Can You Get Arrested For Wiping Your Phone?｜This Week in Privacy #31 (Dec 12, 2025)

[jonah (Jonah Aragon)]

@anon23428838

What can the PG team actually see when it comes to the anonymous mode on the forum? For instance, is it possible to link to anonymous account to the parent account?

Hi. I was going to be on the show this week, but I have technical problems (well, power company problems) sadly. So I will answer this one here:

@jonah

Forum staff actually have no mechanism to see which account owns an anonymous account, so they’re “truly” anonymous in that sense, making this hard to enforce. To be clear, I could see who owns it, so don’t treat this as a pass to go nuts, but it would require some manual database queries which thankfully I haven’t had to do thus far. The community has handled anonymous posting very well.