The history of anonymity

Anonymity is not something that suddenly appeared in the internet era.

For a long time, people have spoken without giving their names, used pen names, and hidden their identities when passing information. There have always been reasons for this. They wanted to criticize power. They wanted to protect their faith or ideas. They wanted to expose internal wrongdoing. They wanted to speak safely as minorities.

Anonymity is not simply a "technique for hiding a name." It is a mechanism for protecting people from unjust retaliation, surveillance, discrimination, and forced silence.

Today, the target of surveillance is not only names. IP addresses, communication logs, location information, faces, voices, purchase histories, search histories, social media posts, cookies, device information, and even writing style become targets for analysis.

This article looks at how anonymity has changed through letters, publishing, telephones, the internet, mass surveillance, and the AI era.

Anonymity has long been necessary

Human society always contains differences in power.

Governments, religious organizations, companies, employers, schools, local communities, public opinion, and majority values. In places where such power is strong, speaking under a real name can itself become dangerous.

For this reason, anonymity and pen names have long been used.

• Writing texts that criticize power
• Expressing minority ideas
• Exposing internal wrongdoing
• Sharing information that involves personal danger
• Speaking at a distance from social prejudice

Anonymity is not only for becoming irresponsible. It is a way to put necessary speech into society while protecting oneself from those in stronger positions.

In a society where people can speak only under real names, only those in strong positions can speak safely. Anonymity becomes a barrier that prevents people in weaker positions from being silenced.

The era of letters and pen names

Even before the internet, people used anonymity and pen names.

Letters, pamphlets, newspaper submissions, political documents, and literary works used aliases and pen names instead of real names.

Anonymity at that time was much simpler than it is now. At its center was "not revealing a name." Of course, identity could still be inferred from handwriting, distribution routes, printers, personal relationships, and writing style.

Even so, not directly giving a real name mattered. In situations where criticism under a real name could bring punishment or retaliation, anonymity and pen names created room to speak.

Anonymity in this era was not complete either. However, the ability to speak without giving a real name played an important role in society.

Publishing and anonymous speech

In the age of publishing, anonymous speech could suddenly reach much farther.

Political criticism, religious claims, proposals for social reform, and accusations against power can be dangerous under a real name. For that reason, texts were issued anonymously or under pen names.

What matters here is that anonymity was not merely an individual's escape route. Anonymity functioned as a mechanism for bringing new debate into society.

Of course, anonymous speech can also be abused. It is used for false information, defamation, and threats.

However, that does not mean anonymity should be eliminated because abuse exists. In a society where anonymity disappears, the first people to fall silent are not attackers, but people in weaker positions, whistleblowers, minorities, and people subject to surveillance.

The era of telephones and communication records

When communication expanded from letters and publishing to telephones, the problem changed a little.

With telephones, the content of the conversation is not the only issue. Who called whom, when, and for how long. This record becomes important. This is not the communication content itself, but surrounding information that accompanies communication.

This kind of information is called metadata.

Relationships and behavior are visible even without listening to the content.

Who is someone frequently contacting? Where are they calling late at night? Who did they contact before and after a certain incident?

Anonymity became not only a matter of hiding a name, but also a matter of how to handle surrounding information about communication.

The internet made anonymity more complex

On the internet, anonymity became even more complex.

Even if you do not write your real name in a post, IP addresses, cookies, login state, User-Agent, posting time, writing style, images, and file metadata remain. Information can also connect across multiple services.

For example, suppose you use an anonymous account on one social media service. But if you use the same username on another site, they connect. If you reuse the same image, it connects to past accounts. If the same time period, the same writing style, and the same topics overlap, it starts to look like the same person.

Modern anonymity is not only a matter of names. It is a matter of multiple small clues connecting.

For this reason, today's anonymity uses Tor, VPNs, proxies, account separation, browser separation, metadata removal, device separation, and similar mechanisms. These mechanisms are covered in detail in other articles.

Encryption and anonymity are separate problems

On the internet, technologies that protect communication content, such as HTTPS and encrypted messages, became important.

However, encryption and anonymity are not the same.

Encryption is technology for making communication content harder for third parties to read. Anonymity is the idea of making it harder to know who is communicating, whose behavior it is, and which actions belong to the same person.

Even with encrypted communication, information about who communicated with whom, when, and how much can remain.

The history of anonymity is also the history of understanding this difference.

What the Snowden disclosures showed

In 2013, Edward Snowden, a former NSA contractor, provided journalists with documents about mass surveillance by United States intelligence agencies.

The disclosures made many people understand this as reality for the first time.

Surveillance is not only something in movies. Communication content, communication records, metadata, relationships with providers, and connection paths crossing national borders can become targets for analysis at a state scale.

What broke down here was the feeling that "I am not doing anything wrong, so it has nothing to do with me."

Surveillance does not necessarily target only criminals. Political activity, journalism, labor movements, religious activity, whistleblowing, immigrants, minorities, and contact with family overseas can also become surveillance targets because of institutions or power.

Also, merely feeling surveilled makes people hold back from speaking. They avoid searches. They hesitate to ask for advice. They give up on whistleblowing.

When anonymity is lost, freedom quietly becomes smaller.

Useful external sites:

Electronic Frontier Foundation - NSA Spying This page collects litigation, explanations, and related materials about NSA surveillance. URL : https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying

The Guardian - The NSA Files This page collects reporting on the Snowden documents. URL : https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/the-nsa-files

The reality shown by China's surveillance society

China's example cannot be avoided when thinking about anonymity.

In China, internet censorship, real-name systems, surveillance cameras, facial recognition, communication surveillance, app surveillance, police databases, and systems related to social credit are combined. This is not simply a story about "a country with many surveillance cameras." It is a story about a society where online speech, real-world movement, and identity information connect.

Surveillance camera networks and facial recognition systems known as Skynet record behavior in public spaces and are used for person identification. Furthermore, when online speech, searches, posts, contacts, app usage, and identity registration connect with other data, individual behavior is tracked more broadly.

Social credit scores are often simplified as "a single score attached to every citizen." The reality is more complex than that. Credit information, administrative penalties, blacklists, court lists of judgment defaulters, evaluations by industry, and local systems are combined.

However, the important point is not the name. The important point is that societies where behavioral records are used for evaluation and restriction really exist.

Movement, employment, loans, service use, online speech, pressure on family. When these are connected through data and institutions, people begin to act on the assumption that they are being watched.

This is not distant science fiction. Surveillance technology, facial recognition, smart cities, real-name registration, AI analysis, and scoring are being introduced around the world. Even when countries and systems differ, there is always a risk that data collected in the name of "convenience" will later be used for surveillance and control.

Useful external sites:

Freedom House - China: Freedom on the Net 2024 As the 2024 edition, this country report covers internet freedom, censorship, VPN restrictions, punishments for online activity, and related issues in China. URL : https://freedomhouse.org/country/china/freedom-net/2024

Human Rights Watch - World Report 2024: China As the 2024 edition, this annual report covers the human rights situation in China, surveillance, repression of minorities, and freedom of expression. URL : https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2024/country-chapters/china

Anonymity in the AI era

In the AI era, the meaning of anonymity changes further.

In the past, investigating an individual required a lot of human manual work. Reading posts, looking at images, comparing times, and searching past information took time.

AI makes this work much faster. It processes large amounts of text, images, posting history, and public information at high speed. It also finds small matches and tendencies.

For this reason, anonymity is not satisfied by "not giving a real name."

In the AI era, the following kinds of information are connected.

• Writing style
• Posting time
• Image background
• Face and voice
• Areas of interest
• Relationships
• Location and usual activity area
• Past accounts
• Public information
• Surrounding information from communications and logs

Even if each piece is small, when they combine, they start to look like the same person.

Anonymity is not simply a technique for withholding a name. It is judgment for reducing, separating, and not mixing material that can be correlated.

What the history of anonymity shows

The shape of anonymity has changed by era.

What they have in common is that anonymity has never been only a matter of "names."

Clues change by era. However, the essence has not changed: how to reduce clues that connect speech or action to the person.

Summary

Anonymity did not suddenly appear in the internet era.

Across the eras of letters, publishing, telephones, the internet, mass surveillance, and AI surveillance, people have needed anonymity to keep distance from unjust retaliation and surveillance.

The Snowden disclosures showed many people that communications surveillance exists as a real state system. China's surveillance society shows that when data, facial recognition, censorship, real-name systems, and institutional restrictions connect, the lack of anonymity affects life itself.

Older anonymity centered on not revealing a name or using a pen name. However, as communication technology advanced, call records, IP addresses, cookies, metadata, posting histories, writing style, images, and public information became important clues.

In the AI era, the power to connect small pieces of information is becoming stronger. For that reason, anonymity needs to be understood not simply as hiding a real name, but as judgment that reduces correlation between pieces of information.

Knowing the history of anonymity becomes a foundation for understanding anonymity not as a technology for abuse, but as a social mechanism for protecting people.

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