In a social and cultural context in which the majority of the population is surveyed, classified and controlled as if a sheet inside a vast database is involved anonymity seems to be a dream as appetizing as unworkable. At the same time, one aspect of them in a more recurrent in computer-mediated communications is providing precisely, a way of networking anonymously. This is at least a general view among many of the users and most of the mass media, with more or less rigor, address the issue. However, this view is not fully shared by all. Both those with sufficient expertise, as several scholars of these social phenomena, they think that a complete anonymity on the Internet may not be possible or desirable. On the following pages will address various areas related to anonymity in computer-mediated communications: information that gives any machine when it establishes a connection to World Wide Web and various forms of control such information and potential dangers that lurk a connection with an IRC server and, finally, some considerations about the type of anonymity that we want and / or fear.

One of the great attractions of the Internet, in all its facets, is that it allows us to observe without being observed. A behavior that some qualify as’ voyeuristic ‘can be identified in the “innocent” and increasingly common practice of anyone who surf the World Wide Web, for any purpose. Anyone seeking information specialist, who reads the newspaper, who visit a page erotic or pornographic or who sailed without any destination tend to experience the power of stillness do and see without feeling watched. Few believe in the possibility that his steps are not as secret as imagine. The computer monitor becomes a window to a world that is paralyzed before our eyes and does not have the audacity to ask. The apparent calm that gives absolute privacy, together with the strength and the vastness of the Internet are good arguments for enjoying the Network in all its glory and without strings attached.

However, there is something that many users ignore: the ‘footsteps on the path’. There are plenty of ways in which our ‘footsteps on the path’ reveal information about ourselves. To launch an Internet connection means that a stable link between two points. One, the visible, is the destination point. Another, which is often ignored is the point of origin of the connection. Without going too far in technicalities or exceptions, we will say that the point of origin of an Internet connection is the IP address. The IP address of a computer connection (the computer, modem, phone line …) is fixed in much of the time. In other varies slightly, often due to the type of supplier that has been hired (dynamic IPs). The IP address is unique and identifies the origin of the connection. The IP address, therefore, is the minimal information provided by any user to connect to the Internet. Minimal information that can lead enrolled some more data, such as the organization or country of origin. These are the ‘footsteps on the path’ that nourish any hits put on a website and that slightly more exploited, used, for example, to develop more comprehensive statistics that generates a counter-type ‘Net stat’ that can be in any personal page for free.

The fact ‘grant’ this information need not be feared, but that can be used for ‘benign’. This is the base from which he worked on the project “The web sociable” at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Despite the fact that his project did not have the acceptance and success that their designers, Judith Donath and Niel Robertson, imagined, “the Web sociable” was an interesting idea, as it sought to exploit such information to Web sites that want to participate the initiative proved much more socially interactive: that the visitors would coincide simultaneously on a website could establish connection between them. Since a good part of the websites exist to provide information on very specific aspects of interest in this project is designed around software applications that took advantage of the data provided by the IP address for users to know if there were more people consulting page simultaneously, and opened up the ability to chat with them. Thus, browsing the World Wide Web became a little less lonely and more collaborative, allowing users could help each other to find what they were looking for, exchanging views, ideas and tips. An implementation date of these ideas is the software ‘ODE’ (see the list of addresses).

Another example of how the surfer is leaving his footprints behind his supposedly anonymous walks by the World Wide Web is the functioning of the so-called ‘cookies’. The base model of cookie is a text file that is entered in the user’s computer by some websites you visit it. Since they are only text files, they can not contain viruses or damaging the system. In any case, are clear limits to the privacy of the environment, since it works by compiling and organizing your personal information? Many cookies, the so-called ‘persistence’s’-usually configured to stay on a user’s system for months or even years. The cookies contain information on previous visits that the user has made to that page and this information can be more or less abundant, depending on the use that he wants to give. In this way, can consist of a simple invisible code assigned to each visitor to account for how many users turn to page after it has been discovered, purely for the purpose of internal control and calculation or it could be a long list of data that have been supplied to the website with a detailed recounting of page views, personality profiles, or objects purchased by the user is interested, and so on.