what "anonymous" means here

we use the word carefully. here is exactly what it means on unsaid — and what it doesn't.

anonymous to everyone else: total

• nobody on unsaid can see who you are. not on a post, not in a reply, not by tapping anything.
• there are no usernames, no profiles, no follower graphs, no "posts by this person" page.
• your personal world and your professional world are two separate identities. nothing connects them anywhere another user can look. switch worlds and you are, to everyone else, a different stranger.
• reactions are anonymous too. when you tap "felt this", the author learns a number went up — never who.
• when you mute someone, we resolve who they are on the server. you never learn it, and they never learn you muted them.

anonymous to us: it depends how you got in, and we're honest about it

• if you slipped in anonymously (the default way in), we hold no identity at all — no email, no name, no token. your account is a random id and nothing more. the catch: lose the device and that account can't be recovered.
• if you used an email magic link, we hold exactly one piece of identity: that email. nothing else.

an email (when you choose it) gives us three abilities, and we want you to know all three:

• we can let you back into your account on a new device.
• we can stop a banned person from endlessly returning.
• we can delete everything when you ask.

what we *can't* do matters more, and it's true for every account however you signed in: we can't show anyone who you are, we hold no real name, no phone number, no location. inside the product, your authorship is structurally hidden — the public data views that power every feed simply do not contain the author column. it's not a policy promise; the query physically cannot return it.

the limits, plainly

• a court could compel us to hand over the email tied to an account, and the content. nothing more exists. see the privacy policy for the full honest version.
• you can de-anonymize yourself. the most common way anonymity breaks is the writer including details only one person could know — a company name, a city, "the only woman on my team". we run a guard that warns you when a post or role title looks identifying, but the final judgement is yours. write like someone you know might read it, because they might.
• role titles are public. "eldest daughter, 24" is safely vague. "head of design at [company], bangalore" is not. we'll warn you; please listen.

what we promise to keep true

• author identity never appears in any client-readable table or view. we test for this.
• moderation staff see content and case files, not browsing identity dossiers.
• deletion is a hard delete, not a flag. gone means gone.
• if any of this ever has to change, we will tell you in plain words before it does.