"When I started on Steemit, I did not and would not join steemchat or steemitchat. One simple reason. They want an email address and are not decentralized."
Providing an e-mail doesn't affect your anonymity much (you can provide an address that's detached from your personal identity)
Yes, chat is not decentralized, but is a nice, community driven place. In future (hopefully not distant one) we are going to use Posting Key for authentication being done through SteemConnect.
"Steemconnect is asking for my OWNER KEY. Do you realize what you are giving them if you choose to pass the owner key around all willy nilly?"
No. You shouldn't (never, ever) put your Private Owner Key anywhere near the machine that's connected to the Internet. And you don't need to. SteemConnect shouldn't ask you for it.
Even when SteemConnect asks you for your Private Active or Private Posting Key, it never(*) sends your keys anywhere. It use them locally to sign transactions. For example to use Private Active Key to add Posting Authority for some app, like Busy.
Other example is voting for witnesses. To vote for a witness you can either go to https://steemit.com/~witnesses and log in within Steemit site, or use SteemConnect like this: https://v2.steemconnect.com/sign/account-witness-vote?witness=gtg&approve=1
In both cases your key is used to sign voting transaction with your key.
Maybe that "This operation requires your active, owner key or master password." is what made you think about owner key requirement, but it just states that any of those has power to perform the operation. Of course you should always chose least powerful key.