There was an article in the New York Times last week titled "The End of Online Anonymity", that caused a minor kerffufle in the blogosphere. The article's author Sarah Perez wrote: "On tomorrow's Web, we're no longer going to be anonymous. In fact, one can argue that we're no longer anonymous today, but that's not entirely true. We're still hearing of people hijacking people's names and brands on social networking sites like Twitter, for example, and any MySpace search for a famous celebrity will return hundreds of results purporting to be the 'official' page for that person. But those days of 'faking it' may be fading fast." That got me thinking about fake personas.

Perez refers to the soon to be infamous Lori Drew MySpace trial “…where an overprotective mom established a fake online identity to bully her daughter's rival. The judge's ruling has now criminalized the act of creating a fake persona online.” The young girl committed suicide and many feel the ruling was simply society’s rightful vengeance. Unfortunately, the judge let society’s indignation overstep the rule of law.

So-called “fake” personas have been a staple of writers and storytellers from at least the days of Homer. Any novel with at least one character has “fake” personas. But, you may say, the author isn’t pretending to be that character, are they? Well, consider the “autobiography” of Howard Hughes. This was called a hoax, it’s true, because Howard Hughes could be proven to really exist. But what about the autobiography of a fictional character – such as David Copperfield (the Dickens character, not the illusionist)? There’s certainly no ‘crime’ there (unless you’re a high school sophomore forced to read it!).

People create many personas for themselves, especially online, for many different reasons. That one person abused this with the unforeseen consequence of a person’s suicide should not make us all criminals.

Of course, this all has nothing to do with anonymity either. What Ms. Perez is talking about is pseudonymity – defined as an artificial or ‘fake’ identity. There is nothing intrinsically anonymous about a pseudo-identity but it may be difficult to tie that identity back to its biological owner. Difficult, yes but rarely (if ever) impossible. We’ll go into that a bit more next time.

Dave Kearns is a consultant and editor of IdM, the Journal of Identity Management.