The rise of “burner” digital identities

My friend Greg Cohn recently reached out to me to ask if I’d post Burner 3.0 to Product Hunt. I’d only used the app once before to talk to someone I met on Secret (before Secret v11 launched with in-app chat), so it hadn’t really stayed top of mind, even with the rise of anonymous and anonymish chat apps. Furthermore, like most people, “burner” connoted cheap, prepaid, disposable phones used by drug dealers to evade surveillance to me. Of course, I blame The Wire for this:

But this is a facile read of what a “burner” actually is (and I’m not talking about those of us who go to TTITD).

It’s not the phone that the drug dealers care about — it’s the repudiability. A burner essentially makes fungible the association between an attribute (like a phone number) and an individual. This is important. Whereas a social security number is used as a lifelong attribute (and is therefore not fungible), a phone number is useful as an identifier only as long as the owner chooses to keep it. Once the number has served its owner’s purpose, it can be recycled back into the pool of available numbers without being traceable to the former owner.

As it turns out, this kind of flexible, mobile-centric, disposable identity is incredibly useful, and not just for drug dealers. As Ben Popper of The Verge writes:

The inspiration behind Burner was to make identity on your phone as flexible as it is on the web. “With the internet, people have become accustomed to having multiple names, pseudonymous characters, and multiple points of contact they can distribute and eliminate as needed,” says Cohn. “But with phones most people are still stuck with this monolithic number they need to use for work, family, and recreation. It doesn’t make any sense.”

So what we take for granted on the web is changing our expectations of mobile identity (even as TouchID directly contradicts this trend). And yet, on the flipside, I recently noticed that Kinja has adopted the “burner” nomenclature for anonymous commenting on its site— the first example I’ve seen of this language being used on the web:

Although I’ve not seen widespread of this language on other authentication screens, the proliferation of mobile usage suggests that it could replace a term like “anonymous” which is increasingly associated with the notorious hacker group. Now a site can offer “burner accounts” to support anonymous participation alongside more strongly authenticated users. And, to increase trust, the burden of account maintenance is shifted to the user:

…if you lose the burner key initially issued we will not be able to retrieve this information for you or reset the account. Save your key! Everything about a burner account is yours to control — which means no old-fashioned passwords stored on-site.

This is a major shift away from the conventional model where sites store passwords (and many users rely on the “Forgot password” flow to access their account). In the case of a burner account, there is no recovery mechanism, and so even if the host site is hacked, there’s no way to trace a burner account back to its owner. For some, this may result in significant inconvenience, but for others, the peace of mind will be welcome.

Why these terms are important

What difference does it make if unlisted and burner are added to the modern lexicon?

I believe they’re important because of their relationship to user conceptions of privacy and digital identity. Both suggest that users are developing more sophisticated habits in sharing content via the web (rather than emailing attachments or sending via SMS) and in managing their identity footprint(s) through disposable or temporary identifiers. People are looking for easier and more flexible ways to share information and to connect, and are either removing boundaries to the intended audience(s), or adding new barriers against being associated with personal identifiers.

As these new terms subconsciously take root in people’s minds, product designers can deploy more appropriate solutions without being held back by confusing technical jargon. Instead, they can increasingly rely on phrases like “unlisted video” or “burner account” as replaces for once complex descriptions. And in the hands of talented designers, the benefits of these features can be brought to a broader range of people.