Imagine yourself, if you will, several years in the future as a working professional, scaling ladders both in terms of peer admiration and career trajectory. You might be in a position of some authority, a manager of a small team, a representative of certain interests, a mediator between various parties’ means and ends. A promotion might be on the cards, a young family might have been planned or have already arrived and with it a whole life-raft of other duties and responsibilities to keep buoyant.
You wake up and scrape the frost of sleep from the windscreen of your tired eyes; another day beckons and as you traipse to the shower, standing for a micro-sleep whilst the jets heat, you begin to sift through the catalogue of events that will provide its form. You step from the shower and start to dress.
As you proceed through these morning rituals you reach for the digital device to begin your online engagement for the day. A strange message is waiting for you, one that switches on the ice-cold shower-head of surprise and confusion. It says that on this day 8 years ago you sent an anonymous message using an app that was popular at the time.
You vaguely recall using those kinds of apps back when you were in your teens, impressionable and a little disaffected, but their interest soon faded and you forgot all about them. You certainly don’t remember sending the message that is now being presented to you, in all its lurid immaturity, as though the intervening years had been a long and particularly vivid dream from which you’ve only just woken.
It’s only after a few seconds that you realise the message is a threat, promising to send your teenage indiscretion to particular addresses – the boss with whom you have an 11:30 meeting, your still-sleeping partner. Just as the adrenaline begins to joy-ride around the freeways of your nervous system you realise there is an option of escape being offered to you: a fee to pay.
***
Such a scenario may seem blanched with melodrama, but it can surely be taken as the extension of real possibilities from observable contemporary behaviour with social media. One of the weightier trends among consumer applications in 2014 was the rise of ‘anonymous social networking’; apps that allow users to post publically to networks without disclosing their real identities.
Once the foundations had been laid the construction of these apps was formidable with sites such as Ask, Snapchat, Whisper, YikYak, Secret, Afterschool and Formspring leading the way.
In 2014, 9% of American internet users aged 10-18 visited Ask on a daily basis, 5% used YikYak and Whisper, whilst at its height Secret boasted over 15 million users. In February, The Guardian reported that the Tinder ‘dating app’ was generating more than 60mn profile reads and 6mn matches a day.
In a sense, this proliferation of assumed online anonymity was a logical response to the Edward Snowden revelations of mass surveillance of ordinary internet users on the part of NSA and GCHQ. The knowledge that teams at GCHQ had been assigned with analysing the sexual video messages of Yahoo users for instance, was hilarious for its absurdity but also rather perverse for the way in which it cast the security state as voyeurs on a grand and unaccountable scale.
So it is unsurprising to see the growth of these vines of anonymity spreading across youth internet culture and yet, given what we know about the lengths to which the state will go to monitor our digital platform, it doesn’t take the most wilful conspiracy theorist to begin to wonder where all this might lead. It is almost as though the state were now happily distributing tin-hats to everyone, only making sure they have GPS-tracking capabilities built into them.
Of course, with these apps serving as digital confessionals, receptacles for our boundless appetite for salacious gossip and sensation, it should also come as no surprise to note the nature of this ‘anonymous’ content. A brief trawl across Whisper for instance offers these as a routine sample:
‘worried my baby doesn’t belong to my fiancé. What to do?’
‘I was molested by my older cousin when I was a child and I’m still afraid to speak out about it’
‘I can’t stop my evil thoughts’
‘I have 2 kids, my wife has no idea’
‘I’ve slept with 20 guys’
‘I’m a lesbian and madly in love with my best friend who is straight and pregnant’
‘wish I could be single and childless again’
‘I’m an alcoholic and have been since I was 14’
‘I cheated on my boyfriend and loved the thrill of it’
‘I love the taste of blood’
‘I’ve tried killing myself before and no one knows, not even my parents or friends’
‘my personality that they love so much is 60% fake’
‘my aunt and I took a shower together when I was 10’
‘I cut myself too much’
‘I’ve had sex with my friend’s dad more times than with anyone else’
‘my husband loves watching black guys fuck me’
‘I’ve had sex with my older brother. We still do it. I regret nothing’
‘I plan on drinking this bottle of wine tonight. If my mum hears me puking in the middle of the night I’ll just pretend I’m sick...again’
‘I was high when I asked her out, I’m even higher at the wedding’
‘that moment when you buy weed you don’t need because the weed man is the best booty call you ever had’
‘my husband is so quick I hardly even get to start getting excited, don’t know what I’d do without my toy’
‘being gay isn’t a choice - the government injects every 100th baby born with a gay virus to control the population'
'in a perfect world my son will never find out that my boyfriend isn't his real father'
Whilst much of the sleaze reflects the apparent titillation in anonymously sharing, the more disturbing examples emit the nihilistic sentiment of the genuinely troubled. Each one though is a viral wrecking ball poised to smash into the citadel of an individual's reputation at some point in the future.
Of course, it is very probable that a sizeable portion of posts will be mere lies and hyperbole concocted out of boredom or the desire to elicit some small measure of shock or opprobrium from the community who respond. But this argument misses the fundamental point: regardless of the reality behind these meme-masks, once the digital fingerprints are there they cannot be wiped clean and truth or falsity is an irrelevance. Like Josef K's plight in Kafka's 'The Trial', an offence will be registered and doggedly pursued leaving it up to the individual to prove their innocence.
A cursory examination of the Terms and Conditions of these apps is enough to isolate passages from amidst the suffocating legalese that offer sufficient ambiguity to fuel the misanthropic imagination.
In late 2014, The Guardian reported that Whisper was tracking the whereabouts of its users even if they had disabled location services. Their updated T&Cs state that 'we collect very little information that could be used to identify you personally', only information that could be utilised to improve services and overall user experience. However, that collected information amounts to the type of device being used, the operating system, the web browser, the ISP and IP address; all information that could easily lead to an atomised individual being identified.
Snapchat, an app that allows users to send messages that spontaneously combust after a few seconds, state that submission of content grants them an 'irrevocable, non-exclusive, sub-licensable, and transferable licence to use, reproduce, modify, etc...such content'. Similarly, YikYak 'reserve the right to retain your Submissions, even after they have expired from view within the App or even after you have deleted them'. Along with Snapchat they reserve the right to sublicense content to third parties.
Expanding on this point, Whisper state that they may establish business relationships with third parties but only if they 'believe they are trustworthy'. Continuing to ladle ambiguous reassurances, they state 'we may give service providers only the information that's necessary for them to perform services on our behalf', and:
'we may share the information we collect from you with businesses that control, are controlled by, or are under common control with WhisperText. This means that if WT is merged, acquired, sold, or in the event of a transfer of some or all of our assets, we may disclose or transfer such information in connection with that particular transaction.'
Put simply, if at any point in the future the team behind Whisper decide to sell up, the purchasing company will acquire all that juicy gossip; low-hanging fruit to be picked for potentially dubious gain.
Across the internet there is the feeling that the beginning of the end for anonymous apps may be nigh. Each of these apps spurt up like geysers from the Silicon Valley ooze yet their lifespan is predictably brief (earlier this year, Secret announced it was shutting down), in accordance with the fickle whims of their target audience - the digitally-adept teen market searching for distraction and reacting like one of Pavlov's dogs to the bell-ringing of scandal and sleaze.
The obvious reason for this decline, alongside controversies regarding privacy and cyber-bullying claims, is that they have failed to provide a clear path to monetization for their investors. This is a stark problem because the funding behind these apps is substantial; $61mn behind Whisper and $70mn behind YikYak, for example.
Rather more modestly, Secret generated $35mn of funding and in the aftermath of its demise it has been reported that whatever money is left is to be returned to the investors. Without adequate means of marketing and advertising revenue generation, anonymous apps face a steep decline unless they are bought-out by a mega-firm like Facebook (who are also developing their own standalone app 'Rooms').
As the common cliché goes, if the service is free then you are the product. In the absence of any other means of remunerating their investors all of this information is, or will shortly become, incredibly valuable and the reward for those willing to strike the right deal may be too tempting to resist. As the hacker/writer Stewart Brand said, 'information wants to be free', although he followed this with the proviso that 'it also wants to be very expensive.'
One of the finest Monty Python sketches is 'Blackmail', a mock TV show in which the host Michael Palin plays grainy peeping-tom footage of individuals in increasingly compromising situations, with the target urged to call in as the ransom fee inflates.
This could be a prophesy of the extortion propagated by nefarious digital debt-collectors of the near future - not the public shaming via social media such as Jon Ronson has written about recently, rather the undercover private shaming of individuals before those with whom the ramifications will be most severe.
If not shady 'third parties' sublicensed several years down the line when the information asset is ripe for off-loading, then surely mischievous hackers could play havoc with such a trove of dirt - that woman you're about to promote as regional manager or elect to a board, here's an incriminating message she posted as a teenager ... that guy you're about to get engaged to, here's a sample of the chauvinistic comments and nude pictures he used to send to women.
Who knows, perhaps a heroic 'third party' will mysteriously appear from the trees and swing into action, promising that they will wipe clean the dirty fingerprints left smudged along the surface of your web history. Any service for the right price...
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