Oh yeah, I third option for wanting an alias is to change your name on each review so someone can't reconstruct your purchasing history by scraping the site and searching for your name. First of all, I bet 90% of buyers won't change their alias from review to review, but even if the do, their stats will allow an adversary to rebuild their purchasing history with relative ease, as I've already outlined: They find a reviewer with 12 purchases and $675 spent on a $125 item. So they search for reviews at earlier time points from someone with 12 - 1 = 11 purchases and $675 - $125 = $550 spent. When they find a candidate, they can confirm it by the account age, because the second review came N days before the first one, and the account is N days younger (if they stamp the review with the account age at the time it was made, and not the current account age, in which case it would be even easier since they would be direct matches). The second review is on a $50 item, so they look for a review with 11 - 1 = 10 purchases and $550 - $50 = $500 spent. Rinse and repeat. There might be some false positives and a little difficulty because of the slightly floating cost of items due to the exchange rate and not hedging, but it won't be too hard. The buyer age will usually be sufficient to get the right person. So again, the alias simply fails at everything it is intended to do.