Research 2 : Anonymity on the internet

Source

Anonymity on the internet
http://people.dsv.su.se/~jpalme/society/anonymity.html


What I hope to learn from this topic

I want to give readers background knowledge about anonymity before interenet and argue that anonymity is not something which was invented with the internet.


Note

Anonymity is not something which was invented with the Internet. Anonymity and pseudonymity has occurred throughout history. For example, William Shakespeare is probably a pseudonym, and the real name of this famous author is not known and will probably never be known.

Anonymity has been used for many purposes.

A well-known person may use a pseudonym to write messages, where the person does not want people's preconception of the real author color their perception of the message.

Also other people may want to hide certain information about themselves in order to achieve a more unbiased evaluation of their messages. For example, in history it has been common that women used male pseudonyms, and for Jews to use pseudonyms in societies where their religion was persecuted.

Anonymity is often used to protect the privacy of people, for example when reporting results of a scientific study, when describing individual cases.

Many countries even have laws which protect anonymity in certain circumstances. Examples:

A person may, in many countries, consult a priest, doctor or lawyer and reveal personal information which is protected. In some cases, for example confession in catholic churches, the confession booth is specially designed to allow people to consult a priest, without seeing him face to face.

The anonymity in confessional situations is however not always 100 %. If a person tells a lawyer that he plans a serious crime, some countries allow or even require that the lawyer tell the police. The decision to do so is not easy, since people who tell a priest or a psychologist that they plan a serious crime, may often do this to express their feeling more than their real intention.

Many countries have laws protecting the anonymity of tip-offs to newspapers. It is regarded as important that people can give tips to newspapers about abuse, even though they are dependent on the organization they are criticizing and do not dare reveal their real name.

Advertisement in personal sections in newspapers are almost always signed by a pseudonym for obvious reasons.

 

Final thoughts

 

I think it is good information to argue that anonymity is existed before interent is invented so it makes opponents hard to argue that interenet anonymity is not natural.