Imagine a world where you can speak your mind without fear of retribution, where your actions and words leave no trace. This was the utopian vision at the inception of the Internet. It was a place where humankind could connect face-to-face, irrespective of distance. History shows our innate desire to connect, from cave paintings to radio transmissions. But nothing rewrote the fate of communication quite like the Internet.

In the late 20th century, the Internet became a haven for free expression. However, over the past two decades, constant censorship by tech giants and social networking sites has made free speech online a fading dream. Yet, the Internet remains a lifeline for whistleblowers and victims who seek a safe space. All of this is happening amidst rising privacy concerns, censorship, surveillance, cyber crime, and curtailment of freedom of expression. The need for anonymity online has never been more critical.

How can you become anonymous, and to what extent?

Britannica defines anonymity as “the quality or state of being unknown to most people.” Thus, the ability to interact, communicate, and access information on the Internet without being known is called anonymity online. One can achieve Online Anonymity through pseudonyms, virtual private networks, TOR networks, encrypted communication, and anonymous browsers.

Using fake names or pseudonyms is not just about deception. It is a powerful tool that empowers individuals to express their ideas without fear. This approach provides a shield against privacy invasion, censorship, and retaliation. It allows the common person to compartmentalise their lives. Most importantly, it is a lifeline for activists and whistleblowers. It enables them to challenge oppressive regimes without fear of retaliation, retribution, or censorship. In fact, 86% of users adopt pseudonyms to avoid exploitation due to their online visibility.

Virtual Private Networks, known for their efficiency in countering man-in-the-middle and DDOS attacks, help maintain anonymity by channelling internet traffic through secured pathways to a server controlled by a VPN operator. Users prefer using them to bypass firewalls and access restricted content. The 2023 Statistica report on “Reasons for VPN Usage Worldwide” identifies privacy (51%) and anonymity (44%) as the most significant reasons.

The Onion Router gets its name because of the several layers of encryption the internet traffic passes through before reaching its intended destination. The US Navy initially developed it to prevent enemies’ interception of military communications. It became an open-source project on the Internet in 2003. It is prevalent among activists and journalists to communicate securely and organise protests against unlawful authorities. One such example is the Arab Spring of 2011.

Through these means, individuals pursue anonymity on the Internet in myriad ways. Some users desire complete anonymity, where tracing them at all is impossible. In some cases, their actions are so erratic that one cannot build a profile of interests based on their activities. Dread Pirate Robert, of the famous Silk Road case of 2011, remained untraceable for a long time because of his unlinkable online activities.

Implications of Anonymity

Unbelievably, access to the Internet has created its own set of problems. Moreover, anonymity has further augmented the confusion. Anonymity allows malicious attackers to pose as legitimate entities to disseminate phishing emails, consequently facilitating identity theft. Trolls wear the digital cloak of anonymity to harass individuals online. This becomes specifically problematic when one realises that around 80% of the world’s internet users are young. This four-fifths of the Internet’s user base is impressionable minds. Here, cyber bullying can lead to uneventful outcomes, such as suicide and long-term psychological impact.

Anonymity is notoriously the most admirable attribute of the dark web. It acts as a breeding ground for atrocities such as illegal goods trade, drugs, weapons, and stolen data. In this part of the Internet, human trafficking, child pornography, and terrorist funding are quite rampant. Silk Road and Alpha Bay were two infamous dark web marketplaces that dealt with illicit activities. Anonymity also normalises hate speech and extremist content, cradling misinformation to propagate a thought. It enables the distribution of copyrighted material on the Internet, as individuals bypass legal and ethical considerations by freely sharing a creator’s work.

Moreover, cyber criminals hide behind the cloak of anonymity to launch large-scale cyber attacks. For example, the Miraibot Attack in 2016 relied on proxy servers, VPNs, and distributed infrastructure. This creates hurdles for law enforcement agencies in investigating the incident, catching the perpetrators, and handing them over to the prosecution.

What is Digital Footprint?

Anonymity is a technique netizens use to escape digital footprints, which are the traces of an individual’s activities while on the Internet. It became a concern in the early 2000s, creating widespread apprehension about privacy, security, marketing, and personal reputation issues. With the rise of the Internet, netizens began sharing more personal and professional information online.

Social networking sites like Classmate, Friendster, Myspace and eventually Facebook encouraged people to share information online. Platforms like LinkedIn drove individuals to supplement professional information on the Internet to update resumes, find jobs, and aid the Internet in creating a ‘global village’.

Simultaneously, e-commerce sites and financial institutions provided access to financial services. This created a sense of confidence that allowed the sharing of financial information. Eventually, all of these developments contributed to burgeoning digital footprints.

Thank you, Digital Footprint

Stakeholders have always found reasons to justify the tracking of digital footprints. Some will say that it caters to people’s needs and provides them with a customised and enhanced experience. A user’s internet history and browsing preferences make up most of their digital footprint. Advertisers use this data to create more relevant advertisements so that users can search for necessary items quickly. The purchase history on an e-commerce site works similarly, curating a list of the most probable items the user would purchase.

Similarly, navigation apps often use live location and location history to recommend better or similar places. Social media platforms pick digital footprints to recommend mutual friends or potential connections with similar interests. An example is the “people you may know” feature on several social media platforms.

Are digital footprints making privacy a joke?

The Internet, while promoting freedom, also provides governments and corporations with tools for surveillance and control. Several prominent thinkers believe that digital footprints eradicate the notion of privacy. Entities can create detailed profiles of individuals, often without their explicit consent for targeted marketing. This not only manipulates customer behaviour but could create demographic-based discrimination, disorientation, and distrust about the whereabouts of customer data and create filter bubbles that limit customer exploration.

Vast quantities of sensitive information on the Internet often lead to malicious actors tapping into this information to execute their devious agendas. Identity theft, one of the most widespread cyber crimes, is usually executed with digital footprint data as its backbone. Around 65% of identity theft victims report the crime due to a data breach or their other online activity.

A digital footprint can be both intentional, like liking posts of a particular genre, sharing stories along with entering contact information on the Internet to be reachable, creating a database that one knows exists or unintentional, like one’s browsing history, the time spent on a site, all the clicks on a site. All of this information is trackable through cookies and IP addresses. Unintentional digital footprint being tracked becomes more controversial when consent is subtracted. Electronic Frontier Foundation reported that 91% of websites had web trackers without explicit user consent.

Prominent individuals like former US President Bill Clinton believed cyber space needed a strong government presence to track individual activities and counter cyber crime. On the other hand, some scholars, supported by purists, believe cyber space to be equivalent to this state of nature, as discussed and described by John Locke. They think that cyberspace requires autonomy and independence. Its sustenance depends on a regime of self-governance in the digital domain.

What does the future hold?

The constantly evolving Internet is expected to significantly impact the practice of anonymity and digital footprints. Blockchain technology, a new decentralised field, offers anonymity through privacy-focused coins such as Monero and Zcash. Still, its immutable nature creates a permanent digital footprint, highlighting traces of one’s activities.

Similarly, AI acts as a double-edged sword. While AI-based tools can enhance data anonymity and identity through encryption, AI’s ability to comprehend and process vast amounts of data could lead to de-anonymisation. Yves Alexandre de Montjoye and his colleagues exhibited one such illustration at MIT in 2015 when they, with the help of machine learning, uniquely identified 95% of the individuals in an anonymised data set.

The future awaits more stringent regulations with mandatory identification when accessing specific servers. In the past few years, there has been a flurry of data protection legislations across the globe. Public awareness here will be the critical pressure-driving force that will induce data collectors and processors to better manage, handle, and utilise personal data. Thus, educating internet users about the implications of digital footprints becomes vital.

Conclusion

Anonymity creates a safe environment to express oneself and strengthens data protection; it is also misused as a shield to cover malicious acts and leave no traces behind. At this avenue, digital footprints allow individuals to be tracked and held accountable. Still, it becomes problematic when one’s digital data is used to treat them as prey for capitalism, creating an ambivalent balance between the need for anonymity and digital footprints. Striking a balance between both becomes necessary to maintain the sanctity of cyber space and should be achieved through privacy-first technologies that also allow tracing of malicious activity.