Well yes of course, your first paragraph was exactly my subpoint - declaring otherwise would be impossible.
From there it follows that it is indeed a proper freedom to be able to communicate while limiting the scope of who is privy to that communication, including limiting what can be attributed to some singular inescapable "identity". Saying that preventing this is "a good thing 99% of the time" is a baseless assertion. While this may appear similar to how social strictures have been managed for thousands of years - that's thousands of years of oppression of individuality and persecution for deviating from the herd. The West has overtly bucked that vein of collectivism, which I'd call progress.
Furthermore what you're invoking as some open-and-shut traditional state of affairs was anything but. Witness the concept of hearsay - where party B claims that party A has said something, ostensibly so that others will judge party A for it, but modulo B's reputation. Digital communications render hearsay moot - the default result of party B being able to prove to themselves that party A said something, is that party B can also prove to anyone that party A said that thing. Hence the need for the cryptographic property of repudiation, as the physics of digital information leaves no ambiguous middle ground.
From there it follows that it is indeed a proper freedom to be able to communicate while limiting the scope of who is privy to that communication, including limiting what can be attributed to some singular inescapable "identity". Saying that preventing this is "a good thing 99% of the time" is a baseless assertion. While this may appear similar to how social strictures have been managed for thousands of years - that's thousands of years of oppression of individuality and persecution for deviating from the herd. The West has overtly bucked that vein of collectivism, which I'd call progress.
Furthermore what you're invoking as some open-and-shut traditional state of affairs was anything but. Witness the concept of hearsay - where party B claims that party A has said something, ostensibly so that others will judge party A for it, but modulo B's reputation. Digital communications render hearsay moot - the default result of party B being able to prove to themselves that party A said something, is that party B can also prove to anyone that party A said that thing. Hence the need for the cryptographic property of repudiation, as the physics of digital information leaves no ambiguous middle ground.