If you're not a member operating under the criminal or civil justice system in the United States, it might be anonymous enough. Anonymous "enough" is all you'll usually get anyway. If you want to get technical, there's no such thing as true anonymity. Of course, whether or not "enough is enough" is, as always, going to depend on your threat model.
> The claim was that Twilio was "mostly anonymous", which isn't true.
If you accept that anonymity isn't a purely true/false proposition, which you are doing by using the word "mostly," having your identity only available to law enforcement after a court order has been issued seems like a textbook instance of "mostly anonymous."
Possibly? In this sort of continuum of anonymity we're talking about, that's probably a lot more anonymous (but it isn't fully anonymous unless you're paying someone else to buy the phone for you in a different city, and they don't know who you are, and probably some other things I'm not paranoid enough to think of).
It's still fine to say Twilio is "mostly anonymous," and objecting to that - that Twilio is "mostly anonymous" - on the basis that law enforcement can find out who you are with a court order is very silly. As if a service that requires due process of law to uncover any information about you is morally or practically equivalent to having your name and address in the white pages.
So should we just say it's not anonymous at all? Eliminate the whole notion of "mostly anonymous?" That's what the argument was. If Twilio isn't "mostly anonymous," what is? And why the heck does having subscriber data available via court order eliminate something from the "mostly anonymous" category?
edit: by the way, I never said '"anonymous" simply means it's not listed anywhere'
You can't see the difference between something where it's difficult to even figure out who the user is and something else where anonymity depends entirely on you trusting the service provider and them not being subject to a court order?
At a nesting depth of six or seven comments, is it really productive to reply with rhetorical questions that don't even respond to the comment? Of course I can see the difference. I just don't understand what it is about the level of privacy that comes from requiring a court order to access user information that moves a service from "mostly anonymous" to "not anonymous at all." It seems like a highly ideological rather than a practical position to take.
I'm sure we can all agree that "mostly anonymous" isn't good enough for a dissident, but holy fuck what a useless subthread you started. Or I started. Dear God.
It's ironic: the above reply is the first time you've responded to something I actually wrote. I almost admire the fact that it's impossible to tell whether I'm being trolled or whether you are actually like this.
Is the only way I can "respond to something you actually wrote" by repeating key words and phrases from your post? I reject your notion of "mostly anonymous" as essentially impossible to distinguish from "not anonymous."
