3.3 What Is Expected to Happen?

their contacts will be affected as well. Exposing the personal information of a single person not only harms the person herself, but may potentially harm anyone who interacts online with her: her friends, relatives, etc.

In addition, people who need anonymity for their physical safety will be severely impacted. For example, people in non-democratic countries may face immediate danger. Even people in democratic countries, such as whistleblowers and journalists, may be severely impacted if they cannot operate anonymously.

Finally, organisations will also be significantly affected. Indeed, information that used to be confidential within a business (such as number of customers, number of sales, peak times, etc.) could now be found (or at least inferred with high accuracy) by trackers and advertisers that are involved in the interaction. One might think that large organisations would be able to scrutinise their web sites and eradicate any tracking done by third parties. This is probably true. It is not clear, however, whether small companies will have the expertise and/or the capability to do something like that.

3.3 What Is Expected to Happen?

In a world where anonymity is not easy to achieve, people will just not be able to act anonymously. All aspects of their activity will be recorded somewhere online by someone they probably do not know: what time they wake up, what time they go to work, what items they purchase, what books they read, what notes they take, what news they are interested in, where they eat, where they spend the night, who they spend the night with—everything is going to be recorded online.2 People will have little (if any at all) private life any more. In the absence of a strong legal system that heavily penalises unauthorised access to information, we are afraid that this information may eventually reach the wrong people. Indeed, although initially information may be shared with a trusted entity (such as our ISP or our email provider), information, much like any other digital commodity may eventually be sold, acquired, or even stolen. The worst thing of all is that we do not really know if this will happen, or even if it has already happened.

Some people might say “I have nothing to hide”, so they may think that it is reasonable to disclose all of their activities online. However, the main point here is that once information is disclosed online it may eventually find its way to the wrong people or may fall into the wrong hands. If it falls into the wrong hands, information may cause major damage to people. Imagine, for example, organised crime syndicates. They would love to know the whereabouts of

2Even the time of the day when I am typing these characters and the time of the day the reader reads this text is maybe being recorded somewhere online.