Is WSO actually anonymous??

jl12

No. WSO is not anonymous. This lack of anonymity occurs in a few ways. 

First, any time you have to create an account means anyone can trace your comments to that account. The "anonymous" "Analyst 2 in IB-M&A" type posts are not actually anonymous. Anyone that is halfway decent at scraping a website with halfway decent analytical skills can identify all the posts that belong to an individual account. 

Second, unless you say absolutely nothing of consequence, you will identify yourself in what you say. Speaking about schools, jobs, anything like that, and someone who cares enough will be able to piece together who you are. This does require a bit of work. It isn't to say that this is easy. Just that this is the type of analytical work that I have personally done in university classes, so if someone really wants to know who a commenter is, it is not a strenuous ask. For example, in one of my business analytics classes, we basically were given an anonymized dataset and were given a list of politicians to identify in the data. This is to say that it isn't the ability to identify who an "anonymous" poster is that is the constraint. It is really a question of whether someone wants to put the effort in to do so. It is incredibly rare to care enough to do this.  

Third, and this is only really if someone really wants to identify who you are (and I can't stress the IF enough), how people speak is a lot like fingerprints. Most people speak in a way that is unique to them. I don't know why anyone would care enough to do this, but someone could use the way in which you write your comments on WSO and on other platforms to identify who you are. No one would do this because that's a giant pain in terms of time, resources, and effort. But this is theoretically a thing that can be done. 

Paranoid much?

Yea I've personally been able to pinpoint people I knew in real life from their comments on here. But the posts/comments have to be really specific. Like "I went to Yale and was a summer at Barclays last summer but didn't get the return offer" kind of specific. If I say something more vague like "I went to an M7 and am a first year associate/consultant at MBB in a HCOL city"... this could be so many people. 

Third, and this is only really if someone really wants to identify who you are (and I can't stress the IF enough), how people speak is a lot like fingerprints. Most people speak in a way that is unique to them.

I sometimes get stressed because I use a lot of parenthetical comments and say "etc." a lot in my posts and someone will recognize it elsewhere lol. 

The admins of this site will always be able to see your email, so don't use a personal email if you don't want them knowing who you are.

Jokes aside, it's anonymous for end users to the extent that you don't allow yourself to be socially engineered like my dumb ass. You'll notice that my account is only 8 months old or something. Well, that's bc someone figured out who I was on my previous account and even pmed me about it, so I had to make a new one. So don't be dumb like me and talk about what team you interned or worked at if your specific group is only 10 people.

To protect yourself, I suggest not naming which school you actually went to, name a peer school instead and don't say HSW or HYP. Just say Princeton if you went to Yale, etc. They're basically the same when it comes to recruiting on here anyways. And if you worked at Goldman, say you worked at MS on here instead, you get the gist.

agidhar

I always had the feeling the wso mods had a more clear idea of who writes what. 
 

How about other forums though, same issues? 

I'm on a triathlon forum and no one really cares about anonymity as most of us post race results which is easy to find the person if you see a picture, race, and bib number.