In general, searching by a face to gain a name and then other information is on the verge of wide availability: The Russian internet giant Yandex appears to have deployed facial-recognition technology in its image search tool. If you upload an unlabeled picture of my face into Google image search, it identifies me and then further searches my name, and I’m barely a public figure, if at all.

Given ever more refined surveillance, what might the world look like if we were to try to “get over” the loss of this privacy? Two very different extrapolations might allow us to glimpse some of the consequences of our privacy choices (or lack thereof) that are taking shape even today.

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In one plausible future, many people routinely are offered, and use, technical tools to keep their identities obscure. Call it Pseudoworld. When controlling what is known about us is difficult, the natural path is pseudonymization: establishing online presence without using a real name. One recent study found that the more sensitive a topic is, the less likely people discussing it online are to use their real names. It recorded about one in five accounts on English-speaking Twitter as plainly using pseudonyms. In Pseudoworld, that will be far more common. There, to tweet or blog—or sign on to Facebook—under a real name will be seen as a puzzlingly risky thing to do. Just as universities remind students to lock their dorm-room doors, civic education will teach us how to obscure our identities so we can’t be traced online.

We get to Pseudoworld precisely by trying to take individual responsibility for our own privacy. Ten years ago, Joel Reidenberg, a professor at Fordham Law School, asked his students to find personal information online about Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, whose remarks at a conference had hinted at McNealy-like skepticism about privacy concerns. Despite having no access to obvious sources such as a public Facebook account, the students were able to produce a 15-page dossier about the justice and his family, including his home address and his home phone number. Scalia was not pleased, calling the exercise “an example of perfectly legal, abominably poor judgment.”

Of course, Reidenberg’s students had gathered the information as an academic exercise and then moved along. But the assembly of someone’s personal information can turn into a “doxxing,” a public outing of once-obscure or concealed data, which can serve as the basis for online and offline harassment. The “get over it” theory of zero privacy serves to blame the victims of doxxing, suggesting that if they didn’t want the information getting out, they should not have so cavalierly shared it.

Tracking reputation will still be possible in Pseudoworld. People can simply establish track records under their pen names, and platforms (and other users) might choose to pay more attention to comments by those whose previous comments have been deemed constructive or engaging under whatever standard the platforms want to set. The science-fiction author Orson Scott Card imagined this in his book Ender’s Game, in which two preternaturally smart kids pseudonymously accrue great respect through their participation on global message boards, and from there influence the course of the world. Appropriate skepticism of the power of the pen aside, there are lots of Twitter influencers who fit this mold.