The meaning of Anonymity in an information age – Helen Nissenbaum

The meaning of anonymity is conducting oneself without revealing one’s name. In my understanding about anonymity in information age is that when people sign up to social network sites they don’t give their real name but they use nickname or codenames so that people would not easily identify their identity. The power of information technology to extract or infer identity from non-identifying signs and information has been inventively applied by literary scholars to setting disputes and unraveling mysteries of authorship.
The value of anonymity lies not in the capacity to be unnamed, but in the possibility of acting or participating while remaining out of reach, remaining unreachable. In the computerized world the systems of information that we currently have in place, namelessness by itself is no longer sufficient for protecting what is at stake in anonymity. To further understand about anonymity in an information age requires an appreciation of what it takes to be unreachable or out of grasp in a world where technologies of knowledge and information are increasingly efficacious at reaching, grasping, and identifying. Two main problems of anonymous data also anonymized: the first is as soon as data is sent electronically, the senders identification is automatically added to the message. To anonymize the sender, an automatic process of replacing this identification must be implemented. The second is to decrypt an encrypted message, one must know the decryption key of the sender. However when the sender is anonymized, it is impossible to select the right key. An automatic process of key-handling and decryption must also be implemented.