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Comment by jokoon | Hacker News Reader

By "policing fake accounts" they also mean "hunt down real accounts who don't use their real name, and ask for a scan of your ID".

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If you don't want to abide by their policies, don't sign up. It's not that hard.

I understand the distinction, but how do we expect them to do both? If they can't enforce a real-name policy (by backing it up with required ID) then how can they possibly remove fake accounts which often use fake names?

Just watch account behavior, IP addresses... There are many real users who don't use their names for good reasons. Fake accounts are also used for false clicks, which facebook doesn't mind.

And by the way, there are no way to really know if a name is real or not.

Im just saying facebook use the real name requirement excuse... but there are other ways to fight fake accounts.

That was one of the final straws for me. I don't think anyone should trust Facebook with enough information to completely take over someone's real life identity.

FB feels authoritarian in a very Orwellian way, and it is even scarier that, much like Orwell wrote, nobody seems to care. We might not be burning books a la Bradbury, but we seem to be burning away our rights to privacy as a complicit society.

Do you feel the same way about other major institutions like Google and Amazon (they're still getting there)?

Of course. This kind of power is so easy to abuse.

Unfortunately, google and amazon are a little harder to abandon than fb because of their utility...

Just wondering. You say "of course", but the amount of negativity relating to what we are talking about that Facebook gets compared to other giants like Google or Amazon is incredibly slanted. Mainly in tech or geek centric sites like this or many reddit subreddits. So it's not always an obvious thing for me if someone is cool enough with Google but not Facebook.

I successfully use Bing for 95-99% of my search engine searches. I haven't made the time to get off Gmail. It'll take a while. I don't believe getting off Google is any harder than getting off Facebook for many people. Because if you're not using Google search or Android with Google apps, Google's utility isn't that high for you. Gmail also isn't miles ahead anymore.

Unfortunately I'm so into the Alexa ecosystem I'm nowhere near away from Amazon.

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