This study explores the ethics and motivations of online identification—how and why people collect and publish identifying information about others online. In seven interviews, activists, Internet users, advocates, and journalists were asked about their investigative practice and how they viewed the ethics of deanonymization. Using ethnographic interviewing techniques and a thematic analysis inspired by grounded theory, I describe respondents’ investigations and compare them to existing theories in surveillance studies, online anonymity, and digital vigilantism. Respondents often struggled with making their work accessible and impactful in an ethical manner. They obfuscated irrelevant information that might incite online harassment and took care in who they collaborated with. The respondents also debated what to do when people misinterpreted their work or thought that they had acted unjustly. The precautions they incorporated into their publications are examples of how people navigate online ethics when there isn’t a clear standard for moral decisions. Ultimately, the interview results did not follow models of digital vigilantism and doxxing, and I caution against using those terms to apply to cases like those described in this study. I also make suggestions for how these results could augment theoretical models of anonymity, particularly how respondents’ investigative techniques and backgrounds lead them to different moral commitments.

“Watchful waiting” is a medical approach that delays radical intervention, like surgery, but depends on regular imaging and patient self-scrutiny. To explore its social effects in a single case, I conducted an autoethnography of my patient archive from my diagnosis and 17 years of watchful-waiting treatment for neurofibromatosis, type II, a genetic disorder. I show how watchful waiting encourages self-surveillance and the stress it causes. I also discuss how the personal medical archive, with its complicated structure of reports, CDs, and notes, is a tool for communication as well as a cause of moral obligation for the patient. I contrast these uses with information studies of medical records that focus on records’ collaborative use within medical institutions. I conclude that my case has been held in stasis, reinforced by diagnostic surveillance that I participate in, due to the vagueness of “watchful waiting” as a treatment protocol and the uncertainty of more invasive treatments themselves. Through this study, I recenter patients and their needs in the discussion of medical archives and contribute to the collective recognition of disability through the genre of the illness narrative and the method of archival ethnography. I consider how my results conflict with general calls for “open notes” in medical care and cultures of life-logging and -tracking.

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