What is The Difference?
The term “private” can best be defined as this: your identity and online activity are completely hidden.
The term “anonymous” means that your online activity IS visible, but your identity IS NOT.
Being truly private online is IMPOSSIBLE, because (in spite of what some products say) you cannot hide your digital footprints. However, you CAN wear someone else’s shoes, which effectively hides YOUR digital footprints.
Thus, while a user’s online activity can always be seen, that which cannot be always seen is who is actually behind that activity.
An easy analogy for these two words is found comparing a wooden door and a frosted glass door on your room.
When you are behind a wooden door, nobody can see who you are or what you’re doing, and THAT is being private.
On the other hand, with a frosted glass door, your activity can be seen, but your identity is not seen.
THAT’s what being anonymous means. The reality is that you can only be anonymous on the web.
Even if your browsing is anonymous, when you login to a site, you do let that site “inside your room” (in the above analogy by opening the frosted glass door).
Put another way, Big Techs, like Google, Facebook and Amazon, can now see it is you when login to their sites, and then they will associate the data on your device with their collected data on you.
Consequently, it is best to keep the Big Techs outside of your anonymous browsing sessions. “Don’t blow your cover” is an interesting expression from other situations.
The “privacy vs. anonymous” confused use of these works will always be seen.
For at least the last ten-years, the industry has not maintained the privacy vs. anonymous distinction, mentioned above, in its literature, nor in its advertising. Consequently, you will see that confusion, and quite often the interchangeability of these terms, today in advertising, in discussions and in posts.
While anonymous is what must be achieved on web visits, most device users think of their overall “right to privacy” in using their devices.
“Privacy” is the word that device users naturally reach for, to express what they want from the web visits. It is as though this use of the word “privacy” is a cultural super-category having to do with “natural rights,” rather than the technical method impossible of achieving on the web.
Consequently, this natural desire to use the word “privacy” must be respected, even though it can only be achieved by “anonymous.”
If you make the common language distinction, that “privacy” means a “natural right” and, “anonymous” refers to a technical way to achieve that natural right, then you can understand: that you must become “anonymous” to have “privacy.”
Knowing this common usage, and the privacy vs. anonymous difference, will also help you better to understand what people are really saying when they use these words in different contexts, and even somewhat interchangeably.
