'Perfect anonymity either incredibly difficult or nigh impossible to achieve online'

Remember the excitement when Facebook first opened to the public back in the early 2000s?

Public awareness of the risks of posting your personal information online has grown a lot since then, and there's been an outcry as the realisation hit that our information is being used by platform owners to target us for advertising.

Can you ever delete yourself completely from the internet? Well, by all accounts, not really.

When Facebook first launched, says MyBroadband editor Jan Vermeulen, it had a feeling of intimacy as there weren't billions of users yet.

As the dream of a democratised internet happened and it became more of a public space, suddenly there could be dire consequences to your online presence.

Think of instances where people have actually lost their jobs because of stuff they've said online, for instance.

Then there is the opportunity provided for people who want to harm or rob you through exploiting the information you've made available online to better target you.

And then of course, there's the ubiquitous targeting of people by the 'big guys' for advertising purposes.

"I think our information was always valuable - that's why so many of these services were willing to give you access for free in exchange for personal information, but people didn't realise how valuable was until much later, until the systems to monetise that private information got much much better than they were in the early 2000s."

Jan Vermeulen, Editor - MyBroadband

"It started off pretty benign with Google's ad targeting, and then I think the penny dropped with the Cambridge Analytica scandal when people realised 'hang on, these advertisers can target specific people and use the information they've gleaned about them for manipulation', which was political in this case."

Jan Vermeulen, Editor - MyBroadband

What about evidence people cite that you can never fully erase your presence on the internet?

Mhlungu cites her own example of deleting a playlist, and then finding it again on a streaming platform months later.

When you click 'delete' on something that's stored online, you're actually putting trust in the service provider on the other side to honour that command but they don't have to, and often they don't do it immediately, Vermeulen says.

"There's the motivation of mitigating user error... and so now these online services provide a way out where if you accidentally delete something you can contact their support and plead your case and they could probably put it back, so whatever you delete goes into a kind of a zombie state or gets put ito a bin and then it gets deleted EVENTUALLY. But when eventually is, is entirely up to them."

Jan Vermeulen, Editor - MyBroadband

He highlights that users can remain anonymous online by posting under a pseudonym rather than their real name, or through other ways like using a VPN (virtual private network).

However, agencies like law enforcement are able to 'de-anonymise' people by for instance issuing subpoenas to service providers to obtain personal details.

"So, trying to remain anonymous is not foolproof. Perfect anonymity is either incredibly difficult, or nigh impossible to achieve online."

Jan Vermeulen, Editor - MyBroadband

"What is encouraging to me is that people are starting to think more deeply about how they approach their identities on these platforms and how we handle anonymity online."

Jan Vermeulen, Editor - MyBroadband

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