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U. student, alumnus launch Campus Anonymous

Dan Kang ’15 and Akshay Kumar ’14 launched Campus Anonymous, a chat website for Ivy League students, on Sunday.

Kang and Kumar are alsothe creators of Tigers Anonymous,a similar website that only University students can use.

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As of Tuesday afternoon, approximately 400 users had registered and over 1,000 conversations had taken place, Kang said, adding that the most frequent registrations were from the University and Columbia but that all eight Ivy League schools were represented.

Kang said that he and Kumar created Campus Anonymous both because University students were too small of a pool to ensure users would be able to be paired with someone else and because students at other schools had expressed an interest in the concept.

“In the beginning there was a lot of usage [of Tigers Anonymous], but a lot of time when people went on during the day, there weren’t enough people on it, and they stopped coming back,” Kang said.

Campus Anonymous retains some elements of Tigers Anonymous, such as anonymity, randomly selected prompts to help users begin conversations and the option for users to reveal their identities if both users in a pair agree, although Kumar noted there were approximately 20 to 30 percent more prompts on Campus Anonymous.

A unique feature to Campus Anonymous is the introduction of a terms of service and a privacy policy, Kumar said, noting that they are paying for SSL encryption for the chats.Kang said that he and Kumar cannot see the content of chats, and they do not think there should not be a way for people with malicious intentions to view any of the chats or discern any of the users’ identities.

Although Kang and Kumar copied a lot of the chatting code from Tigers Anonymous, they had to work on a new filtering and authentication system to make sure emails were associated with Ivy League students and not with alumni of those schools.

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“There was a lot more machinery with Tigers Anonymous choosing prompts, so we were able to streamline that, make that more efficient,” Kumar said. “The code is a much cleaner version of what we had. You could say, ‘Oh, what took you guys so long?’ We were experimenting with different concepts. We didn't know what we wanted the site to look like. We didn't know what we wanted the image to look like.”

About half of the work has been done over the past three months, Kumar said.

The introduction of anonymity was borne out of Kang’s experience with Tiger Talk, a chatroom for the entire University student body Kang created three years ago in which users’ names were revealed and all users could talk to each other instead of in pairs, Kang said.

Having a single non-anonymous chatroom led to people talking over each other or feeling afraid to talk, he said, comparing it to a precept environment.

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“When you introduce anonymity, people change how they talk,” Kang said. “Some people turn into trolls, just like terrible, saying the worst things, but a lot of people, I feel like they open up a lot more. They're a lot more vulnerable.”

Andres Parrado ’15 said he has already used Campus Anonymous and talked to a student at Dartmouth.

“It was pretty chill, we were just talking about what are you studying, what’s your major, what are you doing right now?” Parrado said. “It was just very small talk type of thing. It was cool that you had the option of seeing who you were talking to eventually.”

He said he heard about the site on Facebook and added that he thought it would be possible for the site to be more long-lasting than Tigers Anonymous.

“It might be different if other campuses make it more popular,” he said. “It might either die down again because people will be hyped up about it at the beginning, but it might also be the case that because there are other campuses involved, people might use it more.”

Laurentiu Rodina GS, however, said he had never heard of Tigers Anonymous or Campus Anonymous. It is possible for graduate students to register on both sites.

Kang said that he and Kumar hope to eventually expand the service to even more schools.

Correction: Due to incorrect information provided to The Daily Princetonian, an earlier version of this article inaccurately stated the number of users on Campus Anonymous. As of Tuesday afternoon, the website had approximately 400 users. The 'Prince' regrets the error.