Respect Anonymity
One of the most valuable things on the internet is your personal information. Who you are, where you’re from, and what you like constitutes the basis for multiple social networking sites, applications on your phone, and of course advertising industries. The range of incentives to seduce us into giving up our likes and dislikes makes it increasingly difficult to hold onto your personal information. Facebook wants us to advertise what articles we read, what games we play, and what products we use, and they want us to remain loyal to their services. All the while encouraging us to turn a blind eye to the fact that our anonymity is being exchanged in order to sustain a new model of internet development, regardless of our own preferences and concerns about safety.
The value of anonymity has undergone a significant change over the last few years. Anonymity used to rule the world of the wide web. Mystery and intrigue defined those first forums and websites of the 90s and early 2000s. In this way, the Internet was controlled by the individual, not only in their agency in choosing how much to share, but also by controlling how much they could trust. Communities emerged around individual interactions rather than reliance on a profile that immediately revealed personal information up-front. When anonymity is the default of a web site or online community, information is exchanged organically, rather than mechanized through pre-set profiles and then easily processed by marketing companies and government surveillance institutions.
This isn’t to idealize the good old days of the Internet. Anonymity comes at a cost, and the possibilities for abuse and deception are larger when people don’t fear the consequences of their actions. The advantages to having more sophisticated systems of establishing ourselves online have resulted in a world that’s more connected and informed than ever. However, what this means is that where anonymity was once the norm, it’s now a privilege. You have to work hard to keep your information private, and take extra precautions that most people don’t even think about.
For some, these precautions aren’t optional. Political and social circumstances make anonymity an integral rather than optional part of using the Internet, and when access to the Internet is defined by the offering of our personal information as sacrifice, the people who most need a safe community and free access to information aren’t able to obtain it.
Information sharing, personal and otherwise, is an important part of the Internet, of course. We enjoy finding out our friends are visiting the same restaurants as we are or that our family reads the same political website as us. But sharing information should be a process we opt into, with our full consent and awareness of the consequences, rather than a prerequisite to accessing a vast majority of the Internet. More sites and applications should cater to this need for anonymity, and create safe spaces where people can discuss even the most sensitive topics without worrying too much about their privacy.
Protecting privacy isn’t an easy priority for web developers, not with the technological system we’re currently building. But the creativity that helped bring this system about in the first place can create solutions that stand up to aggressive marketing companies and invasive government policies. At the very least, we can start to value platforms that don’t aggressively mine our information in the name of a false sense of intimacy, and instead serve as a neutral tool for the creation of communities that can choose to share as much information as they’d like. When we learn to respect anonymity as a liberating tool for the sharing of better kinds of information, the Internet will become a safer and more dynamic space for everyone involved.
