By the way, some people don't even try. Few days ago I saw a girl on the tram carrying her CV in such a way it would be trivial to shoulder-surf her name, email, phone number, date of birth and home address.
Yeah, that happens irl sometimes.
The scary thing is that you don't know who will turn out to be unstable, and it can be someone you never even interact with who is just trying to use you to get under somebody else's skin.
Still, problematic as it is, that's just bad luck. We can't all live in fear of evil strangers sending death threats to us. There is no way a normal person can reasonably protect themselves from an attack like this targeted personally. We need to empower the police to deal better with such cases.
I disagree. Protection of yourself is a multi-angle approach.
One of the very practical ways to not live in fear of evil strangers is to practice good online anonimity, pseudonymity and/or compartmentalisation.
Back when I first got regular Internet access in 1998, this was a no-brainer. Almost everybody did it, and even if you slipped up at first, it was often possible to just cover some tracks and start over with a new nickname.
I walked the web like that for years, until modern Internet made it a lot harder. I was forced to make some hard choices about my own privacy (and thereby automatically about other people's privacy too) versus the ability to stay in contact with certain (groups of) friends. Not for one-to-one messages, email still works fine for that in principle, and everybody still uses it. It's the group communications that were the real issue, forcing very hard choices on people that actually want to choose privacy. But I digress.
The point is, simple precautions like this used to be no harder than simple real-life precautions such as locking your door and not leaving your phone or wallet on the bar counter as you go to the toilet. Simple common-sense things such as not writing your street address on your key-chain label. Or in cases of "bad luck", if some creepy guy is being creepy, being able to safely tell the bartender, paying attention that he doesn't see where you're going as you leave, letting a trusted friend know where you are, etc.
No it doesn't offer 100% protection, but it helps a lot! Real-life precautions like the above are the "way a normal person can reasonably protect themselves" from these types of real-life attacks and threats.
Nobody, corporation or government, would consider making such real-life precautions harder to follow. Or if a corporation would leverage network-effect to turn such a real-life precaution into a social handicap or taboo, people would quickly ask themselves "wait, is this really what we want?", and as soon as the first victims fell, the corp would get a lot of flak for it.
I believe we should allow people to be able to afford the same sorts of easy-to-follow on line precautions, without forcing people to make the awkward choice between privacy (and sometimes safety) and partaking in social life without too much inconvenience to themselves, and importantly, their friends too.
The real-life equivalents to the on-line precautions you've mentioned would be not telling anyone your name, wearing masks in public, not leaving any trail of your activities, and relocating to another town if anyone accidentally discovered what's your first name.
Basically, I don't believe dangers on the Internet warrant such precautions for general population.
I also first went on-line around 1998 and in my part of the world, people were just playing around. Nicknames were created not because one needed them, but because mostly nobody asked for real names.
The reason for that should be clear enough from the examples you gave. Some types of precautions are much easier, sensible or acceptable to do in one type of space than in the other, or vice versa. Some precautions are clearly ridiculous, or just don't carry the same kind of protection in the other type of space. In real life you also don't need to worry someone downloads a copy of your drink :-)
I didn't pick the examples because they have a clear and useful digital equivalent either. It was to demonstrate some other points: Sometimes we have to take precautions to protect ourselves, even if they inconvenience us, even if they do not protect 100% perfectly. And even if the dangers we try to protect ourselves from are clearly illegal, we still take the precautions because we don't expect the law/police to always be there and protect us before they happen. In fact, for real-life we generally prefer it that way, we don't really want to policeman at every corner, hovering above our every move, we want to be able to take care of ourselves, by ourselves. Because sometimes there is no one else.
I'm arguing that we should aim for a similar way in on-line space. Not by carrying the protections to their literal not-quite-equivalent real-life analogies, that would be silly. But to create a similar way of being able to protect oneself, in an (on-line) socially acceptable manner, without having to rely on the state (or a corporation).
I'm arguing that in on-line space, one of the options for precaution should be the ability to pick pseudonyms. They come much more natural to the on-line world than the real world, because on-line you're not attached to a physical presence. This is an advantage, you can't do it in real-life. It doesn't make sense to carry the analogy over, wearing masks isn't quite the same, plus it's not socially acceptable. There are of course many other on-line precautions to protect yourself against dangers, but we were discussing pseudonyms.
BTW a quick side-note, not directed to you in particular. I find that on HN there is a strong tendency to try and find real-life analogies for all sorts of cyber/digital on-line concepts. Often resulting in discussions that carry a metaphor way too far. "No it's more like trying to tie your shoes while your feet are in a locked safe, but your socks are the key ..." -- eh. My point is, in my experience, such kinds of analogies are only useful when trying to somewhat explain a technical concept to a non-technical person. It's not useful at all as a starting point to reason from, just because the analogy (mostly) holds as far as it's descriptive of the concept, doesn't mean the other properties of the analogy that you can reason from there are in any way predictive of the technical concept by the same line of reasoning. Isn't this called "leaky abstractions" in programming? :-)
Artists have figured out long ago that pseudonyms serve a purpose. These days we get sinilar levels of exposure online.
A large part of your FB profile is public. At the very least, I now know your last name. Maybe even your birthday.
In a lot of cases, that's enough to perform some light identity theft. Or I can find your exact address. Or I can find out where you work, or just see all the places you like hanging out at and so on and so on.
I don't want to be that easily findable by strangers, which is why I consistently use a "fake" identity online and offline. It's still me, everyone knows me as Swizec Teller, the name just doesn't have anything to do with my legal first and last name. And my legal name is purposefully difficult to tie with this identity unless you have certain background knowledge.