Anonymous but cool

June 26, 2007 3:51 AM

Would you pay to be anonymous with a cool domain name?

I've had the slightly cool idea of buying a certain domain name that says "Hello! I want to remain anonymous", and then selling email accounts to it so you could be billy@anonymous or stephanie@anonymous, that sort of thing.

The question is, would you pay for such a service or would you find it remotely useful?

posted by almost_wild to computers & internet (19 comments total)

1. People can easily create anonymous accounts using gmail or hotmail or yahoo mail or pretty much any of the countless webmail offerings in the wild at the moment.

So my answers are No & No.

2. I assume that by Anonymous you mean completely Anonymous. Like, If the FBI raid you looking for details on AnthraxMurderer@Anonymous, they'll never find out who that person is.
I suppose there's value in that service, but it's potentially a horrible and litigious and dangerous road to go down.
posted by seanyboy at 4:01 AM on June 26, 2007

You may also want to read This.
posted by seanyboy at 4:04 AM on June 26, 2007

If it was me, I'd set up a dodgeit/mailinator-alike service and slap ads over the top. My gut feeling is that it won't pay for itself, though.

I think you're basically wasting your time trying to convince people to pay for email.
posted by Leon at 4:05 AM on June 26, 2007

I would not...As pointed out already, I can already have a totally anonymous account for free at anywhere that provides free email.
posted by poppo at 4:25 AM on June 26, 2007

I think the question is REALLY anonymous, or semi anonymous.

Anonymous like hotmail? Not so much. Anonymous like hushmail but even more seekrit, bouncing proxies, logs destroyed every day, and hosted in say...the caribbean? There could be a market for that, but then...it would be shady.
posted by TomMelee at 4:37 AM on June 26, 2007

I don't think anybody pays for email accounts these days.
posted by Skyanth at 4:42 AM on June 26, 2007

Cotse.net has anonymous emal, proxies and web hosting for 6 dollars a month.
posted by a.mosquito at 5:17 AM on June 26, 2007

Anonymity and cool don't go together. To be considered cool, people need to know who you are. It'd be like buying an iPhone or Manolo Blahniks but not telling anyone you own them. What would be the point? For something to make you cool, it has to be attached to your identity. Even if you develop a "net identity" that's separate from your real name, if it has enough coolness, you'll eventually lose your anonymity.
posted by desjardins at 5:31 AM on June 26, 2007

Gmail is the only genuinely anonymous email service, I think. It doesn't include the sender's IP address in the mail header, unlike Yahoo and Hotmail. So what you're describing is already out there. People like Google, and like to be associated with it. so it's already a cool email service. It's the online equivalent of Apple products.

Frankly, your service sounds a little disturbing. The problem is that people rarely need anonymous email for genuine reasons. Some people are privacy obsessed, but they're in a minority. You'd find that most people want to do bad things using your service, such as stalk or terrify others, or just insult them. If you sell your service as being specifically anonymous, rather than an all-round email service (like Gmail), you'll be attracting some pretty unpleasant people.

You'd only be able to offer anonymity to the extent that that law in your country allows. Unless you make this explicitly clear, you could be opening yourself up to litigation from users should the government or even a court subpoena your records. And don't think you could just destroy your records, or not keep them—the law also tells you what to do in that regard too.

Your idea sounds a little outdated too. Nobody pays for any kind of service online nowadays. Well, MetaFilter excluded, of course.
posted by humblepigeon at 5:32 AM on June 26, 2007

Somebody already owns anonymous.com, .net, .org, .info, .biz and .us. Somebody also already owns anonymo.us. That's as far as I got, but you get my drift.
posted by box at 6:10 AM on June 26, 2007

You haven't described your actual plans for anonymity.

Would you know who the people are who are using your service? Because you have their credit card or paypal info? That's not very anonymous then, is it?

If you'd like to create a REAL anonymous service, you should read up on the history of such things. Most anything you can think of was probably tried in the mid-1990's or so, so you should see what happened to previous attempts. Some examples off the top of my head:

--a few ISPs offered anonymous email accounts. Send cash to their office with a letter with no return address saying "open an account foo with password bar", the ISP would create the account and post a notice to a public webpage saying "we created account foo, you can now log in". From time to time, keep sending cash marked "for account foo".
--AnonDSL.
--anon.penet.fi, already linked to earlier in this thread
--Mixmaster remailers

One previous poster has it wrong: in most cases you can indeed choose not to keep records. But having kept them, they'll be available to the authorities. So anonymous services consist largely of a combination of choosing not to keep certain records and setting up services where it's impossible to keep records. Making it impossible to keep records is preferred, so that your users don't have to trust you. Strongly suggest you read the technical considerations for the Mixmaster network (or the Tor routing system, same idea) for a discussion of how to make email anonymous even if some service operators are corrupted.
posted by jellicle at 7:31 AM on June 26, 2007

If I pay you for the use of systems in your "cool domain," I'm no longer anonymous. Therefore, no, I would not pay nor would I find it useful. I agree with the other answerers: You don't seem to understand quite what anonymity is if your idea of it is to own a "cool domain name" and sell email accounts.
posted by majick at 7:37 AM on June 26, 2007

One previous poster has it wrong: in most cases you can indeed choose not to keep records.

According to his profile details, the poster is British (Welsh), and so has to abide by UK laws. One of those is that ISPs must keep records.

Don't assume everybody lives in America.
posted by humblepigeon at 8:02 AM on June 26, 2007

What you're talking about is essentially a for-profit "Type 0" anonymous remailer. While not a terrible idea, you're about 10 or 12 years too late, and even then I'm not sure the for-profit thing would have worked out. There's no good infrastructure for handling truly anonymous payments, at least not electronically.

People who want anonymity can get it using nymservers, or Mixmaster if they don't care about having a replyable address.

If your domain name is truly cool, you might get a few people willing to pay a few dollars per year for an address there, but I wouldn't count on it, and I wouldn't even try to guarantee anonymity -- it's just too hard. (Penet had a hard enough time of it, and they were in pre-9/11 Finland; if you're talking about doing it in post-9/11 America you're in for a world of hurt.)
posted by Kadin2048 at 8:06 AM on June 26, 2007

This idea is half-baked and AskMe is not for market research.
posted by mkultra at 8:14 AM on June 26, 2007

An amazing 10 years ago, I ran two anonymous internet mail systems. One was a typical cypherpunk remailer (the huge cajones remailer). The other was something called The Mailmasher, which was a web-based mail system (like hotmail or Gmail).

Both were fully anonymous, in that not even I, the operator of the system, could determine the identities of the people using the system, or who they were sending mail to, or what was in the mail. This means that the system kept no logs of any kind, and did other things to "forget" who was using the system as soon as it was technically feasible (i.e. milliseconds after your browser broke the connection).

This is incompatible with a pay-to-use system. If people transfer payment to you to activate an account, then you're going to know who they are... and you'll need to track usage for recurring billing purposes.

Otherwise, if I want to identify one of your users, all I have to do is get a friendly judge to issue a court order asking your bank for your billing records -- before I get the same judge to require you to disclose your own logs and records.

(With that said, I did accept "donations" when I was running Mailmasher, and I collected about $400 a month, mostly in cash sent through the mail).

While I was running the remailers, I was frequently threatened with lawsuits by everyone from disgruntled recipients of spam to the church of scientology (one of the Mailmasher users was a big critic of CoS, at a time where a lot of previously secret/copyrighted documents were being leaked).

There is a lot more to anonymity than "you don't give a (real) name when you sign up" or "your IP address isn't in the headers of mail you send" or "I trust Google to protect my identity". If you can't say "I don't trust the operator of this system, but I don't need to, because they can't determine who I am", then you're not using an anonymous system.

And don't make the mistake that Gmail is anonymous. Google is famous for the profile information that it collects about its users, and how it links this profile between its properties. If you've ever used Google Checkout, AdWords, or anything else that required you to give google your billing information, and then logged into Gmail without clearing out your persistent google tracking cookie, then your billing info and your Gmail address are linked -- forever.

Your Gmail address is already linked to every IP address that has ever logged into it. If one of those happens to be your home broadband connection...

In this era of the RIAA being able to file a lawsuit against an IP address, the rampant spammers/scammers that operate via email, and the anti-circumvention aspects of the DMCA, it would be foolish to try to start (or even use) an anonymous service based in the US.
posted by toxic at 8:46 AM on June 26, 2007

humblepigeon: The problem is that people rarely need anonymous email for genuine reasons

I can't let this stand.

Huge Cajones facilitated one of the first Narcotics Anonymous mailing lists available on the internet.

The Mailmasher was used to nab someone who was diddling his 15 year old stepdaughter. An anonymous tipster told the girl's school's principal and the stepdad's employer.

At least one battered spouse escaped her relationship with her abusive husband -- who happened to be a sysadmin and who was reading her (non-anonymous) mail.

And those are just the ones that I know about, because I was (anonymously) thanked for running the service by one of the people involved in each situation.

Plus, all of the remailers that were operating in the mid 90-s were instrumental in exposing the absurdities of the "Church" of Scientology's beliefs and policies.

There are plenty of legitimate reasons for anonymity. To lump nearly all remailer users into the no-genuine-social-value category is vastly misguided.
posted by toxic at 9:04 AM on June 26, 2007

would you pay for such a service

No. I can quite easily make [e-mail]
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 9:16 AM on June 26, 2007

There are plenty of legitimate reasons for anonymity. To lump nearly all remailer users into the no-genuine-social-value category is vastly misguided.

Well, to be fair, I did say that "people rarely need anonymous email for genuine reasons". I think the examples you quote are those 'rare' reasons. They're pretty extraordinary circumstances.

I hold by what I said. I remember hanging around some unpleasant parts of the Internet in the late 90s, and one of the things every young hax0r wanted was an anonymous emailing service, along with p0rn and warez. They didn't want anonymous email to send pictures of kittens to other people.

One of the program better-skilled hax0rs made were anonymous emailing programs, and these were passed around like contraband. This is shady stuff. There might be legitimate uses for such services, but, like I said, they're rare.
posted by humblepigeon at 12:33 PM on June 26, 2007