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