Fear it happening or fear its consequences? Doxxing already happens all the time, but the main tools are things like account names or image search, this sort of tool could take it to a new level. A simple experiment would be to run this same algorithm against another site (say Twitter or Reddit) and see if it can reliably pick out the same peoples' accounts there. Once anyone on the internet can quickly/easily draw that sort of connection it would require incredible diligence to avoid de-anonimyzation while still maintaining any sort of "real self" presence on the internet. How much we should fear the consequences probably depends a lot on how marginalized you are within your society, but since just revealing your gender is enough to invite harassment in many forums I'm not optimistic.

>online behaviour tracks back to real life

This is good to you?

Okay, let's just make it like China or SK where your login is your citizen ID and if you write bad things the bad word police will take you away.

Also, no, I have no alts.

So I am asking because my views are only challenged inside my own head, hence the need for external thoughts.

But firstly the "governments will come and do bad things" argument - yes this is clearly and obviously a major problem - but not one solvable by technology in anyway. Fixing violent dictatorships is a IRL problem - one that requires enormous effort and sacrifices (see Ukraine for obvious example). We cannot pretend that a browser extension or a ground up rewrite of Twitter will defeat Putin or would have stopped Hitler.

As for "free" countries (something like 120+ have open free elections), we still have online abuse for voicing opinions that some people don't like (anything from pro/anti Trump to LGBT and bitcoin etc). Those are real consequences but rarely government inspired and honestly I suspect we need better support for police in prosecuting such things - I mean a death threat is a death threat.

In general my view seems to be we should have the same protections online as we do offline - and if those protections are "in theory only" that requires us to use our voting and other political power to chnage it - not to obfuscate IP addresses or so on.

The upside of tech is so great it is worth spending IRL to defend agains the downsides

I am of the generation and mindset that online abuse is not real. Straight up. Log out, turn off the screen and watch Netflix, take a walk and calm down, block the offending user. It's not real.

>I suspect we need better support for police in prosecuting such things

We do see that! But mostly people on Facebook. Here we have had judgements of people who posted threats on Facebook because it is tied to your real name.

And yes, abuse is part of the "fun". Under your system, my 10 years old Leauge and CoD chats would have me locked up.

>I mean a death threat is a death threat.

Is it? I would find it more concerning if someone on the street tells me he is going to kill me than a kid on xbox live.

NOW there is a difference in systematic stalking and harassment online if I would get bombarded with DMs and messages to kys. I don't know how to solve. But a one-off comment is NOT equivalent. Then it feels like I'm just old? At 31? Is it really so serious?

This is almost certainly going to be decided by the "reasonable person" test - and if you were on the jury it's going to have to be a higher bar than I, but I suspect there will be some offences we will both agree on.

My main point is not that we need to lock up everyone who makes a threat, but that we as a society will have to adjust our standards to the new normal.

Once upon a time every conversation was fleeting, every discussion in a pub or bar was ephemeral. Even Einstein and Dirac would walk home chatting without fear of being overhead. Then someone imagined it would be wonderful for the whole word to hear the erudite wisdom of those two geniuses of our age - and Facebook and Twitter and social media made it possible for every conversation in every bar to be captured and recorded and published - and we found out that Dirac and Einstein were just sledging each other and most other conversations globally were worse.

The new normal is that, like speeding, most evenings, conversations in most bars actually broke quite a lot of laws, from hate speech to sexual threats and basic politeness. And now the police can hear them as can everyone else - and discretion does not work on this scale - we either enforce the laws or change them.

That's a conversation for each judiciary- and likely to be either a balkanisation of the social media world, or a race to the top (we can all have twitter as long as we all behave to the standards of the highest / politest society. I am not sure where I stand on that.

Is it serious - hell yes. We are looking at a global technology with global benefits for all humankind - and if we want to communicate globally we need to agree what the standards for behaviour are on this virtual stage - from contract law to human rights and freedom of speech. We are inevitably going to build closer contacts - Brexit is a salutary lesson - and how we deal with freedom of speech online is just part of the jigsaw - but a telling part.

> I am of the generation and mindset that online abuse is not real. Straight up. Log out, turn off the screen and watch Netflix, take a walk and calm down, block the offending user. It's not real.

Until people can pierce the veil of your pseudonymity (which isn't all that hard depending on the platform and the person) and it isn't just online abuse and harassment anymore. "Tied to your real name" includes "tied to enough information about you that someone with plenty of free time can sift through various databases and piece it together" and most people have absolutely no idea how many such databases there are, and how much piecing someone can do.

I'll say something tangential: Even if we both agree that one-off assholes are largely inconsequential, and I think we do, such assholery has a broken window effect on a platform, where people see all the assholes running free and decide that it's either a place for them to be assholes or a place they should stay away from to avoid assholes.

What could possibly be the harm in allowing people to harass others based on posts they made decades ago? What could possibly be harmful in making a person who for whatever reason has changed their online identity easier to track? What could be remotely harmful about allowing Marlboro to find the accounts of ex-smokers? What could be the harm in tracking underaged users site by site?

I'm sure this is completely harmless and will not harm society.

I think this might be old age creeping up on me but I find it harder and harder to work backwards through "argument by sarcasm" to arrive at what you meant. I think clearly you are heartfelt in your views that having your identity online be a real one is bad - but I am not sure if that is because of posts you made years ago being linked back to you or nefarious advertising ?

The old posts issue is interesting- do you mean that there are posts from years ago you would find upsetting to be linked to you? Is this because you have chnaged your mind (a normal process society needs to understand) or because you said things thinking yiunweee anonymous that you would not have said under your real name? Far less of a social issue I think.

It does make for some interesting thoughts if we made everyone post under their real name.

My view isn't that accounts tied to real people are bad. It's that your lack of ability to think of cases where what you propose could be harmful points to a total lack of critical thought on your part.

The point that I am making is that it's incredibly easy to decipher why "track everyone under every identity they choose" can go wrong and lower the quality of discussion, and specifically, that it's so easy the fact you can't think of a single reason why it's a bad idea to completely eradicate privacy.

If I can find an alt of yours saying that you've quit smoking and then push tantalizing ads to you, you're going to bring me a better return than blind-firing into the American public.

If someone is looking for people who are easy to manipulate in borderline-illegal fashion (let's say, sex crimes), it's a cheat code if they see some throwaway account on HN comment on a post about the treatment of youth, "As a present high school student, I disagree with your statement because..." and track it back to a minor.

I disagree that tracking leads to lower quality discussion - for example I know my name and identity is tied to this account and instead of responding to "lack of ...thinking" with an insult I am forced to come up with intelligent responses (now you try ... it's really annoying isn't it :-)

I also explicitly ask for real life examples and studies of harm - I can imagine and create examples but I much prefer the real world to my imagination as a guide. We learnt that as basis of science.

I also think there is a difference between privacy and secrecy. You seem to conflate the two - if your actions online were secret then advertisers would not send you smoking ads. Secrecy is probably impossible - privacy is merely the politeness of our neighbours. And at scale politeness is enforced - by social norms and sometimes legal measures. We are seeing this come in (GDPR) but it's hard to have legal enforcement before the social norms have arrived.

On the smoking ad front, Gabriel Weinbergs main argument is that searching for "red men's trainers" should be enough to serve ads without having to know if I am a 20 something graduate in wisconsin or a middle aged bloke in London. And I suspect he is right within a few percentage points.

As for online grooming -yeah this is a huge danger. Every parents nightmare. And still absolutely something that needs to be enforced in the real world. And may need extra police and social resources. But if we want to stop predators reaching out to vulnerable children then it requires co-ordination amoung many groups onleine and offline - funding, political will, training education over many years.

There will be no quick fixes for the problems tech is bringing - but I remain optimistic that the cost benefit ratio is worth it and that we can vote for and require change to defend against the dangers

which takes me back to my point - what are the real world examples of dangers so we can make sensible policy