BEFORE Facebook and Google became the megaliths of the web, the most famous online adage was, “on the internet, no one knows you’re a dog”. It seems the days when people were allowed to be dogs is coming to a close. The old web, a place where identity could remain separate from real life, is rapidly disappearing. According to Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, and Richard Allan, its director of policy in Europe, a critical mass of people only want online interactions supported by “authentic” identity. And this, say critics, will have irrevocable effects on the web.

Facebook profiles and Google IDs are tied to a person’s real name and real connections, and increasingly to their activities across cyberspace.

Facebook also believes authenticity is linked to a person’s photo stream, which is why it has just paid $1bn for the photo-sharing service Instagram. “Pictures speak a thousand words,” says Allan. “Immigration officials will ask to see a photo album to see if a relationship is genuine. It’s a very powerful way to confirm authentic identity.”

Not everyone agrees. “I would not call what you have on Facebook ‘authentic’ identity,” says Christopher Poole, the 24-year-old creator of 4Chan, an online community founded in 2004. 4Chan boasts two features antithetical to Facebook: first, its 20 million users don’t register and are anonymous; second, there’s no archive.

Poole, voted Time’s most influential person of 2008 two years before Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was declared the magazine’s Man of the Year believes Facebook’s commercial motivations shut down the online experience: “Mark and Sheryl have gone out and said that identity is authenticity, that you are online who you are offline, and to have multiple identities is lacking in integrity. I think that’s nuts.”

Allan believes such attitudes are naive. The millions who have gone online over the past decade want a safe place where they won’t experience bad behaviour, have their identities stolen or be duped by impostors, he says: “Pretend identities don’t work very well now that the web has moved from a minority sport for geeks to a mainstream occupation.”

Any profile on Facebook or Google that does not appear to be tied to an offline name is removed. Nicknames and pseudonyms, regardless of their longevity, are considered breaches of terms of service. What people do online now, and will be doing in the foreseeable future, is tied to their offline selves.

Yet a social network’s success need not rely upon this direct link. In Japan, the three most popular social networks operate under pseudonyms. “[Japanese social networks are] anonymous, but we can trace past mentions by login ID or nickname,” explains Yasutaka Yuno, editor-in-chief of Japan’s most popular mobile technology site, K-tai Watch.

Andrew Lewman, executive director of the Tor Project, hopes to re-anonymise the web. “The ability to be anonymous is increasingly important because it gives people control, it lets them be creative, it lets them figure out their identity and explore what they want to do,” he says.

By arrangement with Guardian