The Laws of Blog Anonymity

I’ve been blogging regularly since early 2001, and sporadically since several years before that. I’ve been reading other blogs for about as long. Over that period of time I’ve read countless anonymous blogs, and I’m always amazed at how brazen these folks are. A recent encounter, about which I’ll have much more in a different post, has made me realize that some bloggers simply don’t realize what they’re dealing with, so with that in mind I present the 3 Laws of Blog Anonymity¹.

1. You are not anonymous.
2. Being discovered is a mere eventuality.
3. What anonymity you do have is a gift, not a right.

One might argue about whether or not these Laws always apply (I’ll address certain exceptions below), but I’ve found that most arguments are technicalities. That is, people will find some improbable, impractical hypothetical and, on the basis of that, assume it’s all crap. In the end, though, people who assume these rules apply are demonstrating their ability to learn from the mistakes of others. People who assume they don’t are naively crafting a fictional world and, in some cases, betting an awful lot that that fiction will persist as long as they want it to.

I. You are not Anonymous.
Unless you use the internet solely through internet cafes where you wear disguises and pay only in cash, someone, somewhere can, as a matter of fact, identify you with a fair (and sometimes frightening) degree of certainty². This group of people includes, but is not limited to, law enforcement. This is a technological fact.

The average reader of your blog is probably not an employee at your ISP, email provider, or anyone else that both could reliably identify you and would be motivated to. Though, statistically speaking, the larger your readership, the more likely this sort of overlap is to occur³.

This is the first mistake most anonymous bloggers make: they assume that this is unlikely and then assume they can ignore the risk. The odds of it happening, though, will be no solace when it actually happens — more likely, it will add insult to injury.

To say that this is the only risk to the security of your anonymity would be, in two words, monumentally stupid. There are two other means by which your anonymity can be compromised: betrayed trust and the inquisitiveness of your readers, both of which I’ll get to in a moment.

As a result, the prudent (and paranoid) person would write their blog with the thought in mind that someone, were they interested, could find it and know, precisely, who its author is… regardless of how likely that person thinks that is.

II. Being discovered is a mere eventuality
If you log on to your blog every day and write actual, no-basis-in-reality fiction — and nothing else — people will be unable to identify you based on clues you leave. They’ll probably also have no interest in it. So, to the extent that this describes your blog, the eventuality adds little to the already existing chance of it. The moment you deviate from the fiction-only format, however, you start providing clues — probably far more than you realize — and whether or not someone can find you out based on them rests on a few variables:

A. How much information you give away, in sum.
This is not the same thing as “how much information you think you give away.” Things that people tend to not even notice, or believe are unremarkable, can provide excellent fodder for someone trying to find you. It is also difficult to keep track, over the course of months or years, what you’ve blogged and what you haven’t. In a year’s worth of blogging you might give away enough information for half of your readers, were they so inclined, to identify you if they put all of the little, inconsequential details together. That’s where the next factor comes in:

B. The resourcefulness of your readers.
Once a reader with a good memory or a lot of free time compiles the clues that you’ve left, there’s still a challenge. How do they turn those clues into a name? There are a million ways and the methods available to different readers will vary. A police officer who reads your blog on his free time might do some searching through your state’s driver registration database. A law student might be able to comb through property records in various legal databases and find ones matching the clues you’ve given. The point, though, is that you have no idea what means your readers have and, therefore, really have no idea what information is inconsequential. If you say “I closed on a house last Friday in a southwest suburb of Chicago”, that might seem like it would be impossible to locate you… but it would be much less difficult than it might seem at first glance to someone with access to the property databases.

C. How determined your readers are.
In short, how hard are your readers willing to work in order to out you? You can’t do much about this, but a blogger who dares someone to out them, or suggests it can’t be done, is going to stir the pot and provide some extra motivation. Likewise if you find yourself getting into heated debates with people or otherwise piss them off.

Once a blogger is done making those other mistakes, they will almost undoubtedly sentence themselves to death by a thousand pinpricks. A little clue here, an inconsequential piece of information there, and a few months later half of the blogger’s readership has the information necessary to narrow it down to a name.

To this end, your best readers are your worst enemy. They read the most carefully, remember the most, and have the most incentive to figure the riddle out.

III. What anonymity you do have is a gift, not a right.
In short, once someone finds you out, there’s really nothing you can do, short of begging, to keep them from outing you. You don’t have a right to remain anonymous (not one that matters anyway). Someone who has your name and a means to publish it can do so at any time they want, period. Invariably, anony-bloggers who are exposed are furious, indignant, and surly. They feel violated.

Why? Because someone didn’t cooperate in their little game. Someone crashed their party and rained on their parade. Someone followed the leads that they left, and they really shouldn’t have… but once they did, the former anonymous blogger will argue, they should’ve just kept it to themselves!

You can tell that most anony-bloggers take this for granted. They don’t think the folks who keep their secret deserve any sort of appreciation and they get mad when someone outs them. They think they’re entitled to anonymity, no matter how hard they try to give it away.

Other Considerations
There are some who will make a distinction between someone who knows “Blog-You” finding “Real-You” and the reverse. They don’t want people who know “Real Them” to find their blog. Potential employers or significant others, friends, family, etc. This is creating categories where none exist or, at least, where they can’t really be determined with any degree of accuracy. For example:

How do you know that your interviewer doesn’t already read your blog? Half of the blogs I read, if not more, I came upon in bizarre ways… and while it might be unlikely that I’d ever run into their authors in another context, it’s certainly not impossible, and as blogs continue to come into the mainstream this will be more and more frequent. People seem to forget how small a world it is all too easily.

Further, since most people think of this difference in terms of Google searches for their name, it is easy, almost trivial, to link a phrase or term — even accidentally — to a website in Google. See, for example, the google bombs that are so popular amongst the more childish members of the political internet. All it takes is one link, especially for a novel term like a name, to pass through a google search spider for it to show up in the google search results. This could be done maliciously or completely innocently. I could put a link in my sidebar to my friend Joe Schmo’s blog using his name and even if his name is never used on his blog, googling his name a few weeks later will turn up a link to that blog.

In short, this is a distinction between “readers and people in the “real world” is more in the minds of anonymous bloggers than anything and, in many cases, it results from the depersonalizing power of the internet.

Conclusion
There’s really only one situation in which anonymous blogging makes sense: you like being anonymous, but have nothing to lose from being exposed. Unfortunately many people, even those who start out this way, wind up blogging in a way potentially has some serious consequences in their real life, and the cases in which a blogger like that is found out and has to actually face those consequences are wide-spread and well-documented.

1. Some see a difference between being ‘anonymous’ and being able to be found via search engine. There is a difference, but the rules are applied in both cases, albeit for slightly different reasons.

2. It should not be assumed that I’ve ignored the possibility of using anonymizing proxies, but the usefulness of those is somewhat limited

3. Some will, no doubt, argue that a possibility of being discovered is substantially different from actually being discovered. I believe this is a pointless distinction. When discussing computer security, there is a benefit to being able to easily detect intrusions into a system because it allows the administrators to clean up the mess and fix the hole… a system which allows an attacker’s unauthorized access to go unnoticed is the worst kind, and that’s the kind that anonymous blogging is: it is another party that moves you from the possible to actual categories, and you will almost certainly not know when that has happened.