But still, it’s useful to keep in mind that it’s a game, where freedom is how we keep score. And ultimately, privacy depends on anonymity, or at least pseudonymity. Given all the authoritarian threats, freedom depends on privacy. It’s fun, and a challenge.īut fundamentally, I do all this because I value freedom. Sometimes I just say that it’s a hobby, or a game.
Indeed, after I’ve gone on about this stuff on Hacker News, someone occasionally asks why I go to all the trouble. And whether you can live with the requirements, and the consequences. It helps to be clear about why you want to be anonymous online. At least, as long as we don’t create online identities, and so become pseudonymous. Still, remote adversaries ideally just see activity, with metadata that’s not associated with anyone in particular. But that can’t be helped, unless we use some undetectable channel. That itself is metadata about us, that we’re people who hide what we do online. But they can also see when we’re online, and the traffic patterns (bits/second vs time). Local adversaries can see that we’re using the Internet, if not what we’re doing. Some metadata is impossible (or at least, very difficult) to hide. And the degree of anonymity depends on both our goals, and our operational security (OPSEC). To be anonymous, we must protect all data and metadata.
Privacy is about protecting data, and some metadata. In other words, anonymity, pseudonymity and privacy are distinguishable in the context of data and metadata. Or at least, only after a few cycles of Google Translate, through multiple languages. But others are very different, and never write in English. So they just hinder search-based linking, and provide some more or less plausible deniability. Some of them are a lot like Mirimir, do similar stuff, and write in English. They’re all sort of anonymous, or pseudonymous. And neither are any of the personas that I use via Tor. Such as email addresses, and accounts on sites. And it’s also pretty aggressive about window size, installing additional add-ons, and so on.īut even with Tor browser, anonymity is toast as soon as we create online identities. And there are just a few security levels, to limit diversity. But Tor browser is very proactive about updating itself, so everyone is at least using the same version. But in practice, that’s not possible, given that people use Tor browser on different hardware. I mean, it’s the goal of Tor browser for all users to be more or less indistinguishable. So anonymity helps protect privacy, and circularly, it also helps protect against deanonymization.īut anonymity isn’t all or nothing. And if we’re anonymous enough, adversaries can’t piece together information about us, and so distinguish us from everyone else. With anonymity, we can express ourselves more freely, with less concern about consequences and coercion. And it’s about controlling access to our identities. 1) What Is Anonymity?Īnonymity is an aspect of privacy. But it’s also about protecting what we have, using full-disk encryption to protect our devices. We use end-to-end encryption (such as HTTPS, Signal and GnuPG) to protect our traffic from adversaries. Online, that’s typically about what we communicate. Privacy is about controlling access to sensitive information. I distinguish anonymity from privacy in the post about controlling communication channels. But first, what exactly does it mean to be anonymous online?
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