Should the World Wide Web Know Who You Really Are?

    More and more sites want you to use your legal name  AKA the name that your friends, family, or even the name your coworkers use. This has brought multiple debates about wether or not this violates our privacy rights. The other debates it's brought up is among the student population and how this effects credibility, as well as the opinion the reader may develop based on what the authors name is and what they can find out about them. There's also the issues of just being online in a community. Where I stand on this topic is in the middle ground. I neither agree nor disagree but I have a strong opinion pulling in both ways. 
       
         Free speech is in the charter of rights and freedoms, but does that include the freedom to use what ever name you want on the internet? Yes I believe it does. Having a pseudonym, or a username that makes it so no one knows who you are isn't always a negative thing. This can be used to do many good things as well as some not so good things. When we look at things like credibility having a user name that makes it so no one knows who you are makes it difficult for readers to trust what you say and  also affects how they see and form an opinion on what you're writing. 
     
       When we look at it from an online community view it isn't as big of a deal. Especially when we look at communities like Gaia, Twitter, Xbox, ect. These are places where we don't always want people knowing our real legal name as it can create issues outside of the internet. These issues could be stalking, bullying, ect. Having some one's legal name makes it easy for people to track you down on the internet as well as in the real world. 

     This is where my other opinion comes in about why being anonymous is a bad thing. If something happens in real life and the person only has fake names all over the internet they aren't going to be easily trackable over the internet or vice versa. There can be many issues with using a fake name online just as it can get you in trouble if you use them with other people when you introduce yourself. This can cause future confusion mis trust and possibly causing issues for the person whose name you've chosen to use or even a username you've decided to borrow from somewhere else.