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Browser Firm That Required Users To Confirm Their Real Life Identity Shut Down After Its Employees Were Threatened (xconomy.com)
New submitter nleskovic shares a report: When Authenticated Reality launched last year, it seemed that the company had struck gold in terms of market demand and fit. The Austin-based startup had developed a Web browser that would require users to prove they are who they say they are. Users would have to sign up for an account -- scanning their driver's license and taking a photo -- in order to download the browser, which would sit "on top" of the Internet, said Chris Ciabarra, Authenticated Reality's co-founder, in an interview last year. "Everybody knows who everybody is," he said. So, when Facebook announced this week that its site was, once again, home to inauthentic pages and accounts designed to influence the outcome of the upcoming midterm Congressional elections, I contacted Ciabarra to find out how the company was doing. But, he said Wednesday that he had shut down the startup just a month after its debut. He said people who had heard about Authenticated Reality from media reports were visiting the firm's offices in California and threatening employees. (The addresses were listed on the website.) "It was getting kind of scary," he told me. "They were thinking we were taking their freedom away because they had to sign up using a driver's license. They thought we were trying to follow them."
See, this isn't about 'stalling development', it's about freedom of speech and freedom of expression and anonymity on the Internet serves to facilitate that, not just here in the United States, but everywhere around the world where there is the Internet. Do you really want to live in a world where someone has to be afraid to speak the truth about, say, their government on the Internet, because they have to use their real name to do it and they know they'll get arrested and incarcerated or maybe killed outright for it? Why do you think things like TOR exist? I know damned well that the anonymity the Internet provides us all with can and is abused but I'd rather put up with trolls and other abuses of of it rather than have that ability taken away. It's already been leveraged quite enough as a surveillance and data-collection platform by ISPs, we don't need people being required to use their real name on it, too, making every gods-be-damned thing you say and do there a matter of public record.