Anonymization

Abstract

Particularly within the last decade the Internet has developed as a phenomenon encompassing social, cultural, economic, and legal facets. Since it has become common practice to use the Internet for both retrieving and providing information it gained the position of a very valuable tool in everyday life. Contrary to many Internet participants� erroneous assumption of surfing on the Internet anonymously, unless disclosing their identity by entering private data, users leave data tracks on each website they pass. Accordingly, surfing on the World Wide Web is far from being an anonymous activity of no consequences. Hence, the decision not to make available personal data best protects the informational and communicative selfdetermination of the persons concerned since with the development of new technologies new attacking tools are regularly developed, too. For putting the netizens� wish for anonymous communication and the protection of their privacy in the online world into practice, in recent years a number of networking techniques have been innovated. With regard to the fact that these techniques are also misused for illegal activities since parallel to the information and communication technologies� development and the augmented use of the globally available World Wide Web as communication tool crimes and/or their preliminary measures increasingly shift from the real into the online world, on the one hand it is still a debatable point whether there is (or should be) a right to act anonymously on the Internet; on the other hand, governmental interventions into anonymity requests should only be legal if a sufficiently legitimized public interest is given.