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Not ‘who are you?’, but ‘what are you?’

There is a flip side to internet anonymity. At the same time as it protects individual users’ privacy, it is also the gateway for people with questionable intents. And some of those people aren’t really people.

01 July 2011

It’s almost 20 years since the publication of Peter Steiner’s famous cartoon of a dog sitting in front of a PC and saying (to another dog): “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”

Even with the latest technology, it’s hard to verify exactly who is on the other end of a connection. This has a good side, as we all know. We don’t all want or need to be as exposed as Lady Gaga, Charlie Sheen or the latest politician caught with his pants down – figuratively speaking, of course.

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