Today, it is completely normal for the internet to know who you are. When you open a new app, you are expected to provide your name, phone number, email address, photo, and sometimes even your location. On social media, people share where they are, who they are with, what they eat, where they travel, and what they are thinking about. We have become so accustomed to this that we rarely stop to ask how we reached a point where revealing our identity became the default.
Those who have been online longer know it was not always this way.
There was a time when it was perfectly normal for nobody to know who you were, and the default approach was the complete opposite of what we see today — personal information was shared only in very specific situations.
Back then, you had to reveal your identity
The early internet was built around a simple idea: identity was not the most important thing.
People used nicknames instead of real names. Photos were not required. Even age, gender, profession, or country were not details anyone expected you to share. That did not mean people were lying or hiding. There was simply a clear boundary between the individual and their digital presence. If you wanted to reveal more about yourself, it was a conscious decision. You had to decide whom you trusted and how much information you were willing to share.
Today, the process is reversed. The internet asks for your identity first and only then allows participation.
When privacy became a burden
Anonymity used to be the default, while revealing your identity was a choice. Today, revealing your identity is the default, while privacy has become additional work. If you want more privacy, you must adjust the settings of every individual application. You must disable features. You must deal with requests for access to your location, contacts, camera, and microphone. You have to actively think and work to keep something that once came for free.
What is even more interesting is that people have started to view anonymity as something suspicious. If someone does not want to use their real name, the question immediately becomes: what are they hiding? Yet we never apply the same logic in real life. We do not ask people why they lock their doors. We do not ask why they do not walk down the street with a sign above their head displaying their name, workplace, date of birth, and bank account number.
Privacy is not evidence that you are hiding something.
Privacy is the ability to choose what you want to reveal.
A generation that never experienced a different internet
Today, there is an entire generation that has never experienced an internet without profiles, photos, and the constant connection between real-world identity and digital activity. For them, it is normal for apps to know where they are. It is normal for platforms to track interests. It is normal for almost every online action to be linked to a specific individual.
And the question is not which of these two extremes is better. The point is that newer generations have never had the opportunity to experience what a digital environment looks like when anonymity is not a privilege, but a starting point.
Because only when you know that a choice exists can you consciously decide how much privacy you want to keep.
