What is the ideology of online anonymity?
I imagine it's something like - Biological and Social constraints have restricted human endeavors. "Online" in terms of the "internet" was an experiment to test this theory.
It both succeeded to a lesser degree than expected and failed, primarily due to social conditions of the times. Wealth disparity (motivating more bad actors than good), and outlet for those in psychological crisis (who tend to have a lot of time on their hands), juvenile behavior (gaming as a gateway) and the weakness of the legislation/prosecution for when cursory privacy invasion was enabled enough to track down bad actors (due to legislators being relative luddites).
It sure as hell does in any practical sense. I expect that I can walk around town, and people that I don't know, don't know my name, phone number, purchase history, etc.
Let's say I want to buy a butt plug or something. I could go to the sex shop in town, and make sure nobody I knew was around before I went in, buy it and leave. If I wanted to buy a studded electro-shock butt plug, and wanted to take extra precautions that I was undiscovered, I could drive to another town and drop it off.
Now suppose I'm a government whistle blower trying to expose some really nasty government coverup or conspiracy committed by the FBI. I'd definitely take the same precaution. I could leave my phone, go several cities over, walk up to a public mail drop and drop off my envelope of documentation in the USPS box and historically, could fully expect to remain anonymous in doing so. That's still arguably safer than sending an email and hoping I've perfectly configured all my network VPN or tor settings to try to ensure there aren't any leaks.
That's NOT the case with facial recognition. Particularly when that info can be processed and categorized into a form where someone could just query an identity and get a complete historical tracking of a bunch of places you've been prior to any sort of investigative interest.
All you’ve done is try to obtain privacy, but you can’t walk into the shop and demand that your neighbor shouldn’t be there.
The “expectation of privacy” is really a hope that you’ve marked your identity well enough, which is really the same thing you do online.
This is a total fantasy.
1. If I was concerned about it, I probably would have noticed before entering that he was there.
2. If I knew him, I'd probably know where he worked and could avoid him.
3. If I didn't catch myself in time, I could walk in and buy something mundane, or nothing at all, or a gift card.
4. If I was really concerned, I'd go the next town over.
5. There's a massive difference between taking a very low probability risk of being identified multiplied by further low probabilities of it being spread notable, remembered, and spread around, and a 100% chance of being categorically identified and logged by an automated system.
I have that expectation for most of that space.
On my Discord. I have a HomoSexual Nazi (I don't think he is a real Nazi I think he is larping because I believe works in a very PC environment), A socialist transexual woman, a half Mexican / Chinese American Immigrate who just got his first job in the USA after he got his Green Card and many other personalities. These people can be who they want and if they want to stop being that, they can just leave and it is gone forever and it is all harmless.
Flamewars, Trolling and some Drama (before the likes of actually harmful stuff like doxxing, swatting etc) were sometimes kinda fun.