What is your opinion of "real name" policies on the web?

When I was originally seeking a Yahoo Answers alternative I decided to Give Quora a shot. So I tried to call myself Nerdy Keith on Quora and got my profile flagged because it’s not my real name. Now I know Facebook has had a similar policy for quite some time, which has caused quite a lot of issues for transgendered people. But it seems to me that these real name policies could have the potential of putting a person’s privacy at risk. Some people don’t know this, but our postal addresses are not exactly viewed by the law as private information; they are legally defined as public domain information. Which means that a person could use certain third party websites to search for you by name and find out where you live, track you down and potentially stalk you. Scary stuff.

I had a close call several months ago. Somebody messaged me on Yahoo Answers, I guess I rubbed him the wrong way. Anyway he addressed me by my full name (middle name included). I asked him how he found out that information and he just responded by saying “You’d be surprised what information people can find out about you and how easy it is to find this information out. I could find out where you live if I wanted to.”

It turns out he simply used Twitter and Facebook to find out my full name. My first and last name is on twitter next to my username. He then obviously put that into google, found my private Facebook page; which contains my first name, middle name and last name. He was just trying to scare me.

So I’ve decided to remove my last name from Twitter. As for Quora? I just can’t bring myself to use a Q&A website the enforces a real name policy along with some other issues too. So I deleted my account.