[droithomme]

I agree with you there is reason to be skeptical that real identities make advertising more effective. This presumes many things such as there are accurate models of human behavior, and that harsh policies won't drive people away or move them to go to more extremes to hide their identity.

I am sure many advertisers think they want real identities, certainly that would appear to make their jobs even easier as they can then pull property value reports and criminal records searches for random people who happen to visit their site. Just because someone thinks they want something doesn't mean it is more effective. For example, many companies are losing in the marketplace because they can't compete because they can't hire qualified workers because they think they want a long list of acronyms rather than someone who is intelligent and has a history of getting the job done.

Which is more valuable for serving ads that are valuable to advertisers? An anonymous user who you track with cookies and ip address (which gives general location) and have a profile of based on their interests and things they search for? Or someone who you have forced to give their real name, so they have switched to Tor and now every access they make comes from a different ip address, none of which appear connected and none which are related to their real geographical point of origin? Or how about the user that simply unplugs.

This is not just theoretical supposition. In the 1980s supermarkets started using shopper loyalty programs. The stores would raise prices of many products, then offer to sell it at the normal price charged by competitors if the customer agreed to use a card linked to their real name and address, confirmed by state ID cards. This card then was used to track all of their purchasing habits and behaviors and form models of the customers in an attempt to influence them with more targeted coupon offers and direct mail advertising. At the same time, WalMart chose NOT to do that at all, and instead charged lower prices with no tracking, but did instead do much more difficult data analysis of purchases by store and region and date in order to find larger trends of what to keep in stock. For example, before a hurricane in Florida people buy a lot of beer WalMart's algorithms figured out and so they analyze weather data and send trucks full of beer when Florida is about to get hit with a big storm. Which approach worked? The manipulative one where customers were identified, monitored and targeted personally, and punished with higher prices if they refused this? Or the alternative where a more intelligent analysis was done of data without lazily requiring actual real id?