All right, I'm fine with "optional" myself ;) And yes, there are several reasons for not giving your real name, not necessarily here at Boonex, but on other sites. The closest comparison I can come up with is that you don't tell everybody in the world what restaurants, bars, and clubs you go to, but just to your close friends that happen to have the same tastes. Imagine you got a job where your boss is a strict vegetarian; would you like him to be informed every day you eat a Big Mac? Of see more course not — but in real life, MacDonalds doesn't track you down by name and posts it publicly for everybody to see. When you buy at MacDonalds you're pretty much anonymous, even if, of course, they get your credit/debit card data to process the transaction.

Anonymity is not really about "deceiving others" about what you're doing. It's about your right to reveal as much about yourself as you're willing to share with others. You might tweet about that Big Mac you've eaten, but probably you're not interested to send a corporate email to all your colleagues about it. This is your choice — to share or not to share what you do, where you go, what your tastes are.

On the Internet things are similar. It's already far too easy to figure out where people are located and what they do, by cross-relating information using Google... the ability to have the choice of what information you reveal about yourself on a site is what gives you security, not the reverse: taking away the freedom to reveal your private information, and making it mandatory.

I'm glad you've gone back on your original decision. Speaking for myself, yes, I was stalked through the Internet, pretty accurately too, over five years ago, by a group of crooks who wanted to blackmail and extort money from me, and I started to be more careful about who gets my private data since then. Better late than never! But I suppose that if you never went through such a situation you cannot really empathise with the ones that did, and typical comments like "security is more important than privacy" pop over all over the place. I have to admit that I used to think a bit like that. Now I see how dangerous it actually is...