The email address has nothing to do with any of this. Your email could be free2rhyme@yahoo.com but you would have to submit your real name as part of the registration process.
I’m all in favor of persistent pseudonyms for each and every persona that any individual or ai brings to the online watering hole, but think ‘anonymous’ is a bit of a cop-out. I firmly believe that you are who you say you are, and may even choose n’ change your pronouns to match your outfit as well as your birthday suit. I’ll gladly introduce myself by my ‘real name’ to most anyone who asks, but tend not to shout it off mountaintops. [Too many syllables - and ‘Vbob’ makes a better echo anyway]
I suppose if a site was serious about it, they could demand some kind of documentary evidence. Coinbase (not a social media platform obviously - it’s a crypto trading platform) does demand proof of identity for account setup.
But for social media, sites that demanded proof of identity and sites that demanded the use of real names would be non intersecting sets. If someone is daft enough to think that mandatory real names are a great idea, that is simply not someone I would trust with a scan of my passport.
Verification is more likely to be a scan of the driver’s license, the name on a credit card, the name on phone bills, etc.
~Max
I’m a strong advocate of pseudo-anonymity. Here’s another view:
Stata is a proprietary and widely used statistical software package. The Stata forum strongly encourages use of your real name. I don’t think that’s necessary, as the pseudo-anonymous Stata forum at Stack Overflow seems to work fine. All that said, Stata’s FAQ provides their reasoning:
- Why are real names preferred?
You are asked to post on Statalist using your full real name, including given name(s) and a family name, such as “Ronald Fisher” or “Gertrude M. Cox”. Giving full names is one of the ways in which we show respect for others and is a long tradition on Statalist. It is also much easier to get to know people when real names are used.
If you overlook this on first registration, it is easy to fix. Click on “Contact us” located at the bottom right-hand corner of every page.
Notably, there’s no subforum at the Statalist devoted to socializing or anything else. It’s all Stata, all the time. The tone is fairly serious: there’s a lengthy essay at the website discussing what makes a good and bad original post. It’s a wonderful resource.
Nextdoor used to have a real name policy, because hey, we’re all neighbors here. I don’t know if they still do because I dropped it for several years, but even then there were obvious fake names, about which nothing was done. I re-joined a few months ago and used a fake name based on my fake-name email, and there was no question.
As for this board, I have shared things publicly here that I would never do if I thought anyone would (bother to) connect them to me personally. Not only for my own sake, but for the sake of other people I have talked about, who might see it or hear about it, or get backlash from it. So no, I don’t think it’s appropriate for this kind of forum. For other types of online communications, maybe. For example, on the special-interest forum I’m on, I have a user name that includes my first name and where I live; but I reveal very little personal about myself there, because it’s not that kind of forum.
Depends where you are I suppose.
Passport or photo card driving licence are the same tier of ID here in the UK.
I disagree with the very concept of “legal names”. If you aren’t using an alias to commit fraud or some other crime, call yourself whatever you want. It’s nobody’s decision but yours. Online, among different in-person groups, pull a new name out of the hat every morning, whatever you want.
That, in fact, is entirely legal.
The problem is that for the last couple of decades, the name on your social security card needs to match the name on your tax records which needs to match the name on your bank account and needs to match the name on your medical records which needs to match the name on your insurance cards and needs to match the name on whatever ID you use to get onto a plane or into some buildings. That’s the sense in which I meant “legal name”.
This wasn’t so for most of my life. Until around the beginning of this century, either the name on my birth certificate or the name everybody knows me by worked fine for nearly all of those purposes. (I think the social security card already needed to match the tax records.)
There’s quite a lot that unpacks from these 9 words - that is, a lot of activities become fraudulent on the sole factor of the use of an alias - for example opening a bank account - you might have no intent to commit wrongful acts, but if you try to open a bank account using an alias, you would be committing an act that is defined as fraudulent.
It’s a fair point that the things you’re allowed to do anonymously (or pseudonymously) is a shrinking set as systems and organizations are being brought under the effect of laws and regulations that require honest legal naming. Since regulatory regimes necessitate bureaucracy, and bureaucracy is almost always utterly intolerant of inconsistency or ambiguity, most life events that involve finance, property ownership, employment, or vehicle operation will require a name which was issued on a legally-recognized birth certificate, and you don’t exist within the system except as that name.
But here, on the Internet? Not for a good long while, I hope. In the US we have succeeded in not outlawing anonymous publishing in other media. Let’s not start with this.
Yes, that’s why the cultural tradition (one might say insistence or command) that women change their names upon marriage puts them at a life-long position of having to continually explain why the name on that “legally-recognized birth certificate” doesn’t match the one they currently use. Currently, even if a woman legally changes back to that name they will still be required to submit documentation on all name changes over their lifetime to, for example, obtain a RealID.
This is not something most men ever have to contend with.
They sort of needed to match - but not to the extent documents need to match now. It didn’t matter if your airline ticket had no middle name and your ID did. Or if your paycheck and W2 was made out to Bobby but your SS card and tax return said Robert.
Hey, I remember airline tickets with no name attached. And no ID needed to get on the plane.
I remember when an airline ticket was kind of like a concert ticket. Whomever had it could use it. The name of the purchaser was on it but the purchaser could give it to anyone to use.
As a counterpoint, I remember a time when the phone company operated a monopoly, and part of their service was to deliver, annually, a printed copy of the legal names, home addresses and phone numbers of everyone in the area to everyone in the area. Privacy schmivacy!
And you had to pay extra to not be in the directory.
Maybe - where I live , the phone listing was in the account name which may or may not have been anyone’s current legal name. They didn’t ask for ID when I opened my account and I wanted people I knew personally to be able to look up my number but not people who only knew me through work. So I opened the account using my first name and my husband’s last, a name I have never used anywhere except on that phone account. I also knew people who had the listing in the wife’s pre-marriage name which was no longer used for anything else.
For one thing, it was common to list only initials and last name. And there was no requirement to show ID; though names listed were usually those of whoever was paying the bill – or at least, whoever had been when the listing was started.
For another – that worked because the only way during most of that time to invade somebody’s privacy was to physically show up at the address or to pay to mail a physical letter or to either personally or by hiring somebody have an actual human call the phone, one phone at a time. So there was far less equivalent of spam, because each attempt took a significant cost in time and/or money.
For a third – pretty sure they’re still doing it; though phone books have gotten a lot smaller than they were, as they generally only list land lines.
And I’ve known multiple cases in which the listing was in one person’s name; and continued in that name for many years after that person had died, for as long as the spouse or a family member lived in the same house.
Well, it’s just my first name, and it’s a very common one at that. As far as I know, I’ve never had anyone on line try to stalk me. Ironically, my one and only serious stalker was an IRL person, not an online person.