This has worked in tandem with a 'technological imperative', whereby it has been perceived to be necessary to apply information technology to the processes of business and government. In the view of corporations and government agencies, it has become almost an article of faith that people who decline to provide their identification, and indeed such other personal data as the organisation demands, must be cheats, and should be treated as such. Proof' of identity essentially does not exist, and the construction of identification schemes which provide a degree of confidence appropriate to the circumstances, is a challenging and expensive business. Anonymity Anonymity, in this context, refers to the absence of identification data in a transaction. The key characteristic of an anonymous transaction is that the specific identity of one or more of the parties to the transaction cannot be extracted from the data itself, nor by combining the transaction with other data.
People desire anonymity for a variety of reasons.
Other reasons for seeking anonymity are of arguably significant social value. Another is the desire to keep personal data out of the hands of companies which are in the business of soaking up whatever data they can in order to use it for marketing purposes. Similarly some people seek to deny data to government agencies, which they believe are prone to using data for multiple purposes, some of which are, or should be, irrelevant, and many of which lead to misunderstandings due to problems of data definition and data quality. A further important reason for anonymity is to deny public knowledge of one's whereabouts in order to avoid physical danger, e.g. from former criminal accomplices, from overly protective fathers, and from organisations which are outraged by something the individual has done, said or written. The Battleground Serious tensions are developing between organisations which seek substantial dataveillance powers, and individuals who seek to sustain some degree of private space.