I actually have not turned off such a switch. This is not because I am lazy or because I do not care about matters of privacy - on the contrary, I care a great deal that people have the law-guaranteed right to create, reveal, own, and trade/barter/buy/sell as much or as little data about or by them as they want. Of course, saying who owns data gets tricky in some areas, but it is pretty clear when it comes to content made (rather than gathered) by someone that they own it and can control it's dissemination, and also personal facts such as name/location are subject to requests for retraction. I believe anyone should be able to be psedonymous and anonymous, as I do not believe any crimes are unavoidably enabled by these things. If a population cannot protect itself from an enemy it does not know, it cannot protect itself at all. This is why security through obscurity is intrinsically faulty, without equivocation. This is, interestingly, also my reason why I do not turn off tracking and switches and things - even taking into account the very real and probable possibility that any government or company can view any data I have, regardless of what promises or user agreements they have made, I can think of nothing that I do not want them to have, that they could leverage against me. [EDIT: Glen just said most of what I was going to say. The rest:] Also, we should not differentiate ideologically (as well as the aforementioned technologically) between one activity and another. Everybody does what they do for an honest reason, and most of us do most of those things for a well-intentioned (subjectively speaking) reason. If somebody looks on the Internet for bomb-making recipes, it may be 1) out of harmless curiosity or 2) to make a bomb, to blow up something they have a problem with. If we deal with this as a legitimate opinion, albeit one threatening to be expressed very badly, perhaps we can come to some sort of decision on how to address that. Or perhaps that is naiive...it is also a bad example, but what I mean is that just as we must insist that 'fake names' are just as valid as real names, there is no wrong use of the internet, just bad consequences. -Arlo James Barnes
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