On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog

Lotus Software founder and early Internet activist Mitch Kapor commented in a Time magazine article in 1993 that "the true sign that popular interest has reached critical mass came this summer when The New Yorker printed a cartoon showing two computer-savvy canines".

[7] The cartoon conveys an understanding of Internet privacy that implies the ability to send and receive messages—or to create and maintain a website—behind a mask of anonymity.

Although a local access point in, for example, a university may require identity confirmation, it holds such information privately, without embedding it in external Internet transactions.

[13] The phrase may be taken "to mean that cyberspace will be liberatory because gender, race, age, looks, or even 'dogness' are potentially absent or alternatively fabricated or exaggerated with unchecked creative license for a multitude of purposes both legal and illegal", an understanding that echoed statements made in 1996 by John Gilmore, a key figure in the history of Usenet.

[14] The phrase also indicates the ease of computer cross-dressing: representing oneself as of a different gender; age; race; social, cultural, or economic class, etc.