Way back in 2006 I had a series of newsletters about anonymity. That’s when I first tried to separate anonymity from privacy — but they still keep getting confused to this day.
Way back in 2006 I had a series of newsletters about anonymity (see “How far can you remain totally anonymous online?“). That’s when I first tried to separate anonymity from privacy — but they still keep getting confused to this day. After that I pretty much left anonymity alone and concentrated on defining and refining privacy in various digital contexts.
If I thought at all about anonymity it was in a political or legal context: Could someone post opinions without fear of retribution by doing so anonymously, and what weight should be given to anonymous postings?
DISCUSSION: What is privacy, really?
Turns out, though, that there’s another context for anonymity, one not viewed so positively and one I hadn’t thought about because of my own context: 1) I’ve been married for 40 years and 2) I haven’t hired someone in 20 years.
A recent New York Times column (“Digital Diary: Is Anonymity Dead?” showed me what I was missing.
Jenna Wortham wrote:
“Consider a recent conversation with a friend: She was excited about an upcoming date with a new guy. There was just one concern — she couldn’t find anything on him after a cursory Google search. No pictures on Flickr or even an ancient MySpace account. His Twitter messages were nondescript and his Facebook profile — or at least what she thought was his — was sparsely filled out and his picture was blurry.”
The guy had a good job and, according to the girl, a good reputation — but the lack of a solid Web presence made her uneasy.
Turns out that lots of people make a Web search of others all the time — and Wortham notes: “… not being able to find anything on the Web about a potential employee, babysitter or romantic connection could be considered borderline suspicious.”
Now what she’s talking about is, at most, relative anonymity. As I noted five years ago:
“If you look up ‘anonymity’ at answers.com, you’ll find some variations in definition:
• ‘The quality or state of being unknown or unacknowledged.’ (The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
• ‘The quality or state of being obscure.’ (Roget’s II: The New Thesaurus, Third Edition)
As the security experts will tell you, there’s a wide gap between ‘unknown’ and ‘obscure’!”
The lesson to be learned? When we’re implementing relative anonymity and privacy controls it’s well to remember that too much might have a negative impact. An Aristotelian approach (the Doctrine of the Mean, “Moral virtues are states of character lying at the mean between extremes of excess and deficiency”) might be best.
