Last week I posted a video of myself on Facebook showing me doing my 15 minute micro-teach, an important assessed part of my teaching qualification.  The video showed myself and my friend John, who was delivering the session with me, teaching vowels to the rest of the people in my class.

I’d deliberately told my classmates a couple of weeks before that I had intended to publish the video on the internet to help me keep in touch with family and friends who live several hundred, and in one case, several thousands of miles away.  Nobody objected.

However shortly after I posted the video, someone on the class Facebook group asked me to take it down.  She said that she wanted to remain completely anonymous on the internet and didn’t want any photos or videos of her online.

I didn’t take the video offline.  I won’t go into all the reasons for it here but suffice to say the video isn’t brilliantly clear and everyone sat in the class only appears for very short periods.  I did agree to limit it to just my Facebook friends however.

It raised an interesting point of discussion with friends and colleagues.  This individual didn’t have any personal details on her profile.  She didn’t include her real name, any personal details or any photos.  She did however include lots of details of her social activities and nights out and had 38 friends.  It led to people asking me why, if she wanted to remain completely anonymous, had she signed up with the biggest social networking website on the planet?

It’s a common thing that people, who aren’t very IT and internet literate, sit at home on the PC in their living room and to them that’s the internet.  They can’t see the enormity of the whole thing, probably because they can’t relate to it.  They can sign up for websites like Facebook and it’s perfectly okay, because they’re at home and home is a safe place.

The long and short of it however is that there is NO anonymity on the internet.  By signing up to a social networking website, whatever it is, you are implicitly agreeing to become part of a community that shares information about people.  You can’t cry foul whenever somebody posts a picture of you online, you also can’t stop them from doing so if it’s innocent and non-offensive.

The simple fact is that there is no such thing as anonymity on the internet, it simply doesn’t exist and anyone seeking it is on a fool’s errand.  If it’s important to you though I can only suggest that you don’t sign up with social networking sites like Facebook, Flickr or MySpace.  Furthermore you shouldn’t let anybody take your photo or catch you on video.  If you do then you’re really shooting yourself in the foot when it comes to arguing your case with others.  Everybody is their own person with their own needs and rights.  Don’t be naive enough to assume that anybody will ever keep your identity secret, especially if you don’t tell them that’s what you want until afterwards.