Anonymity has always been the double-edged sword of the internet – an enabler of good, important things (like political freedom), and simultaneously an enabler of bad, scary things (like slander, or cyber-stalking).

A fake identify, known in a more gentlemanly era as a pen name, can be enormously liberating, as famously captured in the New Yorker cartoon where a dog sitting at a computer types, "The great thing about the internet is that no one knows you're a dog." But it can also open the door to the most antisocial of behaviours, as in the recent "MySpace suicide" case, in which a young girl killed herself after alleged bullying by an adult pretending to be a 16-year-old boy.

Ten years ago, I would have expected the ambiguities of anonymity to sort themselves out by now, with most online activities involving real identities even as some corners of the web were reserved for anonymous interactions.

But it hasn't turned out that way at all.

Today we have a peculiar amalgam, in which fake names and real ones are interspersed in a wide range of online activities. The real names are not usually verifiable as such, and the fake names sometimes represent people whose real identities are actually well known to others in the discussion.

On Facebook, you are required to use your real name, and the utility of the service depends on your disclosing information about yourself, your activities, and your social circle. In its early days, when it was limited to college students, Facebook could police this pretty easily, since members had to have a university e-mail account. But now, it's easy enough to create a fake profile on Facebook.

On NewWest.Net, we've considered requiring that people be registered members to participate in comments and discussions, and the rules of registration require a real name and e-mail address. But, we know this requirement would make the discussions much less lively, and we have no way of fully verifying registration information anyway. (So-called double-opt-in registration, where the system sends an email that you have to click on to complete the registration process, doesn't prevent someone from using a Yahoo! mail account to create a phony identity.)

One reason for online anonymity, of course, is privacy, and as the social web develops there will be no end of argument about how personal data is handled. Just last week, Facebook withdrew from Google's Friend Connect initiative, which would enable people to share their personal data and friend lists and such across different sites. Facebook said it pulled out because of privacy concerns, but the consensus in the blogosphere is that it wants to keep members – and their information – within its walled garden.

The walled garden approach is actually one of the strengths of Facebook: it's a controlled environment, orderly, unthreatening. You feel like Mom is in the room somehow (and in fact we just came up with a great policy on our teenage daughter's desire to be on Facebook: she can have an account as long as she accepts her parents as friends). You trust that Facebook is watching out for you, and won't sell information about you to bad people or let stalkers roam the halls.

Of course the truth is that Facebook will do what it needs to do to justify its $15 billion valuation, and almost by definition that will mean selling information about you to others, in one way or another. I don't really object to that in principle, but partly for that reason I fibbed a little in creating my Facebook account, altering one small personally identifying piece of data. It’s not something that would make the slightest difference to anyone I am interacting with, but there's a slight chance it could thwart an identify thief.

I hope that Facebook won't throw me out now that I've admitted that publicly, but I'm sure I'm hardly alone. So now, in various contexts on the web, we have people with genuinely fake identities, we have people with pseudonyms who are not necessarily trying to hide their real identities, we have people with real identities and fully factual information associated with those identities, we have people with real identities but some false information in their profiles, and we have a lot of people with some mix of real and imaginary online presences.

In the future, understanding which is which is going to matter a lot – both for individuals, and for businesses. As to how we get there, I don't have a clue.

---

Jonathan Weber is the founder and editor in chief of NewWest.Net, a regional news service focused on the Rocky Mountain West in the United States. He was previously the co-founder and editor in chief of the Industry Standard

Explore Tech & Web

• Personal Tech

• The Web

• Gadgets & Gaming