In my last rant/blog about social presence, I recalled, with a bit of nostalgia, the old times when the social web was a list of IRC channels. The good old days where every freak and geek built their whole identity around a mysterious pseudonym and could create a whole virtual life (or a Second Life…).

In the “Facebook era”, where the whole point of social is (as described by one of our consumers in a recent focus group) “filling in a profile with details to build up a network of real friends”, real life and online life are merging.

Lately, more info networking rmed Facebook users have started to be aware of the privacy issues surrounding their lives on the social web.

This awareness resulted in a mass-reaction and rebellion (I’m not listing all the blogs, tweets here they are too numerous!) against the almighty Facebook. The social networking King has made rapid changes in its basic privacy settings to allow more and more data to be public/shared/used/analysed.

The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook by Matt McKeon – To see the full moving infographic click the image.

The point is that if early adopters and other geeks find out that Facebook privacy settings have changed, the slower majority, which probably accounts for 90% of social network users, won’t understand/know about these changes. The consequence of this is that hundreds of thousands of people are unknowingly giving away all their information.

It’s kind of like a bad dream, you suddenly realise that you’re bare naked in the middle of packed room. But this is not a dream, it has, somehow, turned into reality and it’s happening on the web right now.

In a similar story one of the biggest online communities, Blizzard’s World of Warcraft, revealed an interesting change in their interface: now users’ real name are revealed on the official forums. This change goes along with a new statement in their T&Cs where all conversations (messages, public and private chat) will now on be recorded and potentially monitored. Why is that? As per Blizzard, this change aims at fighting against bullying and bad behaviours online.

Users reacted violently to Blizzard’s move, slamming them for what they saw as a pointless move.

One tech savvy user wisely commented “The virtues of protecting your privacy online are some of the most sensible tenets of the internet that the non-techie crowd is slowly learning through painful experience.”

An interesting consequence of displaying real identity is the increased risk of account hi-jacking and other identity-stealing agents. Remember when the internet audience painfully learned about “phishing”? As a result social media has become democratised and people care less. This article from Boston.com helps to explain:

Facebook accounts are attractive because of the higher level of trust on the site than exists in the broader Internet.

As a result, people are more likely to believe a fraudulent message or click on a dubious link on a friend’s wall or an e-mail message. Moreover, [fake] accounts allow criminals to mine profiles of victims and their friends for personal information like birthdates, addresses, pets’ names, and other tidbits that can be used in identity theft.

Another fair issue that has been raised is that revealing ID opens the door to racial discrimination and sexual harassment (loads of girls play WoW but there’s still a long way to go until equality and respect rule there). This is something already more or less present in the game as well as most other social networks, with the YouTube comments section being a prime example.

With all this in mind, I’m not quite sure this is the good move for Blizzard.

If the lovely WoW geeks are not happy with the whole Real ID revolution, what about other more “mainstream” users?

Actually, even with Facebook, Twitter (and maybe even Linkedin?) users are not keen in using their real ID: as shown in this study, only 51% of users are using their real name on social networks.

Overall, I think we’re not that far away from a merge between real and virtual identification, with people slowly being “tamed”. Luckily enough, legal monikers are not the norm on the web… yet?