The anthropologist Gabriella Coleman has extensively studied the social and technical background of the Anonymous online protest group, incl. her 2013 report, „Anonymous in Context: The Politics and Power behind the Mask„.

The Anonymouth text anonymization tool for texts has recently been criticized by the US critic of digital culture, Ted Byfield, in a posting on the Nettime mailing list (25 May 2016). Byfield points out that Anonymouth is closely related to stylometric projects which try to do exactly the opposite, i.e. identify anonymous authors.

„Internetkollektiv Anonymous – Digitale Spaßguerilla oder Hacker mit Moral?“ A radio feature about the Anonymous internet collective; discussing a.o. the diverging strategies of Anonymous activists, some radically opposed to state institutions, some cooperating with them. The programme was screened on the German public station Deutschlandradio Kultur, 23. 5. 2016 (in German).

The public release of the „Panama Papers“ this week by Süddeutsche Zeitung and others uncovers many names of people who tried to stay anonymous by founding offshore companies to manage part of their incomes. Despite the apparent legality of most of the procedures, one may ask why these people put so much effort into a […]

Still, everything is being done to transform the opaque and anonymous consumer into a transparent and identifiable one. Sami Coll analyses consumer surveillance and it becomes clear why anonymity has little place in it. See: Sami Coll (2016) Discipline and Reward: The Surveillance of Consumers through Loyalty Cards, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 42(1)

The Dutch media theorist Daniel de Zeeuw has published several articles and interviews on Anonymity, and the Anonymous hacker group. His MA-thesis was „One Name, One Game. Anonymous and the revenge of the object.“ He is currently working on a PhD project at the University of Amsterdam, about the politics and aesthetics of anonymity in […]

„The social identity model of deindividuation effects (or SIDE model) is a theory from Social Psychology that deals with the effects of (partial) anonymity and identifiability on group behavior.

Scientists have used geographic profiling methods to try and identify the pseudonymous UK street artist Banksy. The commentaries (links see below) are more critical than this introductory abstract: „The pseudonymous artist Banksy is one of the UK’s most successful contemporary artists, but his identity remains a mystery. Here, we use a Dirichlet process mixture (DPM) […]

The project „IMprints“ is based esp. at Loughborough University and at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design in the UK and deals with public responses to Future Identity Management practices and technologies.

The World Charter of Free Media, issued in Tunis in March 2015, demands „the right to anonymity“.