[potamic]

Oh no, I'm not going to go down that slippery slope. We are not talking about CIA whistleblower levels of anonymity here. This is just basic sanity. You may never be able to fight abuse 100%, so it's good practice to reduce the surface of compromise as much as possible. If the information is not needed, just don't send it. It's about de-risking the possibilities. The fact that banks, healthcare institutions etc. are trusted within a boundary does not automatically mean every tom and dick company out there should be trusted as well. There must be a strong justification for access to identity and spam is certainly the weakest out there. Fake identity is not hard to create. Bank fraud is rampant in many countries where fraudsters run large rings using such fake accounts. If banks are not able to stop these, online communities for the purpose of bot detection most certainly won't.

[dcow]

Fake identity is is not hard to create online. You’re right! That is the problem. Fake identity is orders of magnitude harder to create in meatspace. You don't solve that problem by saying “welp I guess we just have to deal with spam to realize pseudo-security via anonymity”. I don't disagree about privacy, even. I think you’d find we agree about not sending information you don't need. Where we talking past each other is on the topic of anonymity vs privacy. I want strong identity and privacy and tools and laws that protect my identity and privacy online as well as offline. Tools that let me manage who has access to my private information and for what use cases. Tools that alert me when that information is accessed or shared. Tools to allow me to verify the information provided by others is genuine. This has nothing to do with anonymity.