Yes, that's a good point. For most people a name is entered because you're asked for it, or the name might be on a GMAIL account if you use that for login. So, you're right -- one never knows what they'll dig up.
But one can have "effective" anonymity with some effort.
In the early days of SI I used my real name on my account here. There came a time when I received an email me threatening me based on some speech here. This would have been roughly 20 years ago. I asked the then-admin of SI to allow me to change to i-node and it has stayed that ever since.
My dad owned a really busy small-town restaurant, and often had visitors and customers from all walks of life; it was a favorite stopping point that anyone driving in the southern half the state was likely to drive by.
Winthrop Rockefeller was running for Governor in about '64, and parked his bus on the town square and provided Polaroid pictures with the Governor for everyone who wanted it. One of the big perks for kids was bumper stickers by the ream; no one said, "You're taking too many".
Next day, we had Rockefeller bumper stickers plastered on our car from head to toe, top to bottom, must have been 100 of them. My dad called me into the kitchen and said, "Boy, did you put all those bumper stickers on my car sitting out front?" "Yes, sir." He said, "you know, every person that drives by the restaurant looks up here and sees that car and they think I'm voting for Rockefeller, and they may be for Faubus. We could lose a lot of customers that way. So, you need to go out there get every one of those bumper stickers off that car so no one thinks I'm for Rockefeller."
I said, "Dad, you ARE for Rockefeller."
He said, "Yeah, boy, but I don't want anyone else to know that."
So, I did as told.
And I've been an artful dodge of politics where customers were concerned most of my life as a result.
Today, not so much. I don't want to lose customers, but I'm done hiding my views from them for the last ten or so years.
But in this era, political views can bring danger on a person and his family. Some discretion makes a lot of sense to me today, to at least make it difficult for any political crazies.
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