On the Internet, There's No Place to Hide

In its early years, one of the most cherished characteristics the Internet offered was anonymity. Online, no one knew your real name.

You were also anonymous in a deeper sense. In chat rooms or MUDs, Net denizens could become anyone they wanted. A bored, thirtysomething middle manager could spend a few hours as a wealthy fashion model, big-game hunter or 18-year-old college coed. Your imagination was the only constraint on your identity. In the words of the famous New Yorker cartoon, no one knew you were a dog.

Fifteen or so years later, the commercialization of the Internet is assaulting both types of anonymity. Information about individuals is now a treasured commodity. A computer user could once hide his or her identity with ease. It can still be done, but it takes considerably more work.

The first type of anonymity -- I'll call it "name anonymity" -- has consumed most of our attention. Privacy advocates have decried infringements on name anonymity by both government and business.

Big Brother certainly has the resources and, depending on whom you ask, the technology to track people as they move about the Web. This is genuinely disturbing. Suppose the friendly folks at the National Security Agency listen in on your Echelon transmissions and become interested in your frequent use of the word "revolution." They could follow your online activities, with staggering opportunities for invasion of privacy. They could punch up your eBay (EBAY) bids to search for suspicious items, see what seditious literature you were reviewing at Amazon.com (AMZN) , check out your dietary habits through your Webvan purchases. Before you know it, there's a knock on the door, and blammo! Janet Reno's working your grandmother over with a garden hose.

Or maybe not. Call me naive but that possibility, in this country at least, still seems remote. For most people, the bigger threat is from profit-seeking data collectors, driven by an insatiable thirst among marketers for lists of promising customers.

Several companies are trying to efficiently amass data on individuals based on their online activities. So, for example, after you enter your name and address to win an online raffle, the data-gathering company will track your surfing habits to establish your likes and dislikes. In theory, this aggregated information can then be sold to companies that can send e-mail and snail mail perfectly crafted to appeal to you.

So far, the promise of perfect information for Web-based marketers falls short of the reality. Even without action from Congress or the Federal Trade Commission, name anonymity seems relatively safe for the time being.

But don't get too comfortable. The second type of anonymity -- the ability to hide and alter our defining characteristics -- is very much under siege. I call this "profile anonymity."

It turns out that to marketers and advertisers, your name is not terribly important. Oh, they certainly would like to know your name, address and so on. It makes direct mail that much more effective. But what matters most is your profile. They want to know what you are.

In what city do you live? How old are you? What is your race, religion, ethnicity? The answers to these questions define you as a consumer. With this kind of knowledge, advertisers can make refined pitches ostensibly crafted to persuade someone just like you, if not you.

Until the technology to accumulate large quantities of data linked to individuals is improved, the dominant techniques of building profiles are simple. For example, Internet users are being funneled through portals designed to attract consumers that fit a certain profile. There are portals for African Americans, women, gays, Latinos and more. At many sites, people are induced by offers for goods and services to fill out questionnaires that help establish salient characteristics of interest to marketers.

This lets companies target types of people, even if they can't target individuals. In this sense, your profile anonymity is eroded. Where once it could be said that "no one knows you're a dog," that is no longer the case. Indeed, a more contemporary caption to the New Yorker cartoon would read, "On the Internet, everyone knows you're an aging, overweight, malamute-retriever mix living in the Southwest, and with a preference for rawhide."

So what? Is there any reason to care whether people are identified by their Internet habits, especially if these cannot be linked to a name? After all, if the worst thing that happens is that a fictitious FloraBonita.com targets left-handed gay and Latino gardeners for its Web ads, who cares?

I do. The commercial pressure to identify online individuals by their demographic characteristics reinforces many of the schisms in society. Instead of breaking down barriers by allowing people to escape predetermined categories, the Internet now reinforces identities, swells their significance in a whole new context and makes it more difficult to be seen as an individual separate from racial, ethnic or gender identifiers.

This means something in real terms. Consider services that attempt to agglomerate computer users by customizing newspapers based on their identifying traits. By limiting exposure to news that is not "relevant" to a certain group, our biases and preconceptions may be hardened because they will remain unquestioned.

There will always be discord in society, with or without the Internet. Whether we are less likely to get together and sing "Kumbaya" is of no concern to me. But practically speaking, building consensus in a multiracial, multicultural world becomes increasingly difficult if society is fractured. While Web portals are not necessarily going to bring about social disintegration tomorrow, they and similar devices of division encourage some of our most antisocial tendencies.

Politicians are more likely to fuel this trend than combat it. Although balkanization of the population inevitably makes policy-making more contentious and challenging, splitting up the electorate has traditionally served electoral purposes. The same logic that leads marketers to subdivide audiences appeals to candidates seeking votes.

Candidate Web pages already solicit information from visitors and direct them to particular areas within their sites. Thus the Jewish voter, the soccer mom or the blue-collar white male see different faces of the candidate. This makes possible a type of high-tech pandering. Without broadcasting potentially alienating views to all audiences, politicians can appeal to the basest interests of supporters without broader accountability.

What made the Internet truly distinctive was its potential to corrode superficial barriers, to let people escape the confines of identity. Currently, it is relatively easy to avoid identification on the Web, but it has to be approached consciously. Every time you check weather forecasts or movie times, for example, you disclose your location. Surfers have been single-minded in their concern for name anonymity, with little or no concern for profile anonymity. Privacy protection may keep our names and numbers from prying eyes, but we may never again be able to lose ourselves in cyberspace.