Facebook's real-name-only approach is non-negotiable | Hacker News Reader

Facebook's real-name-only approach is non-negotiable

theregister.co.uk

17 pointsdavewiner20 comments

Play a social game on Facebook - any of the ones that grant you additional advantages for inviting your friends. (In other words, 100% of the successful ones.) There's so many obviously fake, for-games-only accounts loaded up with completely unconnected for-games-only 'friends'.

When Facebook gets serious about deleting these accounts - irritating the platform's developers and impacting the money it makes through Facebook Credits - then I'll believe their real-name-only approach is non-negotiable.

Aren't these accounts precisely what generate Facebook's revenue?

There appears to be a large number of people who don't want to associate their public identity with their 'social gaming' profile - does this really cause any harm?

Aren't these accounts precisely what generate Facebook's revenue?

That's precisely the point. If the "real name only" stance is non-negotiable, they would ban these accounts, forgoing significant revenue in the process.

What name is more real; one you give yourself, or one your parents give you?

And anyway, nothing is stopping you from photoshopping your drivers' license to say whatever name you want. When Facebook asks you to verify your "real name", just give them a photoshop. Or don't use Facebook.

Incidentally, I have a friend whose passport says "Ingy döt Net". Yup, an O with umlauts. And that's his legal name.

So I don't really see an issue here.

"Incidentally, I have a friend whose passport says "Ingy döt Net"."

Is it an American passport? If it comes from a country which uses ö as part of its alphabet I don't see what would be surprising.

It is an American passport.

Ah. Out of curiosity, do you know what restrictions there are on characters that can be used? Are the criteria for "legal characters in a name" in the U.S. driven by technology/codepages? ö is in ISO 8859-1 and Windows-1252, so perhaps support is more straightforward. I have a feeling č or ł might be a different story.

I keep on meaning to look into synchronizing my birth name (with an ł and a ó, latter is in 8859-1 but not the former) with my legal name in Canada, but I consistently conclude I can't be bothered...

Ingy used to have a blog post about all the different hassles he had with different people coping badly with the ö (passport, driving licence, Amazon account etc). He's killed his blog at least twice since then though, so I don't think it's currently available and I can't find it in archive.org

I don't know about the US, but I made a series of Freedom of Information requests in the UK to find the answer to exactly this issue there, and was somewhat surprised to find that (in Northern Ireland at least) supposedly any Unicode character is valid: http://nothing.tmtm.com/2008/11/irene-and-irene-and-%D0%B0%D...

Whether that extends to the snowman character and the like is still an open question...

Yeah - I'm not at all convinced the principle of having my name right would be worth the hassle.

Very interesting about the situation in NI. Thanks for the link.

Similarity to .Net the framework, maybe?

No. He simply harmonised his personal name and his domain name (plus a heavy metal umlaut for extra fun).

When my girlfriend made a Facebook account about a year ago, I was curious to see how this would unfold.

Her account name isn't her real name as she uses an alias in both her digital and real life (I don't think I even learned her real name for the first six months we were dating.

She won't post pictures of herself to her profile (and will remove any tags other people might add of her) and mostly uses Facebook to play games.

A few months ago she tried to log into her account from somewhere else, and was presented with the "identify yourself by naming your friends" screen and realized that almost all of her Facebook friends (who are mostly people she plays online games with) don't have actual pictures of themselves as their profile pic.

That's interesting she uses an alias in real life as well as online. Is there any specific reason?

I think she originally adopted it when she was dancing (which is pretty common), and is pretty security conscious (paranoid) in general, so she kept using it.

I get the concern, but I feel like there's an entire Internet out there where a real name isn't required... The fact that you have to use your real name is apparent from the moment you sign up, and shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.

I don't know. Around here the adoption is slow (and I joined only recently, already toying with leaving again). Lots of people _don't_ use the real name, but instead obfuscate it at least. It might read out loud to something similar. It might be the last name in reverse. Or it might be entirely fictional. In my (limited..) network there you'll find 60-70% with names that don't match with the name on their ID, mostly foreign monikers and twisted plays on words that even (real, the offline variety) friends wouldn't have guessed.

Requiring a real name and enforcing that would be a major strike against it, I guess. Sort of like the Blizzard 'let's try that on our forums' idea..

There's always been a continuum of anonymity on the internet. Outside Facebook, participants in online communities have to decide on a case-by-case basis how much of their 'real' identity to make available. Because almost all online activity has traditionally been open, indexed, and publicly accessible, this has been the primary way that people have 'protected' themselves.

Facebook inverts this: it requires you to use your real identity at all times, but partitions the online social space into a set of closed, private chambers. Security comes from isolation rather than anonymity.

Facebook has been increasingly successful at working its way into the mechanics of online communities in general, and I think this is a real threat to the unique potential of the internet as a social space. When physical boundaries are irrelevant and people are free to choose how to participate - not just how much - communities emerge that are qualitatively different from the ones we live in offline. But when Facebook's model applies the social constraints of the offline world to the internet, we lose that uniqueness.

So then I guess facebook believes my fb app QA team consists of about a half dozen men who look strikingly like myself but with much more colorful names.

huh? Tons of people have changed their name for their facebook account (e.g. "Rob FromManchester" instead of "Rob Smith"), so they don't pop up in employer searches. I've never seen or heard of a verification system.

Well, it's a good thing that Ciccio Bong, Wholly Subversive, and Guy Fawkes used their real names, then.

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