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Comment by perenzo | Hacker News Reader

By using the term "anonymous" I wanted to say, that no user account is required. To hide one self's identity and network location I would expect the users to make use of browsers like Tor or using VPN. I don't know of any way to provide anonymity on web application level. If somebody knows more, please let me know.

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Side note: WebRTC is disable on TorBrowser[0], but you can use a browser with WebRTC enabled (Vanilla Firefox and others) on the Tor network inside Tails OS[1].

[0] https://tor.stackexchange.com/questions/876/does-tor-work-wi...

[1] https://tails.boum.org/

Thanks for the clarification, imo and as you already see in this discussion different people understand different meanings into the word.

Maybe it's safer to use a clear description rather than "anonymous". The "no user account is required" is a good statement which can be hardly misunderstood.

There are many people out there (including me) which think anonymous means nobody can trace or identify me. Anonymity even with Tor is very hard to achieve on the Internet, I would even say it's impossible.

On my software I'm using the word "private" instead of anonymous to describe such communication; which was inspired by Tor tech talks. I've written about it here https://cryonet.io/technology.html

Ok, I get the point. I opened a ticket to use a clearer wording: https://github.com/holtwick/briefing/issues/51 Thanks clarifying the ambiguity.

How about the term "unauthenticated", which is well understood for HTTP requests?

Well, IMO the definition of the word "anonymous" still fits how personal information is handled in Briefing: "Anonymity describes situations where the acting person's name is unknown" [1] And this is true regarding the Briefing service.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymity

Heh, well you cherry-picked there. It goes on to say ". The important idea here is that a person be non-identifiable, unreachable, or untrackable."

Regardless, it's Wikipedia, that definition ought to be fixed to say "identity" rather than "name".

For online transactions, "name" has been generalized to PII (Personally Identifiable Information) from which name can often be derived.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_data

An anonymous user is precisely the one who hasn't provided authentication credentials

> Anonymous User is any user who accesses network resources without providing a username or password.

Se anonymous is correct in this context

You can create a user account with a random name almost every chat/video application.

A more descriptive term would be "account-free".

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