With all the personal information that’s on Facebook, sometimes a user just wants to be anonymous when going online. With this in mind, Facebook is planning release a new mobile application that will allow Facebook users to interact with each other anonymously.
The new app — which will be released in the new few weeks — sidesteps Facebook’s recent history of having users put more of their personal information into their profiles to connect more with friends and family.
“It’s part of what made Facebook special in the first place,” Chris Cox, Facebook’s chief product officer said in a recent Facebook post. “By differentiating the service from the rest of the internet where pseudonymity, anonymity, or often random names were the social norm.”
Facebook’s new app is being created by Josh Miller, who hails from the recently acquired Branch. Branch was a small start-up that aimed on making products for smaller discussion groups, so this type of application is directly influenced by what he started out doing.
The app will allow Facebook users to interact under different handles to discuss varying topics they normally wouldn’t comment on because their name would be all over it. But with anonymity comes problems:
“The stories of mass impersonation, trolling, domestic abuse, and higher rates of bullying and intolerance are oftentimes the result of people hiding behind fake names, and it’s both terrifying and sad,” Mr. Cox said in the Facebook post.
It’s unknown as to how well this type of app will work on Facebook. As alluded to in the above comment by Chris Cox: Anonymity brings with it a lot of problems.
