I'm kind of in the middle of this. As a Magickal practitioner writing and communicating mostly about Magick online I obviously use my Magickal name attached to the Magick part of my personality. And slowly it is becoming as much me as my birth name is me, and people who know me personally and know my real name often still prefer to call me Echion or Echi in conversation (for whatever reason). Also my first name is pretty easy for most people but both my complete birth name and my legal name both confuse the hell out of people and most people find both of them too hard to write and/or pronounce.

And on top of that I value my privacy, and agree with pretty much everything Hive account@pastbastard just said. And I'm slightly camera-shy and socially anxious so facebook would be a no go zone for me anyways. And with my Sun in Cancer the secrecy should be no surprise to anyone anyways...

And my final reason would probably be that I want to make it as much as possible about my message rather than it being about me.

But then I find myself agreeing with most of this article, and with similar thoughts going through my mind I have become less and less privacy conscious for the last year or so. And I greatly admire and respect the courage of people when they totally put themselves out there and leave themselves vulnerable. It does show that you stand behind everything you do and say, even when you mess up. Maybe I lack the courage in that regard or maybe I'm courageous in my own way and express it differently than most people do. I'm not sure yet, but who knows, maybe I'll just blow these doors wide open one of these days.

While staying private can definitely be a valid statement or form of protest against those corporations which try to turn us into consumer puppets and have no qualms of giving our information away to governments, and I agree with the method of not giving them anything, for me personally I'm just going through a stage where I feel they can scream as much as they want, as their screams will be caught in the net of my ad-block/pop up blocker/virus scan/firewall, and while I still remain somewhat cautious I don't care that much anymore if they find out who the person is behind my messages as I stand fully behind everything I do and say online. Should the government of the country in which I reside ever become a little bit too authoritarian and turn Chinese or something (which doesn't happen from one day to the other) I will have packed my bags and left before that even happens.