Obscurity vs. Anonymity

I search on the internet all the time, and sometimes I’m searching for people. People I used to work with, friends from college, old high school buddies: I probably don’t go a week without searching for someone in one of those categories. I also regularly search for the phone numbers of local carry-out restaurants or neighbors I only know by first name and house number.

In fact, I searched for an old acquaintance today. One former coworker emailed me asking if I had any current contact info for another former coworker. “Why would I need that?” I thought, “I have a current version of the internet!”

So I searched for my former coworker. And why not? It’s not like she’s going to know about it. I won’t have to explain myself. One of the most enticing things about the privacy of Internet searches is that they go beyond anonymity and into obscurity. “Nobody knows who I am” is replaced by “nobody knows that I’m here.” I can be curious about someone without making them curious about me because they have no way of knowing that I’ve been asking questions.

Today someone searching for me totally missed the point, though: she called my house and talked to my wife.

Now, this person wasn’t searching for me me, but for someone named Jason with a similar last name to mine. Still, it was obvious that this person was randomly searching for the right Jason. “Is this Jason so-and-so? Do you live near some particular landmark? Do you remember Brenda?”

No, no, and no.

But it seems weird to me that someone would use the telephone as a search tool. Ever heard of Google? Anywho? Classmates? (If I provided links to those websites, dear reader, I would be insulting your intelligence.)

And the really strange part is how my knowing about this search has made me feel. All kinds of people may search for me on the internet for all kinds of reasons, but these searches are completely obscure and I don’t know about them and I don’t care. But the fact that some searcher went from obscurity to anonymity makes the search feel a little more like intrusion. Anonymity, at times, makes one more powerful and more frightening than identity.