Cyber-Security: Privacy vs Anonymity

We have all heard this phrase at least once in our lifetime time is precious or time is money, so we end up almost neglecting the importance of cyber security. I mean why would you waste irreplaceably valuable time when you can spend it doing something that you actually want to do. In this article I would try to breach this thought. The first step towards achieving this goal would be to establish the difference between privacy and anonymity. Also introducing the concept of pseudo-anonymity.

In today's world of cyber security the two most commonly used words are anonymity and privacy. You may wish your emails to remain private, you may wish your identity to remain unknown. But privacy and anonymity are not the same thing, so let's explore the difference. In simple terms, privacy is when no one is seeing what you do, but probably know who you are. Consider your email as an example, you can privately write and send an encrypted email to anyone and, only and the person receiving the email would be able to access the data. But you are not anonymous as, the email can easily be traced back to you. The goals of privacy are:

1. Maintaining confidentiality.
2. Keeping secrets.

Just like how you are private in your home and nobody knows and needs to know what you do. But, you are not anonymous. Anonymity is nobody knowing who you are, but potentially seeing what you do. Anonymity is the ability to not link your activities and actions with your true identity. The goals of anonymity are:

1. Identity hiding.
2. In short it is a situation wherein out of a set of possible people there is an equal chance it could be anyone.

This is an extra freedom that people can avail. With freedom comes power and also misuse of this power. You may desire this for viewing content, but not for making it, it depends. Anonymity means non attribution to your actions, to be nameless, to be faceless. One example, you connect to the internet through an anonymizing service like Tor and post a message about LGBT under an anonymous username, maybe in a country where that's a crime. Your identity remains anonymous and separate from your true identity but your message is received and not private, this is anonymity. If you connect to a website via a virtual private network, you are potentially anonymous to that website, but when you post a message on their public forum, that message is not private.
And finally, there's a variant of anonymity people sometimes use and that is pseudo-anonymity. Pseudo-anonymity is when you wish to retain a reputation against an identity. A common example is having an alias for social media or for a forum online.

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