in the real world, let alone online. For example, you might think you have some reasonably sound idea about who I am IRL (In Real Life) such as -- and I'm just, as they say, "spit-balling" here -- an expostulator of opinions, a butcher of tech products, an international man of mystery, someone whose middle name is "Danger" and a doctor of divinity (I am available for weddings). But what do you really know about me? What can you verify?

If we were to meet in "meatspace" (a.k.a., face-to-face or FTF), you'd be able to make all of those amazingly quick monkey-brain judgments about my "friend or foe-ness" that a million years of evolution have equipped us to do (of course, if you've read "The Sociopath Next Door: The Ruthless vs. the Rest of Us," or "The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry," you might be a little more cautious about your reflexive conclusions).

But in today's online business and social worlds, we might never meet FTF, and online many people often choose to hide their identities to a greater or lesser degree.

If you don't want your identity known online then you have to consider online anonymity. In meatspace, anonymity is like standing behind a curtain and having a conversation with your voice disguised.

While there's a similarity between online and offline anonymity, being anonymous online is somewhat simpler than in the real world. That said, should you attract the attention of certain powerful people, there's a chance that how you implement your anonymity might not be effective. Even more crucially, that chance will be modified by the technical lengths you are willing to go to ensure your anonymity.

Online anonymity comes in two flavors: what you might call "shallow anonymity" and "deep anonymity."

Shallow anonymity is what you get when, for example, you read this column online and post a comment without logging in. This is allowed in many forums such as those run by Network World and maximizes the possibility of getting feedback but also occasionally leads to such evils as comment spam and incivility.