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If a business demands you reveal your identity as a condition of use, and you would rather maintain your anonymity, you can choose not to use that business. It's not like these companies are providing essential services necessary for life.

Heck, you can't even obtain housing -- which is an essential service -- without having to provide identity in most cases.

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Some people would argue though that if the friend group is on Facebook/Discord or whatever, and they aren't going to move off to cater to the person rejecting those services, then those services are at least essential to maintaining those social ties. They decided that giving up their data was a tradeoff worth it.

What remains to be seen is if the outcome of teenagers becoming social pariahs is really worse than the alternatives.

If not joining social media with friends has been seriously detrimental to teens by making them social pariahs, I'm sure we'd have heard plenty of horror stories by now, as these services have been around for over 20 years. Compare against the horror stories we have heard about those who have gone down the dark roads social media has opened to them that ended in tragedy.

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