Telika: I've already refused to further participate in a serious forum that had established this condition. I'm also very much against facebook, and such all-integrating "social" sites.
It's a matter of traceability. I don't like my entire life to be googled up in 3 minutes. We live in several universes simultanously (work, family, friends, etc), and these don't necessarily overlap, we are not the same person to them all. Privacy allows us to adapt our 'face' to different publics (we don't use the same words, make the same jokes, share the same things, with all of them). The internet tends to merge all these circles. I don't even share or "network" my friends.
Plus there is the question of time. we get old and evolve. Our writings stay intemporal. The internet allows us to write as we talk, light-heartedly, candidly, honestly (well, yeah, it also allows the opposite, but that's not the point here). It allows us to write things we would say and would evaporate, which is different from publishing things that would stay and stay attached to our name, even if we get old, change, evolve on various points, and necessarily, at some point, become someone who would not have said this or said it that way. Being googled up would put all our sayings at the same level, temporal and relationnal. This merging (and temporal flattening) may give, ironically, a false idea of who we are at a specific time.
So, it's both misleading, and intrusive in terms of privacy and management of attitudes to the different circles that demand different facets of us. Internet has the potential to become a dreadful panopticon, and using different names/avatars in that global, unique, and universally shared public space, is the only way to emulate the actual way we live and are asked to behave in the flesh-and-blood social realm and its different sections.
I thought that was a very insightful, interesting and true thing to say.
Basically, we don't want everything we post online to be tied to us by the public, because people can be moron and judge us harshly on things that don't warrant it (including things we might have said or done decades ago that are behind us).
Another example coming off the top of my head would be someone who has HIV and needs to talk about it.
That being said, I do believe that there is too much anonymity online.
While the general public has no business tracking someone down, the police does.
There are many bad apples out there (pedophiles, bullies, hackers and not the kind that merely disrupt financial institutions to make a social statement... the kind that actual ruin lives) and it's still too easy for them to go incognito from the law.
The police should be able to track those people down, always.
