My guess is that the "right to remain anonymous online" is probably an overstatement of what most people believe, and the author was using a convenient, poorly-

My guess is that the "right to remain anonymous online" is probably an overstatement of what most people believe, and the author was using a convenient, poorly-chosen phrase. I don't think he'd expect that you have the right to (for example) purchase goods online without providing personal information, or file your taxes online without giving your name, or register to vote in elections without verifying your identity: those are unlikely, if not absurd expectations. What most people mean when they say "remain anonymous" is something more like: if your identity is not strictly needed to provide some service, you should have the choice of whether to voluntarily provide it or not. By this definition, "online anonymity" is something more like privacy: the right to act without unsanctioned intrusion. I know that anonymity and privacy are two different things, but I think they're often used to mean the same thing, and are in this example. Anyway, to answer your explicit question, article 12 of the United Nations' list of basic human rights[1] lists privacy as a right, and they say that protecting people against unlawful and unnecessary surveillance is part of providing those human rights on the internet[2]. It is a fundamentally difficult question to answer, because who "we" are is hard to define on the internet. We are all part of different jurisdictions, with different laws. The U.N. is the best authority I can think of, though it's not got a lot of teeth. [1]https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma... [2]https://www.un.org/techenvoy/sites/www.un.org.techenvoy/files/general/Digital_Human_Rights_Summary_PDF.pdf https://www.un.org/techenvoy/sites/www.un.org.techenvoy/file...