Navigating the Unknown

There is much that has been written about anonymity on the Internet, but few have been able to speak with much certainty about it. SUNY Brockport philosophy professor Julie Ponesse attempts to come to terms with the ways in which someone can be considered anonymous:

So far, I have made two separate claims about anonymity. One is that anonymity is a measure of non-identification on a continuum between the absolute states of being wholly known (or fully onymous) and wholly unknown. The other is that anonymity involves concealment and not deception, on the one hand, or emptiness, on the other. Anonymity, therefore, is a phenomenon of genuine, but partial, identity concealment. But, since other phenomena such as secrecy, privacy, and mystery can reasonably be expressed as identity concealment, we need to isolate the specific kind of concealment that is unique to anonymity.

Most accounts of concealment, such as those common to theories of privacy, take it for granted that what it means for personal information to be concealed is for it to be undocumented or kept out of the public sphere. When people conceal their criminal pasts, for example, they keep their sordid histories from getting out in the open. But I think this broad sense of concealment is neither necessary to accomplish anonymity nor common to most cases of it. Consider a case in which someone (John) comes to know particular things about me—my age, where I live, etc.—but he does not know my medical record; it has been kept out of the public sphere. Now imagine a slightly different case in which John possesses my full medical record but he happens not to know that it belongs to me since he lacks the information he would need to attribute, or link, my medical record to me. I take it that the first example involves a straightforward privacy relation: John is aware of me but some of my personal information is hidden from him. The relation in the second case, however, is better expressed as anonymity than privacy. In that example, though my medical record is documented (and hence not private), John does not know that the documented information he possesses is about me. What distinguishes anonymity relations from privacy relations, therefore, is a difference in the way information about a person fails to be known. Whereas privacy is a function of which pieces of personal information are known simpliciter, anonymity relies on the extent to which that information is known about, or attributed to, a particular person.

Ponesse, J. (2013). Navigating the Unknown: Towards a Positive Conception of Anonymity. Southern Journal Of Philosophy, 51(3), 320-344.

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