Mar 10th 2011 | from the print edition
WAY back in the early days of the web, in 1993, the New Yorker ran a cartoon featuring two dogs sitting in front of a computer. The internet-savvy canine is saying to its friend: “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” This joke captured the freewheeling anonymity of the early stages of internet adoption, but it doesn’t work now. Today websites often know a great deal about their visitors, including their names and interests.
The ability to use the internet anonymously is being eroded on
several fronts. Some popular websites, including Facebook, the
leading social network, and Quora, a popular question-and-answer
site, require users to give their real names, and block people who
are suspected of using pseudonyms. Other sites ask that users
provide their real names in order to be able to leave comments, in
the hope that discussions will be more civil if people have to
reveal their identities.
[...]
But anonymity is freeing. It lets people go online and read
about fringe political viewpoints, look up words they are
embarrassed not to know the meaning of, or search for a new job
without being thought extremist, stupid or disloyal. In America
some judges have recognised that browsing habits will change if
people feel that they are being watched. In rejecting a
government demand for book-purchase data from Amazon, an online
retailer, a judge wrote that the release of the information
would create a chilling effect that would “frost keyboards
across America”. Librarians have long understood this, which is
why they keep readers’ files confidential. But many of the new
custodians of people’s reading records do not seem inclined to
do the same.
Full article here: http://www.economist.com/node/18304046