
TL;DR
This paper explores the multifaceted concept of anonymity, emphasizing its importance for privacy, protection, and knowledge production, especially amid technological challenges to anonymity.
Contribution
It offers a novel perspective by focusing on how anonymity can facilitate new forms of knowledge creation, beyond its traditional privacy and accountability roles.
Findings
Anonymity enables protection against discrimination.
Anonymity supports participation in stigmatized activities.
Research on anonymity can reveal new insights into knowledge production.
Abstract
Creating anonymity means cutting connections. A common goal in this context is to prevent accountability. This prevention of accountability can be problematic, for example, if it leads to delinquents remaining undetected. However, imputability can also provide protection against discrimination. In medical, religious or legal matters, this is of fundamental importance. Thus, when individuals actively establish anonymity, they do so mostly because they want to prevent certain information about them, that is, sensitive and/or compromising information, from being associated with their identities. By remaining inaccessible as individuals with respect to certain information about them, they can engage in forms of exchange that would otherwise be impossible for them. Examples include practices of exchange in (self-organized) therapy groups, acting out stigmatized sexual preferences, the role…
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Taxonomy
TopicsSex work and related issues · Hate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection · LGBTQ Health, Identity, and Policy
