Anonymity
Anonymity means that a person's identity is not known. The Greek "anonymia" literally means "without a name. Often with anonymity, personal identity is deliberately kept unknown. The desire to remain anonymous can have several reasons. The most common is to protect privacy.
Many situations occur in everyday life where anonymity is quite natural. As strangers to each other, it is far from always necessary to introduce yourself to each other. During a conversation with a store employee or on the street with a passerby, it is quite common to remain anonymous. Besides protecting privacy, freedom can be an important motivation for anonymity, for example when filling out a ballot paper during elections.
Anonymity on the Internet
The rise of the Internet and e-commerce has made it increasingly difficult to remain anonymous. In order to place an order with an online store, you must share data with the store that a physical store does not need to process your purchases. Companies are also making use of the technical possibilities to collect interests and data from website visitors and customers and create profiles so that they can, for example, advertise in a more targeted way.
On the Internet, this is done, for example, by tracking surfing behavior on certain websites using cookies. The use of cookies and other personal data for marketing purposes has been subject to rules for several years, laid down in the AVG and what is popularly known as the cookie law, among others.
In order to allow strategic analysis and other broader forms of processing and storage of collected data anyway, it should be anonymized.
Sender unknown
Of books and other publications, sometimes the author is not known. This may be because the creator of the work himself wished to remain unknown, or the author's name may have been lost over time. To keep your identity secret, you can also choose to write under a pseudonym.
Thanks to the Web, it has become very easy to publish information without revealing your name and your real identity. On many social media and on websites where you can comment or post reviews, the given name of the user or author is not checked. As a result, the number of anonymous texts and other creative expressions whose creator's identity is not known has increased significantly worldwide.
When making a phone call, caller ID allows the recipient to see which number is calling. Larger organizations often choose to dial out anonymously, so the outgoing number is not visible.
