The famous New Yorker cartoon reads: 'On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog.' Peter Steiner, whose cartoon showing two canines conversing in front of a computer has become one of the most reproduced in the world, was right - in 1993. However, developments in technology and law make it trickier to stay anonymous. In 2009, staying ahead of the snoopers and remaining undercover is harder than ever.
For brands, this all brings a threat to the online advertising market, as widespread and often indiscriminate tracking weakens trust in advertisers - strengthening the hand of the privacy lobby and encouraging more people to use advertising-avoidance software.
From society's point of view, anonymity has positives. It enables freedom of speech in authoritarian regimes, allows individuals to seek information on sensitive questions where disclosing their identity would be undesirable, and frees people from the constraints of their true identity.
At the same time, it allows criminals and other undesirables to avoid detection and capture, encrypting their files and distributing them across the net, making them impossible to locate and hard to associate with their owner.
Earlier this year, the Iranian election caused a rise in comment on Twitter, as protestors used the service to organise demonstrations and discuss political rumours. Of course, the secret police were following events closely. Within hours, thousands of Twitterers around the world were listing their location as Iran to draw the spooks off the scent by filling the internet with postings appearing to be from Iran.
For bloggers and forum participants, such anonymity can be a matter of life and death. They use tools such as Tor, a software network designed to confuse monitors by routing a computer's requests via other computers, making it impossible to trace. Freenet works in a similar way, while Anonymiser has more than 2m users, and is subsidised by the US government as a means of promoting free speech in China.
There are dozens of such tools available online, and they are used by activists and criminals alike. However, recent advances in the analysis of text are starting to reveal a surprising amount about apparently anonymous postings - gender, age, first language, even whether the typist is a musician.
Dr Neal Krawerz from Hacker Factor, a computer forensics specialist, has developed profiling tools that help to predict several of these factors. You can try his Gender Guesser tool online - go to bit.ly/36bWxU, paste in some of your writing, and see if it can guess your sex. I put in a sample from last week's Marketing column and it reckons there is a 67% chance that I am male. It was right on all five examples I gave it. If nothing else, I have something to aim for: I'm determined to be 90% male by Christmas, so that I can fall asleep during the Queen's speech.
It's not just technology that is pushing back the bounds of anonymity - the law is moving too. When New Yorker Rosemary Port used her pseudonymous blog to call a fashion model a 'skank and a ho', she expected the internet to protect her. A judge at the Manhattan Supreme Court thought differently, and forced Google to reveal Port's identity to the model's lawyers.
As forensics and the law develop in relation to the internet, the debate about privacy intensifies. While issues such as defamation and freedom of speech are fundamental to this discussion, if advertisers aren't careful, their business could suffer. Anonymity tools are used mainly by those with a real need, but as debate grows about the ethics of ad tracking, there is a danger that their
use will spread to the mass market.
Andrew Walmsley is co-founder of i-level
30 seconds on the Queen's Christmas message
- The first royal Christmas message was broadcast via radio by King George V in 1932. Its audience was 20m people across the then-British Empire, including Kenya, India, Australia, South Africa, Canada and the UK.
- Queen Elizabeth II delivered her first Christmas message by radio in 1952, ahead of her coronation in June 1953.
- The first televised Christmas message aired in 1957 on the BBC. The broadcaster continued to show the speech exclusively until 1996, when
- it began alternating every two years with ITV.
- The Queen has delivered a Christmas speech every year but 1969, when a documentary about the royal family was shown instead.
- Since 2006, the message
- has also been available as a podcast. In 2007, previous TV addresses were added to the royal YouTube channel.
- 'Alternative' Christmas messages from controversial public figures have aired on Channel 4 since 1993. Past presenters include Sharon Osbourne (2002) and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (2008).