I'm not advocating disappearing altogether. There's nothing wrong with keeping in touch with my friends on facebook, sharing the odd picture.
I do disagree that it feels good to use my real name. I wish I'd been more careful peppering my various accounts with references to my real name. I'd really love to be able to press a button and have zero results come up on google for my name.
Why on earth should you, random internet stranger, be a few clicks away from finding photos of my baby son on facebook? Who gave you the authority to know so much about me? Well, I did by sharing it in the first place.
Not that I have anything in particular to hide, but I feel very strongly that it should be me who's in control of that data.
I don't think it can be wholly solved by technology or by laws.
I think it can only be solved by behavioural changes in the way we use the web.
I perhaps have slightly more fringe interests than you, and in the past have been somewhat indiscreet, albeit on obscure forums.
But in general, if I have an opinion about something, I'm going to publicly and proudly state it - even if I later have to recant. I'd rather admit publicly that I was wrong than hide my views.
I personally felt like the Internet gave us the power of managing several identities, having personas tied to some communities, making it simple to meet new people and yet (sort of) protect our privacy.
Now, I feel like the game has changed and if you want to enjoy anything online, more and more, you'll have to allow access to your life to everyone you ever interact with, unless you spend a lot of time tweaking privacy settings everywhere and live almost like a criminal on the run.
All the cloud sync stuff is nice, but not that nice. I would much, much rather have to run my own server for backing things up, or just backup locally to different devices, than be in the mess we're in now. We've given up far too much for what amounts, at the end of the day, to convenience.
As for facebook, I'd personally return to the world before it existed in a heartbeat, given the choice.
Facebook is an awesome service to find old friends, find new friends with the same interests, exchange visual info (sharing your baby's picture with your family) etc.
Being able to sync devices across is awesome. But try that outside Google/Apple and you're against a wall. Of course it can be done, but not for all applications etc.
Thing is that today's technology offers one hell of an options compared to ten years ago. But more than half of those comes with sharing your real data. Not just out of cunning CEO's or the NSA but out of pure functionality: If you don't use your real name in Twitter/Facebook how are other people suppose to find you?
Try keeping contact with friends via email. It's impossible, especially for the tech-unsavvy, while with facebook everything comes easy.
I would like to erase some of my online past, but it's not important. Not that much. What matters to me is:
* Remove all LEGAL powers for someone to harvest, sell, explore your data without me explicitly knowing about it.
* Prevent and heavily punish data abuse.
* Know the system[1]
[1] If you know how a system works (the internet, surveillance, etc) you can circumvent it, anytime. Tor will not help you if you use it to login into facebook. I mean, your enemy will know instantly that you're using TOR, your exit node etc. Being anonymous online, even without someone tailing you it's very hard but it can be done.
The problem with true online anonymity, is that it's not a one-time thing. It's a policy that needs you to be strict. No more forums, new fake emails all the time, registrations, etc. All of us can do that, but are we willing to do so??? I'm not.
We can't turn the clock back in time and undo what we did (except maybe if we are able to travel at light-speed... but that's not the point I guess). We have to focus on how to make governments and companies much more accountable about what they are doing. Many laws need extra elasticity (copyright) while others need to get much tougher (abuse of power by any authority).
Also some advancements at protocol level like user-predefine packet (path) routing, DNS and internet decentralization (away from USA), would not be a bad start.