Abstract
Stemming from the Greek word “anonymia”, the term anonymity/anonymous stands for “namelessness”, “not identified” or “of unknown name” (Oxford Dictionaries) and usually bears on a person’s appearance in public. Consequently, anonymity occurs if a person’s identity being involved in a not-transparent/not disclosed process is non-determinable since the acting person remains unknown to the other acting entities or makes no appearance towards the other participants or acts within the anonymous process without recognizable name (Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik, 2001, https://www.bsi.bund.de/ContentBSI/Publikationen/Studien/anonym/wasistanonymitaet.html;jsessionid=97B15124E289CE809BB8CA90471E5F9A.2_cid241).
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Notes
- 1.
“Persecuted groups and sects from time to time throughout history have been able to criticize oppressive practices and laws either anonymously or not at all.”: Talley v. California, 362 U.S. 60 (1960).
- 2.
Oxfordians are the supporters of the Oxfordian theory of Shakespearean authorship whereby Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (1550–1604), wrote the writings traditionally attributed to William Shakespeare.
- 3.
Stratfordians are of the opinion that the actor William Shakespeare wrote all the works attributed to him.
- 4.
The text of this subchapter is partly based on Weber 2012a.
- 5.
A relevant example in connection with anonymous acting online is the whistle-blowing Internet platform Wikileaks providing capacity for anonymously publishing submissions of private, secret, and classified media thereby following their goal of bringing “important news and information to the public” (http://wikileaks.org/About.html). Having released a number of significant documents in the past the entity sees itself as assistance to peoples of all countries who wish to reveal unethical behaviour in their governments and institutions.
- 6.
The Internet uses IP addresses to identify computers. Their addresses and names (then called host names) were initially stored on a centralized and monolithic file maintained by the Stanford Research International Network Information Center (SRI-NIC) on their NIC name server. By 1984, these addresses had become very complicated to use. That led people to translate these numbers into words and to organize them in the generic domains by the Domain Name System (DNS); for further details see Weber and Schneider 2009, pp. 19–21.
- 7.
In 1989, the US Department of Commerce concluded a contract with the Department of Post and Telecommunications’ Information Science Institute at the University of Southern California, establishing the Internet Assigned Numbers Association (IANA). Although IANA’s tasks were transferred to a great extent to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), IANA among other things is still responsible for the global coordination of the Internet Protocol addressing system allocating IP addresses from the pools of unallocated addresses to the Regional Internet Registries (RIR) according to their needs; for further details see Weber and Heinrich 2011, pp. 78–80.
- 8.
At the beginning of the Internet, a single authority combined both service areas and distributed the information through the RFC series.
- 9.
At the present time there are five RIRs in operation, namely the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) for North America and Parts of the Caribbean, the RIPE Network Coordination Centre (RIPE NCC) for Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia, the Asia–Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC) for Asia and the Pacific region, the Latin American and Caribbean Internet Addresses Registry (LACNIC) for Latin America and Parts of the Caribbean Region and the African Network Information Centre (AfriNIC) for Africa.
- 10.
That is why Internet users intending to visit a company webpage will mostly be redirected to the respective country page although having entered another top-level domain; businesses use this automatic onward transfer for selling products in different countries at different prices.
- 11.
The announcement of the IP address is essential for enabling their locating by the respective web page operator and for knowing where to “send” the requested information to.
- 12.
The pseudonym he/she is appearing with on the Internet.
- 13.
“Cookies” are strings of data introduced by the company Netscape whereby the name was a term already in use in computer science for describing a piece of data held by an intermediary.
- 14.
Social structures such as social networking sites, blogs and wikis made up for individuals (or organisations) that offer possibilities for participation and collaboration.
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Weber, R.H., Heinrich, U.I. (2012). Notion of Anonymity. In: Anonymization. SpringerBriefs in Cybersecurity. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-4066-5_1
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