Hmmm, well I don't really try and present myself much differantly than I am IRL for the most part so I suppose it wouldn't be that big a deal in those terms.
I dislike the idea on principle however because I feel one of the advantages of the internet is anonimity when you desire it. There are pros and cons to it, but most of the cons are simply that relatively anonymous users prevents corperations and even the goverment from controlling information as much as they would like to. Your typical company would like to be able to take a hammer to a lot of their critics, which they can't do when someone is anonymous. Offline a big company can typically go after someone saying something they don't care for with charges like "slander" and "libel". With the amount of money a big company can feed into a legal team it doesn't much matter if what is being said is true or not. This is one of the reasons that for all the garbage circulated, a lot of people use the Internet to spread information that would be difficult to divulge IRL. I think right now people understand that just because something is on the Internet does not nessicarly mean it's true, but right now all of the unfettered information allows them to come to their own conclusions.
Some might think that stripping away the masks might help with certain "physical" crimes like people luring children for sex or whatever. However I think that in general it turns into a craps shoot as other things will simply become easier. For example with this kind of technology camwhores are going to have a field day. Not to mention that especially when dealing with teens not all of them are "victims" when it comes to the pedophille stuff as a lot of them use the internet to experiment and such. I can see this technology making it even easier than before for some 14 year old girl to shop herself around and trade pics, sex acts with friends, etc... for items purchused off of services like Amazon, or even cash through things like Paypal. You'd be surprised how big an issue that kind of thing can be, "kiddie porn" isn't just produced by pimps, depraved parents, and slobbering freaks, but by kids who think it's a "daring" if safe way to act grown up and get the things they want without any actual risk (which is not the reality of things).
Also looking at what people did with the Second Life Avatars, not to mention the existance of "games" like "Naughty America Online" and "Red Light District" just imagine what we're going to see for custom animations and such for this style of avatar given time if it goes live.
Basically, I can see some benefits to it, but I think there are more negatives. Both in terms of removing anonomity/privacy options, and in the way I can see this technology backfiring big time and leading to child protection issues and stuff that we haven't even thought of yet.
I mean geez, we have luddites all over the world (Germany, US, Australia) freaking out about the levels of sex and violence in games now as stupid as that is. We haven't even protected expression at this level, the last thing we need to do is blow more brains when someone decides to say start taking the avatars of people he doesn't like and raping/torturing/etc... them. Even just the image of them. We saw stuff like that in second life, so we'd see it here, except now it would be photorealistic.
