Celtic Soul,

See the above post re: keyword searching matching email accounts, IPs, log-in passwords, and content.

Of course you are anonymous to Mudcat in the sense that I don't know who you are. But then, I don't have any interest in knowing who you are, and what you do on-line.

Increasingly, employers are following their employees on-line tracks. Former spouses/disgruntled lovers are using the technology for stalking. Hackers with criminal intent (usually financial exploitation of people's on-line identities) engage in identity theft. People who are engaged in political activist work (especially those on the left, whom the FBI, CIA and other law enforcement information gathering agencies like immigration, welfare, etc) are often monitored for both on and off line activity. And then there are those people who just prefer anonymity for privacy reasons, ie the same reason they choose to have unlisted phone numbers,etc.

Those are the privacy issues. A person who chooses to protect themselves for any of the above perfectly valid reasons, with the technology available to them, simply won't post in Mudcat or anywhere else with a consistent identity (ie email account, passwords, identity labels like many use in Mudcat to log-on, etc).

Again, hope this helps you understand the concerns some people share regarding right to privacy on-line a bit better.