Anonymity in Online Communication and Internet Forums

Have you ever participated in online communications and noticed that everyone is using made up pen names? Have you noticed that more and more people who email are concealing their names with fancy or meaningless email addresses? Well, meaningless to anyone else but the calling party that is. Have you noticed your attorney uses a rather sneaky type format of their real names? Is the whole world trying to conceal their identities? How can anyone know if any of it is real or not?

The Spammers of course use bogus names to try to entrap you into reading their wasteful ads, phishing scams or tempt you to their websites? Why is everyone afraid to just be them selves? Some say it is because nasty and vindictive people will use this knowledge against them if they show their true identity and they are afraid of personal or financial harm from a crazy computer user out there or some one stealing their identity?

Others have said that anonymity promotes more honesty into what someone is thinking and thus allows us all to say what we really mean without fear of retribution. Many very intelligent people use fake names, alias identities or