Privacy doesn't mean anything anymore, anonymity does

There is no such thing as anonymity. With the number of bits required to ID a person and the fact that you are leaking such bits all the time you can simply forget about anonymity.

Many people online seem to think that they are anonymous and so were emboldened to do stuff that they might not have done if they had realized this. They continued to feel extremely good at this right up until the knock on the door.

Sadly, everybody using a browser from a massive ad company and an idp (not to mention a company with an interest in crawling the entire web for AI at the same time site owners are dealing with better scrapers) means the entire web will be login-only over time.

What scares me is that the more privacy oriented you are, the easier you are to fingerprint. At what point does privacy mean blending in with the crowd and not sticking out?

Any business that isn’t willing to be as anonymous as Mullvad, I assume has a compromised business model that I don’t really like. Assuming there aren’t obvious reasons for needing the data, like tax filing, or various regulatory requirements.

I don’t understand why any company would want the liability of holding on to any personal data if it wasn’t vital to the operations of the business, considering all the data breaches we’ve seen over the past decade or so. It also means they can avoid all the lawyers writing complicated and confusing privacy policies, or cookie approval pop-ups.

Maybe ironically - just going on the title because I can't read the rest as a result - it's behind a cloudflare gate.

tl;dr “Privacy” = the data is private i.e. only on your devices. Or if the raw data is public but encrypted and the key is private, I think that qualifies.

“Anonymity” = the data is public but not linked to its owner’s identity.

If you’re sharing your data with a website (e.g. storing it unencrypted), but they promise not to leak it, the data is only “private” between you and them…which doesn’t mean much, because they may not (and sometimes cannot) keep that promise. But if the website doesn’t attribute the data except to a randomly-generated identifier (or e.g. RSA public key), the data is anonymous. That’s the article.

Although a server does provide real privacy if it stores user data encrypted and doesn’t store the key, and you can verify this if you have the client’s unobfuscated source.

Also note that anonymity is less secure than privacy because the information provides clues to the owner. e.g. if it’s a detailed report on a niche topic with a specific bias and one person is known to be super interested in that topic with that bias, or if it contains parts of the owner’s PII. But it’s much better than nothing.

I would much rather have privacy with e2e encryption than have anonymity. The way that works is a direct connection between two parties without use of a central server, like webRTC.

This was authored using an LLM, wasn't it. The style is unmistakable. Stop wasting our time with this slop.

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