★ Randi Zuckerberg on Anonymity

HuffPo (I hate linking to these guys):

“I think anonymity on the Internet has to go away,” she said during a panel discussion on social media hosted Tuesday evening by Marie Claire magazine. “People behave a lot better when they have their real names down. … I think people hide behind anonymity and they feel like they can say whatever they want behind closed doors.”

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has also made this suggestion, calling online anonymity “dangerous” and predicting that governments will eventually “demand” that people use their names for all online activity.

But the proposal to tie real-world identities to online actions is a controversial one, with many privacy and free speech advocates countering that anonymity is necessary to protect dissidents and other individuals, such as sexual abuse victims.

Gigaom’s Matthew Ingram wrote recently, “Many people believe that requiring real names will solve the problems of trolls and bad behavior, but they don’t — and that policy can have negative consequences in terms of suppressing dialogue about important topics.”

There will likely ALWAYS be places on the web where you can be an anonymous contributor. I will always avoid these places. I don’t read anonymous comments or posts. I pay no mind to false identities that email me hate and give their opinions on how much I suck. I will always lend credibility to those who decide to be themselves.

I hope this is the future of the web. The Federal Government is already testing identities that each person is given that travels with them online. You are #xxxxxxxxxx no matter where you go online and the feds track that. I have nothing to hide. Bring it on.