Facebook Wants You To Snitch On Friends Not Using Their Real Name | Hacker News Reader

Facebook Wants You To Snitch On Friends Not Using Their Real Name

paulbernal.wordpress.com

218 pointsmindstab156 comments

In Mexico, bloggers are disemboweled and strung up from bridges as a warning to others, by cartels.

In Syria, government snipers murdered bloggers to silence them.

In China, bloggers are imprisoned at hard labor.

In the United States, the Federalist Papers were released anonymously in order to protect the lives of their authors.

It is only the spoiled, rich and free countries who make such naive and irresponsible statements such as, "I am in support of people using their real names online."

A better question is, what actions are Google, Apple, and Facebook taking to protect our vital ability to remain anonymous online?

Great post. I am in South Korea. I could be imprisoned for the the things I have written here about Samsung and their owning family.

In Thailand you could be imprisoned if anything you say can be misconstrued as a criticism of the King.

This kinds of laws that make all kinds of utterly harmless speech a very serious risk are very widespread.

See also what happened to some poor guy that made a joke in Twitter about his trip to the US.

People in favor of "Real Names" are the same kind of people who say "If you have nothing to hide, why do you care about privacy?"

In Thailand you could be imprisoned if anything you say can be misconstrued as a criticism of the King.

I've heard that is also true in Memphis.

…but you haven't.

Wouldn't an even better question be: how do we build the kind of society where people can express their thoughts attached to their names without fear of reprisal?

The way forward, in my view, is not acceptance, but a complete separation of individuals and ideas.

Yes, but that's going to take 100+ years. It's is not an argument in favour of real names only, today.

A noble sentiment, but until it can be proven with solid evidence that such a thing is possible, it would be dangerous and irresponsible to force such an experiment upon people.

History is rife with examples of people imposing what they just KNEW was right upon others, with disastrous consequences.

That's an interesting point, perhaps the goal I described is impossible. It just seems like aiming for anonymity is aiming low and solving the wrong problem.

Or perhaps it is aiming high and solving the right problem. Unless one can back up their claims with good evidence, they're merely engaging in conjecture. Thus far, the only evidence we have points in favor of preserving the right to privacy and anonymity.

It's an appealing idea but I don't believe we're wired for it. "Busybody" and "judgmental" and "heretic" have been in the lexicon for many centuries. We evolved in tribes and villages which were too hierarchical and interdependent to tolerate freethinkers and too small (below Dunbar's number) for eccentrics to escape notice. It's the relative anonymity of cities, and the opportunity to reinvent oneself, that unleashed the rate of progress we see today.

These are valid points. But there are myriad ways to blog anonymously. If Facebook wants to be a place where people are known by their real names, then that's their business.

Enforcing real names has pros and cons. For Facebook as a business, the pros certainly outweigh the value lost when accounts can't be mapped directly to real people. Names are a key part of that mapping.

In general, I prefer an option for pseudonymity, because it is much more inclusive (allowing certain people at the fringes to feel more comfortable joining in -- victims of abuse, political dissidents, etc), and is much less messy than total anonymity (which wouldn't really work for something like Facebook, not that there isn't a place for it elsewhere on the web). That said, pseudonymity can still get messy, so I see why Facebook might want to keep it in check.

One can also make the argument that the level of discourse is much higher on services where people are more personally accountable for what they say, and where confusing or offensive usernames don't get in the way of conversations. But I would say that the actual level of discourse sometimes found on Facebook throws that argument into question.

Based on the level of discourse here on hacker news and even on reddit, I don't think one can reasonably say that.

I don't personally agree with the argument, but I've seen it come up numerous times, first on Google Plus and now on Facebook.

Indeed, it seems much more sensible to directly do Q/A on messages, instead of on the names being used. I think the argument simply confuses a correlation with causation.

What Facebook and Google+ gain in politesse, they lose in depth and honesty. I can't assume I'll be held "accountable" in a just way by every prospective employer, apartment manager, or lover I'll ever meet, so these venues get empty pleasantries from me, certainly nothing controversial in any way.

Now imagine a whole generation socializing under these artificial restrictions. Can you imagine how stifling being raised under an umbrella of constant surveillance by your peer group, family, future employers and advertisers would be to your personality and relationships? We're developing a society of sociopatic egotists.

I should upvote you more than once! This is exactly one of the items nobody has on the radar right now.

... and the only cure is 4chan!

Would that it were. The owner/admin's made some bad decisions that opened it up to being restricted/gamed and as a result the site is suffering as a platform for free and independent speech.

Sic transit gloria mundi, I guess. Some people cite backroom lobbying by people from places with authoritarian factions, e.g. Reddit and SA, but I don't have the resources to verify the rumors.

As someone who practically grew up on 4chan, I have to ask: What on earth are you talking about?

That assumes that people don't ignore the constant surveillance and largely do whatever they were going to do anyway. Most non-geeks seem to do just that.

(Whether that is a good idea is another matter. Also, I still don't like Facebook.)

For anyone interested, there's a visual novel that explores this idea.

"Don't Take it Perosnally Babe, it Just Ain't Your Story."

---

The driving motivation for the story is that this generation _raised_ on "4chan" and "Facebook" shares deep and intimate things with each other _knowing full well_ that what they're sharing may be under review.

Towards the end it implies that privacy is an antiquated concept; and yet that changes surprisingly little.

---

I'm with you; whether it is a good idea or not, I can't say. I'll just wait until it manifests in culture.

That being said: I don't like the implications of getting rid of privacy. Not when society likes to latch on to the most unimportant of biases when making incredibly important decisions. (For e.g: getting turned down for a job offer because of some political, philosophical, or religious rant on your Facebook wall.)

If you're going to hold such things over my head; then I'd rather not share them with you. -- And that (to me) is the essence of privacy.

It's why I like Google+ and Diaspora so much. I think the concept of "Circles" or "Aspects" gives the user a lot of flexibility when it comes to managing their own personal idea of privacy.

You can tune Facebook's privacy settings to whatever you want. So you don't need to share everything to everybody.

But if you do, be aware that occasionally they get reset to the defaults, just for shits'n'giggles. As happened to my partner this morning. Facebook simply cannot be trusted with anything of consequence - it's up to you to decide what that is, and whether it matters that you're telling everyone you know, plus all their friends, plus having that information sold to any company that wants it badly enough.

That would possibly be true if people had no other way to socialize. Just because Facebook exists doesn't mean that older ways of communicating have all died; the real world is still real, and you can talk in it.

People may have other ways to socialize, but there are plenty of social groups where Facebook has become the way that a lot of social activity is coordinated, and where standing outside means you simply won't find out about a lot of thing in time.

We are basically under constant surveillance by our peer group and family, just not in an Orwellian sense.

It's incredibly common for people to grow up afraid to say many things, having massive restrictions on some parts of their personalities due to those kinds of pressures.

We see it most obviously with the single big things such as "I can't tell my religious family I'm an atheist" or "I got ostracised for dating someone from another culture" or whatever, but it's almost certainly going on for a huge range of smaller personality facets - or ones which were blanked out before they developed.

Who would you be if you'd never had any restrictions on what you could say other than moral ones? If any interest you had, you would have been supported in following up, any comment you made would have been taken seriously and never laughed at, any attempt to better yourself was encouraged not mocked.

Maybe more and more surveillance such as you imagine will actually make it more obvious that others opinions are their largely their own problem and don't affect you all that much, and you should develop more confidence sooner.

sorry I dont understand your last point - can you please rephrase it for me? thank you

I was trying to say that maybe total surveillance would feel less bad than occasional surveillance, since you would be forced to "get used to it" from an early age, and for things where there are no particular consequences other than embarassment, maybe that would be an improvement.

(Yet, that only applies if you assume the oversight is only for spotting criminals and the guides for criminal activity exactly agree with your own, and the system is fair).

Personally as I said before I do not advocate real name policies, but I am for fixing such problems if possible. For example, the illusion that people are perfect is obsolete in this day and age.

>so these venues get empty pleasantries from me, certainly nothing controversial in any way.

Is nobody familiar with the privacy settings? Facebook has lists, G+ has circles. One for family, one for acquaintances, one for close friends, one for business. Guess who gets to see the pictures from the house party and who doesn't?

> Guess who gets to see the pictures from the house party and who doesn't?

Google gets to see all of them. The proper way to compartmentalize is to actually compartmentalize.

> Is nobody familiar with the privacy settings?

I'm not, and neither are you unless you work there. They routinely add new settings with recklessly chosen defaults; there's no way to be confident about may be publicized while we aren't looking.

And yet I'm somehow the only person on the face of the internet that's never had something revealed on FB that I didn't want to.

Either this makes me lucky enough that I should consider playing the lottery, or these concerns are overstated.

Facebook had lists. I was happily using them. Then Facebook added more lists with default names, with no way to delete them. Now I'm never 100% confident I've got everyone in the correct list. Who knows what will happen the next time they update?

Adding new lists somehow made the existing lists you had set up inconsistent? I don't understand.

Facebook pushes the their new lists, while ignoring the old ones. I'm constantly suggested to add people to the new lists, but not to the old ones. I started doing this, not realising the lists were different, as my old lists have the same names as the new ones. The only way to distinguish between them is the new icon. Facebook's list management tools don't make this easy to fix up.

So is facebook meant to be a service for your close friends and family or a broader social network that promotes businesses, news, celebrities; a wider discussion? If it wants to be both, there are only cons. You can't conflate personal relationships with media discussions and advertising. This is why facebook is ultimately a doomed prospect (either socially and/or financially). It's either successful as a true social network, or it's an ad/personal information scam.

Real names policies are questionable but debatable. Asking friends to report friends to some authority reveals utter contempt for the very personal relationships that Facebook supposedly thrives on.

Absolutely. I think that everyone who receives one of these questionnaires should select "I don't want to answer". If the majority answer that it becomes meaningless.

Actually, I think a less harmful solution would be if everyone simply answered "Yes".

The only problem with forcing real names that I've recently encountered are family members who work in prisons. They use a modified name as to make it difficult for an inmate to gain knowledge of them and where they live. Personal and family protection in a way with the ability to still use Facebook to connect with distant friends and family members.

Anyone else run into this instance?

It seems like it would be more sensible for them to use modified names inside the prison.

Of course, they probably don't get to choose what name to use in the prison.

Seems to me that guards using fake names should be a matter of course in prisons.

I think judges have more to fear than prison guards.

I think that both guards and inmates should be assigned fake names in prison, or addressed simply by number, to avoid prison interactions spilling out of the prison and affecting prisoners' families etc. Of course, the danger with this is that abuses within prison would become harder to track and account for.

I going to guess that referring to inmates by numbers would be widely criticized as inhumane by many human rights groups. It would be an uphill battle to keep something like that going.

Inmates are commonly referred to by their number in prison -- as far as the prison system is concerned, they're not 'Leland Highsmith,' they're A319445 -- it's tied to their phone calls, commissary purchases, meal records, medicine records, and health records.

I'm not entirely sure how it works inside, I just know the reason my brother-in-law has a modified name on Facebook. As for the inmates, they obviously all have numbers but any prison guard can look them up in the computer.

Fun fact: Portions of the numbers on an inmate's chest refers to things like the year they entered the prison, what number they are for the year that they entered, what they're in for and either how long or when they get released.

Or a corrupt prison officer who leaks the whole spreadsheet of every fake name : real name.

That's a good example, but there are countless reasons why people cannot safely use their legal names in places like Facebook.

They can elect not to participate, and Facebook can elect to prohibit them.

Neither party really suffers any material damage, but it does frustrate some decent people.

I'd argue that people do suffer material damage by being blocked from using Facebook.

Could you elaborate?

Isolation from friends and family. Like not being able to go to your moms house because her neighbor might try to kill you and her if he discovers she is your mom.

The conclusion "no facebook = severe social isolation" (including being cut off from ones own family) only works under the assumption that basically everyone everywhere forgot how to socialize without "social" and that interaction without facebook is somehow impossible or at least hard. This assumption is maniacally and laughably absurd. I can not even fathom how the planet might look where such a statement might sound reasonable.

Although you're right that it's no impossible, it is much harder. It's like default values on software products. The easier something is, the more people will do it. Lots of things are harder without Facebook access, like accessing photos from a family member.

Being turned down for jobs for not having a Facebook account: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/109ipi/no_faceboo...

Sadly, safety concerns are not a concern of advertisers or the CFO.

I have been on online networks of one kind or another since 1992. I am 100 percent behind the idea that people using their real names (the rule of some networks I have been on) promotes better online community and people taking more responsibility for their personal behavior in the community. That said, I do have some friends who have long established pseudonyms that have most of the good effects of real names, because those friends still try to build up reputation for those pseudonyms. (You'll have to be the judge of how well I'm doing here building up the reputation of "tokenadult," a screen name I brought here from two other online communities where pseudonyms rather than real names are mandatory but changing names is difficult so that reputation still accumulates for each name.)

That said, I refuse to "out" my niece's dog, who has a Facebook profile. It's important to have amusing counterexamples out there so that people don't invest too much trust in Facebook. In the last week or so a Hacker News participant (I don't know his real name [smile]) suggested that Facebook could monetize by being an online payments platform. For consumer-to-business transactions, I don't trust Facebook as a payment platform because its engineers have the attitude "Don't be afraid to break things," which just doesn't appeal to me for a network that handles my financial data. For user-to-user transactions, I also don't trust Facebook because I don't trust the users unless I know them in person--my Facebook community is enjoyable because it really consists of people whose real identity I know, and who know me. If I want to do business with strangers, I occasionally do that through Amazon Marketplace, but that is because Amazon has built up its own reputation for standing behind transactions there.

AFTER EDIT: Several comments in this thread are along the lines of

It's not hard to imagine a near future, if not a present, in which a person's identity is entirely evaluated, shaped, and determined by a monolith such as facebook.

But most people in the world still are largely stuck with the reputations distorted for them, before they can develop their reputations for themselves, by their family or their classmates in some small community. Facebook is LESS of a "monolith," because it is made up of hundreds of millions of users, than any small town anywhere. A lot of people find it liberating to find online communities based on shared intellectual interests (Hacker News works for this too, of course) rather than just being stuck with their current group of in-person acquaintances.

> Facebook is LESS of a "monolith," because it is made up of hundreds of millions of users, than any small town anywhere.

You inadvertently bring up a strong counter argument.

Suppose, in your small town, you are outed (rightly or wrongly) as <insert marginalized subgroup here>, and ostracized. Normally, after much introspection and reflection, you or your family could decide to move away, if the social effects were severe enough and unfixable.

With a real name policy and a permanent archive of the psychodrama, you cannot start over elsewhere without all of it following along with you, ripe for the next group of maladjusted simpletons to harrass you with. Not everyone can move to tolerant cultures, not all marginalized groups can find reliably-safe new places.

I think this also speaks volumes about the "dangers" of using large general-purpose social networks.

Think about it for a second: if I'm ostracized (using my name or a pseudonym, it doesn't matter) from a `Club 3.14: Raspberry Pi Hackers` message board; I can find other message boards with a surplus of R-Pi hackers.

If I say something stupid on Facebook... where am I supposed to go in order to replace Facebook?

The issue with Google+ is (<-- replace with your favorite defunct social network) that it's a graveyard. (I say that facetiously; I actually use G+ and quite like the service. That being said, I can't deny that it is missing 95% or so of my Facebook friends.)

So the issue here isn't so much the ability to have pseudonyms, IMHO.

The issue is that Facebook is quickly becoming a "monolith", and that fact _combined_ with an inability to escape your ostracism via "moving" your online presence to a new identity is where the problem lies.

I feel the real problem is that Facebook is all-encompassing. They want to be _the_ platform for online community.

Therein lies the problem, if you're only allowed _one true identity_ on their platform, your baggage follows you to every sub-community _on that platform._

> I am 100 percent behind the idea that people using their real names (the rule of some networks I have been on) promotes better online community

That's funny, since hard evidence for that idea is pretty thin on the ground. I really don't think it is a good idea given that it can do a lot of harm http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22Rea...

> That said, I do have some friends who have long established pseudonyms that have most of the good effects of real names

Which good effects of real names do long established pseudonyms lack?

Also, would you be happy to put your real name on your reply here?

taking more responsibility for their personal behavior in the community

Non-anonymous commentary is generally skippable. Attach your name to something, and you have to be careful to the point of sterility.

Alternatively, anonymous commentary quite often yields shallow/knee-jerk comments and trolling. As tokenadult pointed out though, there is a difference between real name and an online handle with a reputation associated with it. People not uding real names have to build / maintain their reputation just the same, but throwing a handle away and "starting over" is obviously easier than doing the same with a real identity. Not sure if that is good or bad, likely a mix of both. Though Facebook has clear ulterior motives other than "civil discourse enforced through 'real world' reputation tarnishment".

reputation with whom

the world is not just. there is no such thing as a "good" reputation, only popularity.

you are saying that if you are popular you won't need to defend yourself with anonymity, which is kind of like the point

Hey folks - I work on the Site Integrity team at Facebook. We work to keep people safe from scams, spam, fake accounts, and having their account taken over.

We're always looking for ways to better understand how people represent themselves online and improve the design of our service. We look at the results of this kind of experiment in aggregate - the responses doesn't have any impact on the user account or that of their friends.

1) The idea of people giving out information about their friends to an anonymous entity such as Facebook is going to result in a considerable increase in paranoia no matter what you say.

2) The claim that real identities result in either greater safety or greater civility has been debunked here quite a number of times here. After all, probably the largest number of people who are using pseudonyms are doing so out of a desire for safety.

Then why the other three options? Why not just "I don't know this person" or "Ignore this message"?

That doesn't mean what you're doing is not inherently sociopathic.

I sure hope your response is authentic. You might not use that information now, but you may potentially at a later date, i.e., warn a user to use their real name and if not you're account is suspended until doing so. Facebook's in the information business and now that you're a publicly traded company, the higher ups want to look good on the balance sheet and search is your organizations next step. This seems like a slippery slope to me.

The best way people, especially kids, have to protect their future selves from things they write or post today, is by assuming a fake identity.

Kids are quickly learning that everything on the Internet is forever. Take the option of hiding their identity away from them, and I think they will move to a service that will allow this.

My kids are sick of me harping on this. But now they use different pseudonyms for every site, including Facebook, and I'm proud of them for it.

They rarely use Facebook anymore; it seems it's becoming boring.

Why are you deleting accounts of people who cosplay? It's mostly kids having fun playing dress up and taking photos and making plans to appear at conventions, all while calling themselves by anime-inspired names. When these kids lose their accounts, they also lose their connections with each other, connections which they spent a great deal of time and energy cultivating, and what's even worse is that it's difficult for them to reconnect, after creating new accounts with their real names, because they know each other only by their cosplay names. It's a nonsensical policy, which does little-to-nothing to keep these kids safe, and which rather effectively kills existing social circles.

example: http://japanimeclarinetist.deviantart.com/journal/They-delet...

article: http://dailydot.com/news/facebook-purges-cosplay-accounts (Facebook Purges Cosplay Accounts)(08/21/12)

Right. You're absolutely NOT trying to put a name on everyone to make more money. Absolutely not. It's all for the users, as one would expect from such a pro-bono, for-the-greater-good company such as Facebook.

As someone who had the promise of Google Plus completely ruined when the nymwars chased my largely-pseudonymous-on-the-Internet circles away, I plan to be either consistently lying when presented with this "is this their real name?" dialogue box, or simply rolling a die to choose my answer.

Presumably you are storing the individual submissions, even if the reports generated are aggregate.

What safeguards are in place to make sure that the information is not used in the future to target accounts for suspension?

     [mkjones]
     - I do not know this person.
     - I do not think this is a real name

But do you store the data individually?

If, for example, you store that my profile was identified as real by a friend of mine, then you're essentially collecting personal data on me.

And I doubt that I would be informed about this fact, or be able to see it somewhere. (This assumption being based on the previous and ongoing mishandling / incomplete answering of requests under EU data protection law.)

I don't want to be Crazy Internet Conspiracy Guy here, but I note this is a somewhat carefully worded response. mkjones did not say "We don't store the individual answers anywhere", "your answers are not recorded" or anything similar. Nor did he/she say "the data is only stored in aggregate", but "we look at the results in aggregate", which is a rather significant difference.

However, there's every chance that's just a case of bad wording. So, mkjones - can you confirm that the option the user selects on the dialog box we're discussing here ("Is this your friend's real name?") is not stored, saved or recorded in any way that could subsequently be connected to that user's account?

First, shame on you and yours for asking people to rat on other people. Do you understand what could happen in the real world?

Next, I am a little sick of this "real name" business since Facebook and Google get it so wrong. I will give a couple of examples.

I grew up on a reservation in the US. Several of my friends have been given "Indian Names". Is that their real name or would Google / Facebook say that it's not valid because it is not a state issued ID. Is Google/Facebook combing the cultures of the world to pick out what they believe?

I do sysadmin work. Several people are named the same as parents / grandparents, but are known by other names. I use what people call them for their accounts not their official id. I would say I am right and have a better grasp of what their name is then someone who only uses official ID. Heck, would Google/Facebook take a tribal ID?

The cases of people trying to get away from a bad situation where Facebook / Google basically provides a target, not a safe place, are too numerous to iterate.

It isn't about the people using Facebook / Google. It is about your customers: the advertisers.

> We work to keep people safe...

Real name is unsafe, outside of Facebook's control. The unsafe aspects include bullying and robbery, e.g.

If the responses are actually anonymous (as they claim, but I don't believe it's actually anonymous in their database), it would be easy to generate enough false positives to spoil the system.

There is a 0% chance that Facebook does not record your response to every request.

If it turns out it isn't anonymous and they are shutting down accounts over it, can there be any repercussions for them lying like that or is it just "unethical"?

Funny - it says they won't take any action over it. Do I trust that?

makes you wonder why they are asking then.

I personally had my name in Russian letters, so that it resembled my real name with symbols. Facebook got aware of this and blocked my account and forced me to upload a scan of my ID card. After a heavy dispute because I was not willing to hand out my ID to a foreign company (and various other reasons) I gave into their request, uploading a fake ID of me with fake data.

Every time fb does something scummy, and people act surprised, I am surprised. They've proven themselves to have the morals of a used car dealer. Why would you trust them, or be surprised when they act untrustworthy?

"Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." No?

Used car dealers presumably have that reputation because they still manage to fool people, otherwise the immoral ones would quickly go out of business. Part of the skill is to manage to convince people that things are different with you and them.

I don't really think the connection that he tries to make between Facebook's real name policy and the need for anonymity for whistleblowers/oppressed regimes is really fair. Facebook wants to be a social portal were you feed your desire to be seen and make stupid updates about your life and contact your friends when you go out with them. I don't really think that Facebooks policies are crucial for whistleblowers :D

What should be done? Stop using Facebook. Everybody has e-mail, it's quick enough, it's fun and people tend to think before they send off an e-mail (something i miss with instant messaging).

The niveau on facebook has been hiding under the table since i don't know when and that is true for their policies and for how people use facebook, so instead of trying to force the niveau to come out, how about giving up already?

If Facebook is such an important part of one's life that even while being unhappy with their policies you can't give up on the service, then that's just sad....

Rumors on Reddit that employers are asking for a Facebook presence pre-interview. What then?

Then use it for exactly that. The point is if i use facebook for having a profile cause my employer wants me too then i can afford to (mostly) ignore facebooks policies on privacy or real name policies, because i want my real name to begin with and don't give them every crappy detail about my life... or explain to your employer why you don't use facebook and see how he reacts! I read once about some security expert who had to deny connections to hackers as part of his job and then instead of doing that explained to his employer that he is part of the hacker community and is speaking at hacker conferences etc and what he considers to be a hacker etc and it turned out to not be such a big deal as he thought in the beginning....

I do not believe that for one second. As someone who has interviewed hundreds of candidates, there are many things a prospective employer really, really does not want to know. Religion, sexual orientation, veteran status, the list goes on... A company that finds out these things and rejects a candidate for any reason, even a legitimate technical one, is begging to be sued.

That is what LinkedIn is for...

The laws about these things are there because at least some employers do want to find out these things. Some of those employers would love a more innocent-sounding way of finding out those details exactly to reduce the chance that the candidate will think they have grounds to sue.

This could be a good way to hasten the departure of users from Facebook. If you get the accounts of all your friends using fake names suspended, they might be more willing to move to Google Plus.

It might hasten the departure of users from Facebook, but if they're leaving because of facebook's real name policy, I doubt they're going to find G+ more attractive.

FTA: Indeed, under the terms of the Snoopers Charter, it wouldn’t just be Facebook who could access this kind of information: the authorities could potentially set up a filter to gather data on people who don’t confirm the names of their friends

Yes, and I could potentially sprout wings from my ass and become a travel carrier. The rest of this article is nothing more than a ton of thinly veiled fallacies, slippery slope and appeal to emotion the least of the two.

Is the feature dodgy? Perhaps.

Did you agree to the rules of the party before joining? Yup. One of which is: "Use your real name".

Should you be surprised if you get called out on it? Nope.

You're more than welcome to protest unfair policies (whether saying you'll put truthful info on a form is "unfair" is left as an exercise to the reader), but much like civil disobedience, you have no right to complain once you are found to be breaking the law/policy and are punished for it.

This is a website. Let's try to keep perspective here.

> Did you agree to the rules of the party before joining? Yup. One of which is: "Use your real name".

I signed up for Facebook in September 2004. I most certainly did not agree to that rule, because as far as I can recall, no such rule existed at the time. You may make the argument that my continued use of their service implies assent to any subsequent modifications to their terms of service, but that's an issue that would need to be litigated.

Unless you had some agreement in place that the original tos was perpetual, I don't think you can do much about updated terms.

What's a "real" name? The one on record with the government? What if no on calls me by that name?

Agree with your larger point, but your tone is a bit argumentative.

Also, civil disobedience doesn't mean what you think it means:

  much like civil disobedience, you have no right to complain once
  you are found to be breaking the law/policy and are punished for it

Civil disobedience is all about breaking the law in order to maintain the right to complain. "Under a government which imprisons unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison." http://www.gutenberg.org/files/71/71-h/71-h.htm

It's argumentative because poorly constructed appeals to emotion usually have the opposite effect on me.

Anyways, by the comment about civil disobedience, I meant that, if you willfully break a law you feel to be unjust, what comes with that is a reasonable expectation of the punishment for breaking that law to be meted out.

I see it kind of like a button that says "By clicking okay, you will be punched in the face". The people that click okay don't have any reason to complain, they were warned.

Replace "punched in the face" with any possibly negative thing. If you are told that X will happen if you do Y, and you do Y, and X happens, don't complain.

You'd make a great henchman in a totalitarian regime.

Above: An example of a weak appeal to emotion

You'd make a great persecutor in a totally liberal regime.

Honestly, I don't think that. But could you try to focus on the argument and not the person? Your ad hominem attack has contributed nothing - just like my first sentence contributed nothing either!

It came out as an ad hominem but what I said does attack the argument. Karunamon puts the rule of law above all other considerations, and that's a bad position to hold. People better their lives every day by breaking laws, and when laws at senseless and when your action is not hurting anyone, then breaking the law should be considered as a real option.

Let's take illegal immigration. Yes, there is legal immigration, but it's limited by draconian max quotas and a preference for the educated. But the US is still a great opportunity to find decent jobs and help support one's family. I feel for illegal immigrants in our country and if I had any way of supporting them (beyond just voting for pro-illegal and amnestey measures) I would! And I want to make the law and government as toothless as possible against.

Millions of people break drug laws. For some, it is damage themselves and the people around them, and encouraging them to be more dependent on the state and to resort to thieving.

But illegal drugs help a lot of people. There are possibly some various benefits for cannabis, and at the least it acts as a pain reliever. MDMA helps treat PTSD and potential has use in couples therapy. Mescaline, LSD, mushrooms and ketamine provide satisfaction to spiritual soul-searchers. Adderal and other amphetamines boost some forms of productivity.

Our founding fathers disliked taxes and were essentially smugglers and tax evaders. They had moral arguments against the law placed on them-- Karunamon would have them following the law anyway.

Karunamon has no empathy for the human reality of law breaking. If our political process does not find it convenient to de-criminalize actions that help humanity, how can we respect that law?

And so, I stand by my statement that Karunamon would make a great henchman. I can imagine him now, shouting at the criminals: "UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES AND MORALITY ARE OF NO CONCERN, THE LAW IS THE LAW."

This comic sums up how I feel about the law: http://asofterworld.com/index.php?id=469

I am using many appeals to emotion, but I've still demonstrated that: following the law blindly is not a good strategy for the improvement of humanity.

>Karunamon puts the rule of law above all other considerations

What the everloving hell is that supposed to mean? Don't fucking join the service if the rules bother you - that too is an option.

It seems a lot of people want to have their cake and eat it too though, It takes some level of arrogance to say "Screw it all, I'm going to do it this way, ToS be damned", then get caught breaking those rules and suspended or somesuch, and then complain that the suspension happened.

Do not join $service if the rules of $service are offputting to you. That applies to every service ever made on the internet or real life. It applies to Facebook, G+, App, Twitter, a church, a discount club, or quite literally any other service.

Furthermore, if you join $service, and your account has action taken against it for breaking the rules you agreed to and said you would follow, you shouldn't complain. You did lie about the whole "I will follow the rules" thing.

Rule of law is a different matter than the terms of service for a web app. Breaking laws in real life has a great deal more negative consequences that getting your Facebook account deleted. One of these things is relatively minor, one is not.

"Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion." Oscar Wilde

> You'd make a great henchman in a totalitarian regime.

I'm not sure whether this counts as a Godwin

Unfortunately many people don't react on reason without an emotional component. "X really happened" can help there.

That fits the Facebook situation rather well: "Oh, they want you to give a real name snicker Seymour Butz will do". There used to be an expectation that such rules aren't really enforced.

Now they are, and it's notable that Facebook picks a method (reporting on your friends) with a certain tradition.

As a side note: That approach and "don't complain" go well together: said tradition didn't favor free speech, either.

This is not a website. This is a massive web of communications, past and present. This is not a wire tap without a permit, this is a permanent archive of every sniffle. Guys with warrants and/or guns get what they want, and Facebook has what they want.

Does Mark Zuckerburg strike you as the kind of fella who will go to prison to fight for your privacy?

This is not a wire tap without a permit, this is a permanent archive of every sniffle

Uploaded willfully by the people concerned. What is hard to understand about "don't put something online you don't want others to have access to"? (Values of "others" change with the service involved.. but you'd have to be frankly, moronic to put something on a social network site and not expect it to be accessible to others, as well as authorities if they come knocking)

Well, that's a very simplistic view, but I'm not up for the challenge presently. If all Facebook users were legal adults, you'd be on less shaky ground.

However, I was thinking more about private messages and chats, tracking cookies, etc. Also pernicious: being tagged in other people's content.

Tying a real name to private data can have repercussions, even for responsible law abiding adults -- especially when the data is archived indefinitely, in one convenient central location.

What's so hard about it is that few individual things feel like "something you don't want others to have access to", yet in aggregate the individual things and the connections between them can become such.

On top of that you are putting the responsibility on people to "think of every bad use of this information which could happen, and if you are still happy, then post it". Which is an impossible task. Much better to enumerate what can happen, what it will be used for, which can be made a limited set of things, and then if you are happy with that, post it.

What is a "real" name vs. one that is not "real"?

Did you mean legal name? And if so does that exclude legal aliases?

What about Madonna, is that her 'real' name?

Um, yeah.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madonna_Louise_Ciccone

Are you called "fleitz" in real life? No? That is not your real name then. It is a pseudonym.

This isn't rocket science.

What if people call me "T-Bone"?

The divide between "real name" and "pseudonym" is very fuzzy as soon as you step outside the "engineer box" and look at real world data. Many people in this world go by names that you would never expect to see on their driver license or passport, both of which seem to be things Facebook asks users provide to "prove" their "real names".

And lets not even get started on the fact that facebook is in fact part of real life. If people call you a certain name on facebook, they are calling you that in real life. Different names for different social situation is far from unheard of. Which is "real"?

What's not real about Facebook?

My ex goes under 3 first names. Her legal name is an African name that few people in the UK can pronounce. Two largely non-overlapping sets of her friends call her by two different English names that are "close" to her legal name. Only some people in her family usually call her by her legal name.

Which is her "real" name? Most people use one of the English names. She responds the same to all three.

If she had to use her legal name everywhere, most of her friends would be unable to find her, as few of them even know her legal name. What makes her legal name more or less "real" than the others (which are used more, by more people)? Why?

Your legal name is Jonathon but friends know you as Johnny. Should you be reported to facebook HQ for not using your legal name?

What if your nickname distorts its origins further, such as "J", which easily turns into "Jay". Have we know left the realm of Real Names?

What if you prefer to go by a middle name? Or an ethnic nickname which doesn't have an obvious relationship to the original (i.e. Alexei -> Alyosha). What about the common practice of adopting a "Western" name for people who native names translate poorly into English?

Is a facebook employee qualified to judge whether you're using your real name?

Well a lot of people call me by my playa name so I guess I can use that on Facebook.

Apparently the name "Madonna" is real enough for Facebook (though they probably have exemptions for famous people).

https://www.facebook.com/madonna

That is a page, not a timeline :)

"The rest of this article is nothing more than a ton of thinly veiled fallacies, slippery slope and appeal to emotion the least of the two."

I agree, and it's a pity that's the route chosen, because the point about what kind of atmosphere it creates is enough to carry the argument. It isn't hard to emotionally read that dialog as "Please select who you are more loyal to: A. Facebook B. Your friend C. I just can't decide! D. Why are you asking‽"

I can't imagine that in the longterm this is a gain for Facebook, even if they somehow squeeze a short-term bounce out of this.

(Though I can't help but feel that both the advertisers and Facebook may be overestimating the value of "really" reaching the real "people" they think they are. So very, very much behaviour information leaks into every minute of interaction with Facebook regardless of whether you are in your "real" account or not that I bet the ad algorithms still mostly work even on the "fake" accounts.)

The problem is that it has turned into more than a website now where people get denied jobs for not being a member (see my previous comment in this thread). This is wrong.

I'm a rational anarchist. Make all the laws (and policies) you want, and I'll follow the ones I like.

So, just to confirm here - you don't think there's anything wrong with your friends being encouraged to anonymously betray your trust by giving information to a third party that may cause you social and emotional harm?

(And records of whether that information was given subsequently being recorded.)

The article's points on "snitching" seemed sound to me. Encouraging people to inform on one another and betray trust is generally societally harmful.

They'd love a database full of confirmed names, which advertisers could buy into. With Facebook the '900m users' are all real people not just accounts created.

Oh excellent. I can help those poor neutered friends stuck as half of user like "Susan N Steve Smith" because their significant other created that account.

Where is the X button? "leave me alone" ? i'm deleting my account right at this moment i had enough

If nothing else this might help put the kibosh on the intensely annoying way Facebook users tend to use cutesy fake names so that you don't know who the hell they are when they comment on your posts.

Or you could unfriend people you don't like to hang out with on Facebook.

I'd rather have Facebook fix the problem.

There's a reason why people do not want to use their real names. Currently Facebook does not keep up with such promises. What has changed to make me have a leap of faith on Facebook?

I always wondered why google+ got all that bad press and facebook didn't for real names

I'm guessing it's because a culture and expectation of using real names had already been established on Facebook by the time the masses arrived, while privacy-conscious techies were the first G+ users.

Time to call it: Jumped the shark.

Is there anything more "anti-social" they could have done? Betrayal. Or... maybe they're just trying to make it more realistically social?

Seriously, it's another instance of not listening to your users. Strong-arming only works as long as you are strong...

Everyone has people they don't like and vice versa. People that know your real name. I suspect it wouldn't too hard to crowdsource "identification" to the audience of Facebook so that they can monetize their idiotic platform better.

I was going to say that I can't believe Salman Rushdie stooped so low as to mail a copy of his passport to some website.

But it's harder to believe that he had a facebook account in the first place.

why? the man loves attention, haven't you seen his twitter account: http://twitter.com/SalmanRushdie

Wrot wrow, the gig might be up for myself. Hopefully none of my HS friends will out me. If so, I'm going to have to close my account.

Not that I use a lot anyways. . .

Maybe it's a kind of Milgram experiment.

This is really bad.

A lot of educators aren't allowed using their real names on social networks.

We're setting a really bad precedent for the future here and these sorts of things need to stop now. Unfortunately, people don't seem to want to fight this.

Now we have people getting turned down for jobs because they DON'T have a facebook account[1]. What's next?

1. http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/109ipi/no_faceboo...

No social media presence? Clearly you are a psychopathic recluse unfit for normal work.

We only want employees who do normal things, like obsessively refreshing a particular website all day long.

Brilliant!

Haha I love it. This stuff really is disturbing though - society is getting worse as a result.

Facebook is possibly the most dangerous social construct created. And no, it's not because privacy or information are too sacred to be utilized, but because personal identity is so easily perverted with market, institutional, societal interests.

It's not hard to imagine a near future, if not a present, in which a person's identity is entirely evaluated, shaped, and determined by a monolith such as facebook.

> It's not hard to imagine a near future, if not a present, in which a person's identity is entirely evaluated, shaped, and determined by a monolith such as facebook.

I don't think this is entirely correct. I think that facebook is better described as a catalyst for those who would do the evaluating, shaping, etc.

The question then is how long before someone creates a business around "staging" your Facebook profile to fit certain profiles.

That should be addressed by better employee rights in the USA

I work with Matt at Facebook and wanted to reaffirm his comment below. This survey was a small anonymous test designed to improve the systems we use to keep the site safe for everyone. And, we have already confirmed that the responses collected will have zero impact on people's accounts.

We believe a real name culture is core to our mission of making the world more connected and helps us to provide the best possible experience for our users.

PS One thing I did want to note is that we offer Pages where the individual admins are not listed and have been effectively used in the past by a wide variety of groups, movements, brands, and individuals.

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