Can you still call yourself anonymous in 2026?

One of the very first accounts of social engineering would be, I believe, the Fall of Troy. The army of Troy was manipulated into thinking that the war was over, and the Greeks had accepted defeat and given up on the fighting. The war had been going on for 10 years with no success on the Greek army's part. The people of Troy had found a way of convincing themselves that the war was finally over. The other reason to bring the Trojan Horse inside the city walls was solely because of the connection between the two armies: the Gods of Olympus. The horse was brought inside the city walls, their defenses and guards let down, a trust forming for this huge gift, not for them but an offering for the deity Athena. They were then shot 57 times.

Reconnaissance: the attack before the attack

The Trojan War was a classic example of a combination of deception, psyops, and social engineering. That is precisely where reconnaissance comes in. It's the act of knowing your target's likes, dislikes, and interests so deeply that you have all the information you need to exploit them. You bypass their intellectual barriers in such a way that they would never question it.

What role do memes and reels play in social engineering?

In modern times, meanwhile, we have social media as the biggest tool for conducting reconnaissance.

So, we all know that TikTok and Instagram are just apps, right? An average person might not see it that way because his day consists of waking up, opening social media, scrolling, closing it, and going back to sleep. He might not pause and think to himself what this habit is taking from him. Well, his ability to touch grass, for starters.

He is giving away much more than he should. He is giving this information through the reels he likes, what pages he follows, and how the algorithms are literally designed to give him what he wants. There's this saying going around, "If it's free, you are the product," and it couldn't be truer.

Say you are a student interested in cybersecurity, you go to your favorite browser, look up cybersecurity internships, and the next day your feed is filled with cybersecurity reels. Your personalized little algorithm knows exactly what keeps you hooked. This doesn't end there, though. You open mail, and there it is:

An internship offer from a company, the domain looks something like "googIe.com". Yep, that's phishing. See, that's a capital "I" not L. Don't apply (they are going to ask for money later).

So, are you still anonymous on the internet?

Does the internet guarantee your anonymity after all this? Or is your information, which was supposed to be "private," now in the open because of all the memes and reels you liked, all the trends you followed, and how much "influence" you got?

The point is that from the ancient Greek era to 2026, humans have not changed much because the tactics used to manipulate and exploit them have been changing and learning. That's reconnaissance, and that's scary. Well, maybe if you feed the enemy wrong information about yourself, things might be different…or just don't give away much about yourself in the first place.

So the question remains, are you still anonymous? Not when the ads or every other second reel is microtargeting you.