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Comment by snowwrestler | Hacker News Reader

When you want companies to change their behavior, it's not fair to forever judge them by the same set if historical facts.

Zuckerberg used to say "real name for eveything." Later he said he could see good reasons to remain anonymous online sometimes. And this "anonymous login" feature sounds great.

Meanwhile Google is forcing everyone into creating Google Plus pages, real name usage on YouTube, lining all services into one, etc.

Look at the arc of their actions--the trend. I think Arrington got this one right. Facebook is improving their treatment of privacy as Google is getting worse.

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> it's not fair to forever judge them by the same set if historical facts

Disagree. The spots on the leopard don't simply change and there's no such thing as "anonymous" to Facebook. That's antithesis to their business. This is purely a PR play.

By the way, we learned from the AOL data breach in 2006 that "anonymous" doesn't actually exist on the internet[1]. So let's not pretend Facebook is trying to do us all a great favor.

1. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/09/technology/09aol.html?page... "A Face Is Exposed for AOL Searcher No. 4417749"

I didn't think that it would change magically either, which is why I asked the question I mentioned in another comment.

It's important to realise to whom you will be anonymous using that feature.

You'd be anonymous to client sites, but Facebook will still know exactly which apps you've signed up for.

eg Facebook knows that you use Grindr even if you signed in 'anonymously'

Your dichotomy is as silly as Arrington's; narrative arcs based on what turns out to not even be based on real life events, but actually the absence of knowledge of events because you weren't paying attention.

As far as I can tell they both still require at least pseudo real names, the absence of which will get you flagged. Facebook just had a thing in the news like 6 months ago where they were demanding government IDs from people to unfreeze their accounts.

Here's the help page:

> We require everyone using Facebook to use their real name and birthday. This way, you always know who you're connecting with. When we discover accounts that look fake or like they’re using fake information, we ask the owner to confirm that they are who they say they are.

https://www.facebook.com/help/385569904840341

I avoid ever using Facebook login, but I think this new anonymous login is great, will be a boon to users (though not offering those users privacy from facebook itself, as others are focusing on) and I'd like to see a lot more of that in Android itself (especially those per-function permissions).

But what exactly has happened to Mark Zuckerberg's opinion on privacy since the early days of Facebook for example is still an important question, especially if trust is to be regained.

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