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That's been the question of a lot of debate, which is why we're focusing on policy right now (hopefully eventually law). The Telemedia Act specifically allows use of non-government-issued ID online. This has been the subject of a big lawsuit with Facebook: http://fusion.net/modern_life/story/german-state-fine-facebo... Regarding the second set of questions, that's the big question right now. IANAL, but the "my house" is a domicile related context. While Facebook is not a domicile, they are a company, and a company can set their own policies. The challenge is that the people using Facebook aren't really employees, and they are using it like a public forum, which it isn't. There are a lot of social issues revolving around this. There's also the 3rd party doctrine to take into account (which incidentally is how NSA is justifying a lot of their monitoring). In terms of government ID being mandatory, you have two issues: one, that while many countries do have a national ID, the US does not. Second, if you require an ID for a website, then you run into all kinds of issues: data retention, access privilege, fraud problems, etc. South Korea had a related law which they abandoned in 2012 after several years, and China just adopted one. So the general answer is "it's complicated, it's a discussion much longer than a hnn thread offers, and nobody really knows yet." Hope that helped :) |