Who Wants Anonymity?

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

    Oscar Wilde

This opinion is very widely shared, and is even to some extent, and for historical reasons, at the basis of some elements of the constitutions of several elective democracies. It is also implicitly used to justify the practice of various polls, and customer surveys, thus structuring an important part of communications.

Yet, is it a universal truth (is there anything of that kind?) or it is only one branch of a trade-off? If so, what do we lose, when we grant anonymity to some peers in the communications?

We lose quite a lot in fact...

• The possibility to track who said what, obviously. But this also means what else said this same person, and what she did not say. In fact, what we lose is an essential element of context.
• The possibility to ask for precisions, to enquire, to disambiguate. What is said anonymously is all there. You are both forced to and free to interpret it as you wish.
• The possibility for the author to add precisions, or to correct, or to change her mind.
• The possibility for her to track what has happened to her message (her investment, her effort, her time...), how it has been interpreted, and used in general.

We lose even more. Because of all the losses mentioned above, we lose all state: anonymous communication is stateless. It is synchronous. Fire and forget.

We see that anonymity is not a privilege that is granted, it is a completely different game than the manageable communications we need. We need to structure information in order to obtain an optimal signal per noise ratio, so that we can focus on differences, and sediment (geological metaphor!) the stable, well understood and agreed upon, documentation, away from the concerns of communications. This process must however be gradual, and reversible. On the contrary, there is often a dupe trade in granting you anonymity. The advantage is often to the organization which will process the anonymous data.

Accepting to become anonymous is accepting to be treated as a number. In the context of manageable communications, security is better granted by publicity than by obscurity.

-- MarcGirod - 25 Aug 2007