Thoughtful piece. One issue that has become apparent to us in starting this company — and that is evident in the good comment stream here too — is that we need a vocabulary with more precision around the range of services on the anonymous spectrum. If for example you’ve heard the term “anonymish” thrown around, it’s a pretty good indicator that many services are handwave-y around the concept of anonymity but may or may not be truly, fully anonymous and/or encrypted, and people are either being lazy in their investigations or the services themselves are compromised or being ambiguous.

“Anonymous Coward” comments here, for example, are a great example of, basically, an “anonymous guest” mode. It’s very useful and you don’t have to authenticate yourself, but you also don’t get the benefits of an account (e.g., notifications of replies to your comments).

A “Burner” account, both in the sense Chris Messina is talking about in his article and in the sense we think about Burner phone numbers, is an actual account with an actual login, but one under which you can be pseudonymous, and one that you can also easily change if you want to create a new identity (or perhaps maintain multiple identities at once). These services are also great for avoiding finding yourself in marketing databases, or at least “fuzzing” your data within them to some degree. But Burner works by interoperating with the generally available telephone network (CMRS & PSTN carriers). This is its primary advantage, as a single-player user can use it effectively without asking his or her counterparties to download or sign up for anything, but it should be self-evident that any communication through it is only as secure as that entire system –including counterparties’ carriers, hardware, and software — is.

I think of encrypted services as having a different value proposition entirely, but even among them there’s a range (e.g. encrypted message services that still capture metadata, as can be assumed to be the case with companies like Yahoo and Apple who are starting to do encrypted messages, VS companies and services claiming true end-to-end anonymity and encryption). Think of using a service like coinbase vs. buying bitcoins through a strong proxy in a cash transaction. The latter types of services would be the preferred services for whistleblowers, investigative journalists, and fourth-amendment enthusiasts trying to stay truly “off the grid”. The problem with these kinds of services and the reason I’m not naming any of them (setting aside their potential for nefarious uses) is that you have to get them exactly, perfectly right or risk compromising your system. One social hack or single point of infosec failure could be disastrous — especially so if the vulnerability is invisible to the owners or users of the system, as is often the case in surveillance situations. It’s also easy to misunderstand (or misrepresent) them by some obscure but critically important degree.

We take good care to understand and try to be clear about where we sit on the spectrum — the first principle of a privacy policy should always be honesty! Not everyone else takes this approach, but it’s great that there’s discussion starting to happen.

Not to be pedantic, but hopefully it’s obvious that if these nuances are important to you (or your readers, users, etc), you should definitely do your homework.

“”Companies are only required to retain certain records related to the conduct of their business.””

“And when it comes to things like customer metadata, only certain companies are so required.”

Well what I was thinking of but did not articulate clearly was the legal data retention of metadata some service providers must observe as a condition for staying in business.

Interestingly the EU Data Retention Directive did not apply to online services i.e Dropbox, cyberlockers, online forums or other messenging protocols.

So one could legally set up a blackbox service which business model more or less explicitly was premised on offering burner identities, or at least so until the law catched up.

Cell phones are problematic because they rely on an closely regulated telco infrastructure, but pure IP only services could be commercially viable and legal because there is a limit to mandatory data retention.

Bu

In”If the burner account has been paid for anonymously or in bulk, the investigative trail is cold”

“That’s not a “but”. That’s a feature.”

Yes, and that’s why some nations have banned prepaid anonymous sim cards.

“”If I upload something to Dropbox and encrypt with the recipient’s public key, anonymity is not even necessary if the other party has purged his secret
key.””

“Anonymity remains very important even when the contents of your communications can’t be read. Metadata is often just as (or more) sensitive than the actual
contents.”

If the cloud provider is located outside the investigating jurisdiction, or only cooperates if shown the correct paperwork, even this step will offer some degree of pseudonymity by forcing the government to jump through more hoops.

They can only use the metadata if they are able to correlate information from different providers, and if the investigation is of low importance even forcing the state to fill out some paperwork and check some boxes is good for anonymity.