On some boards, I'll add my real picture to user profile, but I generally prefer to use one of my cats or a very accurate, Mad Men-esque cartoon avatar. On sites where my privacy isn't a concern, I still don't want to keep encountering my visage repeatedly through threads.
Where privacy is a concern, I have actually created a whole other online persona or two, a pen name or nom du guerre as the case may be. Probably because my real name is quite distinctive, public, and my entire career seems to pop up on the first page of any google search! Ah yes, journalism, publishing, and the dot-com world were not conducive to privacy.
