The web should remain anonymous by default

The unique architecture of the web enables a much higher degree of user privacy than exists on other platforms. Many factors contribute to this, but an essential one is that you don’t need to log in to start browsing. Sharing details about yourself with a website is an optional step you can take when you have reason to do so, rather than the price of admission.

These norms mirror those of a free society. You can walk down the street without wearing a name tag or prove who you are to passersby. You can enter a store without introducing yourself, and only open your wallet if you decide to buy something. You aren’t hiding anything, but society shows restraint in what it asks and observes, which allows you to be casually anonymous. When this is the default, everyone can freely enjoy the benefits of privacy without having to go to great lengths to hide their identity – something that isn’t practical for most people.

It’s easy to take casual anonymity for granted, but it depends on a fragile equilibrium that is under constant threat.

One way to erode casual anonymity is with covert surveillance, like a snoop following you around town or listening to your phone calls. For more than a decade, Mozilla has worked hard to close technical loopholes — like third-party cookies and unencrypted protocols — used by third parties to learn much more about you than you intended to share with them. The work is far from done, but we’re immensely proud of how much less effective this kind of surveillance has become.

But there’s also a different kind of threat, which is that sites begin to explicitly reject the norm of casual anonymity and move to a model of “papers, please”. This isn’t a new phenomenon: Walled gardens like Facebook and Netflix have long operated this way. However, several recent pressures threaten to tip the balance towards this model becoming much more pervasive.

First, increasing volume and sophistication of bot traffic — often powering and powered by AI — is overwhelming sites. Classic approaches to abuse protection are becoming less effective, leading sites to look for alternatives like invasive fingerprinting or requiring all visitors to log in.

Second, jurisdictions around the world are beginning to mandate age restrictions for certain  categories of content, with many implementations requiring users to present detailed identity information in order to access often-sensitive websites.

Third, new standardized mechanisms for digital government identity make it much more practical for sites to demand hard identification and thus use it for all sorts of new purposes, which may be expedient for them but not necessarily in the interest of everyone’s privacy.

All of these pressures stem from real problems that people are trying to solve, and ignoring them will not make them go away. Left unchecked, the natural trajectory here would be the end of casual anonymity. However, Mozilla exists to steer emerging technology and technical policy towards better outcomes. In that vein, we’ve identified promising technical approaches to address each of these three pressures while maintaining or even strengthening the privacy we enjoy online today.

A common theme across these approaches is the use of cryptography: some new, some old. For example, most people have at least one online relationship with an entity who knows them well (think banks, major platforms, etc). Zero-knowledge proof protocols can let other sites use that knowledge to identify visitors as real humans, not bots. Careful design of the protocols maintains privacy by preventing sites from learning any additional information beyond personhood.

We’ll be sharing more about these approaches over the coming months. Some details are still evolving in collaboration with our partners in the ecosystem, but we are confident it is possible to address abuse, age assurance, and civic authentication without requiring the web to abandon casual anonymity.

The web is special and irreplaceable — let’s work together to preserve what makes it great.

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