My name is only real enough to work at Facebook, not to use on the site | Hacker News Reader

My name is only real enough to work at Facebook, not to use on the site

medium.com

11 pointsmxhold10 comments

> As a technology, Facebook isn’t neutral. It’s actually changing the way we interact with names. Before Facebook how many of your friends’ surnames did you actually know?

It's hard for me to get over the strangeness of this question. Of course I knew all of my friends' surnames. There's a strong implication in the piece that I should be different?

You know the names they've given you.

You have no idea if those names are real enough for Facebook - plenty of people don't use the name on their birth certificate or marriage certificate or passport. (And this is legal and correct in many countries.)

Yes, like in California, where you're technically allowed to change your name through continued usage (though that doesn't fly for Social Security and thus neither for DMV or banks, which makes this method pretty useless)

http://www.courts.ca.gov/1054.htm

What I'm getting from this is that you don't know your "friends" particularly well. How do you know how well I know my friends?

I think you underestimate how common it is for people to use names other than on their birth certificates, passports or marriage certificates.

On the contrary, I am friends with such a person. We've talked about it.

Actually, I am friends with many such people, if you count Chinese people using English names. There is a mode where I don't know any part of a Chinese person's name, but there's no mode where I know their personal name but not their surname.

Now that I think of it, at least four people I know have some sort of divorce or estranged-parent thing going on with their last names, and I never would have been aware of it if not for the mismatch between the name I met them under and the name on one of their online profiles.

This is from several months ago, since then Facebook has announced changes to the name policy - might be more valuable to get a more recent discussion?

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/11/facebooks-new-name-pol...

It's also a problem that they immediately shut both the user themselves and their friends out of their account just over the user's name. Even with the changes they're making to reporting, the user's account completely disappears from the site until the "issue" is resolved. People might think something happened to them, and of course the user is still shut off from what may be their only means to communicate with some (or even all) important people in their lives or support groups.

Also, from what I can remember from helping my mom through that process, I don't think you can even export your own data if your account's been flagged. Even if you could, the export process is broken: exporting private messages is broken (a long, 50,000+ message conversation with a close friend doesn't export in full for me, and archived conversations also don't get included), and according to https://www.facebook.com/help/405183566203254, your notes, your own timeline posts, your posts on others' profiles, things you've shared, things you've liked, and your following list are also not included. (Edit: I also just noticed that photos don't export in the highest available resolution, and not all photos even export to begin with.)

Not to mention what happens to your ability to log in to other sites with your Facebook account (I honestly don't know about that one).

Overall, the way they handle real name "violations" is just way too drastic. I'd say they should give a 45- or 60-day warning before shutting off access to the account, and even then still allow the user to export their data (and fix the export process) and/or close the account. They also need to let other users access the suspended profile if the user doesn't choose to close it.

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...

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