Open Questions:

1. How much socially and scientifically relevant information is lost through distortion strategies, and to what extent can fictionalized and distorted data still be meaningfully reused?
2. Is it always possible to anticipate which information might pose a risk to research participants in the future? “We don’t know if the anonymization strategies in place now will still hold up twenty years from now, and […] what kind of information from my field might later be politically weaponized” (Behrends et al., 2022, p. 8¹Translated by Saskia Köbschall.).
3. In many cases, anonymity cannot be guaranteed, as “the overall structure of personal information itself – that is, its individually specific context, for example, within the reconstruction of an individual biography – can theoretically allow re-identification despite the anonymization of detailed information” (Kretzer, 2013, p. 3²Translated by Saskia Köbschall.). How can this be dealt with?
4. It must also be considered that officially issued and archived research permits may enable the reconstruction of ethnographers’ identities as well as their research locations. How secure are pseudonymization strategies in such cases?
5. The ongoing digitization process makes achieving anonymity increasingly difficult and requires careful consideration of field recording strategies (see interview with M. Kramer; Shklovski & Vertesi, 2013; Bachmann et al., 2017). Are secure forms of anonymization and pseudonymization still achievable in digitally networked worlds?