> I would say the terms are mutually exclusive only because there is no expectation of privacy where a party is anonymous.
But as an end-user, do you really care about privacy if you are already anonymous?
I can think of situations where you would. But for most scenarios, it seems to me that anonymity renders privacy a moot question. At least that's the case for me --- therefore I also think that the statement "the terms are mutually exclusive" is fairly meaningless, at least for my own online activity.
My intuition is a lot of "regular" people (i.e. the non-hackernews crowd) would see it the same way...
Your logic assumes the remote party in a transaction has no privacy considerations only because you yourself have anonymity. In a very practical sense it means they are not likely to disclose things to you.
Even still would you really be willing to give out all your financial and sexual preferences to a stranger even if you are anonymous? I suspect most people would continue to harbor reservations.
I see it more as a soft trade-off, than something that has hard limits. The more I trust my own anonymity, the less I worry and care about the privacy at the other end. And the more willing I would be to give out details that could come back and bite me if my anonymity was blown.
I see it more as Stockholm Syndrome to the web’s client server model. People are willing to abandon privacy to a web server out of convenience but that doesn’t sound emotionally appealing so they give up and pretend what they have is good enough.
But as an end-user, do you really care about privacy if you are already anonymous?
I can think of situations where you would. But for most scenarios, it seems to me that anonymity renders privacy a moot question. At least that's the case for me --- therefore I also think that the statement "the terms are mutually exclusive" is fairly meaningless, at least for my own online activity.
My intuition is a lot of "regular" people (i.e. the non-hackernews crowd) would see it the same way...