[tor-talk] Measuring on-line anonymity

[panoramix.druida]

Hi, is there a way to measure the level of anonymity on a system?

For example Signal es a very good keeping secret on communications, but is very bad for anonymity as it need a real phone number to work. Using a real phone number to communicate makes an association of all your chats with your real identity. In many countries in latinamerica you need to give you document id to get a phone number.[1] It is also a centralized service so that the sysadmins and the people behind Signal can have a look at the metadata if they want.

Ricochet is way better to protect anonymity. I don’t need a phone number, not even a name, I just use the onion service hostname. With Richochet I am anonymous all the time unless I identify myself.

Email may not be as good as Signal for end to end encryption (even with pgp), but it can be way better for anonymity. For instance, this email account was created using Tor in Protonmail, and there are other mail providers that allow me to this. If I always use Protonmail with Tor, it is very hard for Protonmail to learn who am I and where I live, doing that with Signal is harder. However with Ricochet is way easier.

Is there a way to measure the “level o anonymity”. I am very interested in comparing email, chat and voip tools to find out witch tool is better for anonymity. For instance in email is hard to be anonymouse to the server provider and in Signal is even harder, however in Ricochet is very simple as there is no service provider.

[1] Actually you don’t need to use your real phone number, advance users can do tricks. That is not for everyone. https://theintercept.com/2017/09/28/signal-tutorial-second-phone-number/