I’m not going to tell you who I am until the end of this essay because I want to prove a point to you. Knowing who I am–who the author is–matters. Yet, in our new age of electronic media, this crucial fact is vanishing from much of the information we consume.

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Mr. X lives in ZIP code 02138 and was born July 31, 1945.

These facts about him were included in an anonymized medical record released to the public. Sounds like Mr. X is pretty anonymous, right? Not if you’re Latanya Sweeney, a Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor who showed in 1997 that this information was enough to pin down Mr. X’s more familiar identity–William Weld, the governor of Massachusetts throughout the 1990s.

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YouTube’s cat-and-mouse game with governments abroad continues.

To avoid a South Korean law that would require users who upload or comment on videos to first register with their real names, YouTube last week disabled those two features on its local Korean site, according to the company. The move garnered new attention Monday, after it was reported by a Korean publication, Hankyoreh.

Scott Rubin, a spokesman for YouTube parent Google (GOOG), said it devised the compromise because it believes in users’ rights to be anonymous online. He notes that users in Korea can upload and comment on videos by changing their country settings to another geographic zone. And users of the Korean site can still watch videos anonymously.

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The lack of security and privacy online has some technology experts pushing for a do-over on the Internet, according to a Sunday Week in Review article in the New York Times.

“What a new Internet might look like is still widely debated, but one alternative would, in effect, create a ‘gated community’ where users would give up their anonymity and certain freedoms in return for safety,” writes John Markoff. “Today that is already the case for many corporate and government Internet users. As a new and more secure network becomes widely adopted, the current Internet might end up as the bad neighborhood of cyberspace. You would enter at your own risk and keep an eye over your shoulder while you were there.”

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It seems we’re approaching a new age here on the Internet. Instead of being anonymous, faceless IP addresses, social computing and changing technologies have allowed the lines between the “real” world and the “virtual” world to blur. Web 2.0 helped create a world where your identity is revealed in bits and pieces as you share snippets of your life online–a photo here, a Stumble there, a tweet, a Digg, etc. However, the rise of social media is only one of the changes that is busy shaping the new Web.

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An Eastern Kentucky lawmaker wants to ban Kentuckians from anonymously posting information on the Internet. State Rep. Tim Couch (R., Hyden) filed a bill that would require anyone posting on interactive Web sites to first register using their legal names, addresses and valid email addresses. Couch, however, said he won’t push the bill–he just wants to draw attention to the growing presence of anonymous and often mean-spirited comments on Web sites.

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