I agree with Tony Li and others who believe that there is a
fundamental tussle between anonymity and reachability.
Since this is a fundamental tussle, rather than being specific
to any particular technology, a human example using ordinary
mail (not email) suffices.
(TOTALLY ANONYMOUS/PRIVATE/HIDDEN)
If one wants to be totally anonymous, then no one knows who one
is or where one really is located. If a family member wanted
to send an anonymous person a parcel or letter, it would be
impossible because they would not know where to send the
parcel or letter -- and would not know which name that person
was using at that moment in time.
(PARTLY ANONYMOUS)
If one wants to be partially reachable, then at least the
sender of the parcel/letter needs to know what the destination
address should be for the envelope or shipping label. Also,
the delivery firm (or the government post office if one is
using the post) needs to know how to forward the letter or
parcel to that written destination address, including the
precise last-hop delivery route. If one uses the now largely
disused "poste restante"/"general delivery" scheme, then the
post office needs to know which post office to deliver the
letter/parcel to, and the human trying to retrieve the letter
or parcel will need to provide a name for the post office
to look for within the "general delivery" mail bin, and the
post office might ask for some form of identification that
the person asking for the mail is in fact that name. In this
case, one has partial anonymity (or perhaps partial location hiding),
but it is very far from being totally anonymous and hidden.
(GENERALLY REACHABLE)
If one wants to be more generally reachable, one is often
listed publicly somewhere, perhaps in a telephone directory
with a house number, street/road, and city. In this case,
people wanting to send letters/parcels can look up the address
and send the letter or parcel via some delivery method.
However, in this case one does not have significant amount
of privacy.
Various other intermediate degrees of anonymity vs reachability
exist. I'm just using 3 examples to illustrate the tradeoff here.
[NB: I don't list "totally reachable", because for many people
that just isn't possible. For example, some countries do not
exchange postal mail or parcels. Also, in some countries
there aren't any reasonably reliable delivery methods to certain
places [especially very rural places like a wilderness]. Also,
tragically, there is fighting from time to time in various
places and that often prevents letters or parcels from being
delivered.]
There really is a fundamental tussle here. Different people
fall in different places on the above continuum -- trading off
varying degrees of privacy/anonymity/hiding with varying
degrees of reachability.
Yours,
Ran
PS: I suspect the Internet equivalent for "generally reachable"
might be:
- has a unique fully-qualified domain-name
- that domain-name is published publicly
- that domain-name has one or more reachability
data associated with it (e.g. DNS A records)
- the reachability data is reasonably accurate and
reasonably stable
- an actual usable path exists between sender and
the delivery location indicated by the reachability data
EOF
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