Federal government considering ID verification for social media accounts
news.com.au
news.com.au
However, until privacy is guaranteed by constitution, there will be always a temptation to make things easier by tying your personal id numbers to accounts.
Take away anonymity and the abusers will have a much easier time finding their victims (back). And/or the abused will need to forgo using social media.
Short version: Data that isn't online can't get breached.
But yes, ultimately being offline can provide most likely highest level of privacy - and then if wanting to not be connected to any verification system, then there are the myriad of problems like managing out people from bullies to bad actors from network(s) of verified users.
Alternately, we could recognize that having the highest profile verified account on one's service (eg. Twitter) does not -in fact- prevent someone from violating a service's TOS. But it sure does allow one to deplatform people one disagrees with!
And just when I answer, this happens to reinforce our faith in humanity %-) . Blackmail not even required!
I simply don't understand why governments in "free" countries feel that they need to meddle with every aspect of people's lives. I'm starting to think that it's better if things I like don't become popular, so that governments don't start meddling with them.
I'd also point out that increasingly companies are forcing such policies - using mobile phones - that in the end is the same result. That logging into many services require use of a mobile phone and/or a credit card. One might argue this is better than a government id/validation system, but in practice the government gets access to all the data anyway and now you have that friction and you've now distributed the data to multiple databases for whatever uses.
I'd prefer to not have either.
That there are significant problems in the world that might be improved upon with a lack of anonymity. Be that social media bullying, slander, the review 'industry' - or just the more dark aspects of human nature that anonymity allows - such as people getting the dopamine hit of attacking a person.
There are other things that anonymity allowed that are good - whistleblowers, people under restrictive regimes being able to communicate. Sometimes it's freeing to be able to say what you really think anonymously.
So what to do? There probably isn't any one single answer. That many services will require your identity to use. Having a government ID system if correctly engineered and administored - that arguably actually might be preferable for some services.
There could be services services that allow anonymity. The distinction could be reach or some other mechanisms.
'Freedom' is an odd word as it is used in the US. I don't see people generally talking about it wrt companies requiring ID for example - and yes often there is no or little choice. If it's anything restrictive from the government then immediately it's a big deal. It's a weird kind of freedom - people are free to by cyber bullied, to be erroneously attacked and lose their jobs, to erode trust - from reviews, to news, to science and so forth. To erode democracy itself. That's apparently not a problem because we are 'free'. It doesn't make much sense to me.