Help, I’m Trapped in Facebook’s Absurd Pseudonym Purgatory
wired.com
wired.com
I agree with the article's stance on how Facebook enables stalkers to stalk their victims, and the very nature of Facebook makes it easy for them to do that.
If you are at risk of such things, please do not have a Facebook account. With the example of being homosexual in a country where the punishment is death, foreign governments may be able to use Facebook to find you due to any number of security issues that have existed, exist currently, and will exist in the future, so please, just stay off Facebook altogether.
Why can't it be that they can care about both of these things and acknowledge that it's a balance which can shift in either direction depending on the product they're putting out?
It sucks, but it's true. You can argue with the ideological purity of it all you want, but it boils down to the fact that you must choose between purity, and staying in touch. Period.
In my experience there was a phase where that was an issue, but people learned relatively quickly that saying "oh, sorry I didn't invite you, you weren't on Facebook" doesn't go over well, and is really hard to spin as the others fault.
With Whatsapp, they have data (text of conversations) and some metadata (who I'm talking to often) but its much harder to draw inferences from that. I don't see any ads, and my behaviour isn't tracked. With Android M, I'll strip it of all extra permissions like location and microphone, further boosting my privacy.
tldr - Its a lot harder to monetise me on Whatsapp.
Your cellphone constantly broadcasts your location to your carrier and to Facebook and other apps, if you have them installed. If you analyse this data, it is possible to make out where you work, where your home is, where you like to hang out (and with who), and where you take vacations. Further, it is possible to identify a person uniquely from just 4 points of location data if you have a database of everyone's location data. As former NSA general counsel Stewart Baker said, “Metadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody’s life. If you have enough meta data you don’t really need content.”
For more uncomfortable and scary revelations like this, I recommend checking out Data and Goliath by Bruce Schneier.
I just wanted to add another voice saying that this isn't remotely true. I have a large and close-knit circle of friends, who work in technical fields, but Facebook isn't our thing. A few of my friends use Facebook a lot, but many use it rarely, and many don't have an account.
After going on about how stalking and protection from stalkers is important, surely she should be able to realise that protecting the reporter's privacy is important to prevent any sort of retaliation (not saying the author would do this, however it should be a cornerstone of any reporting/flagging policy to keep the flagger/reporter confidential).
Besides, it might not have even been anyone she knows or knows well. 'Nads' is a pretty common slang term for male genitals so I can see why some random person might flag it as a fake name.
Isn't that Facebook's whole argument thought? You should be accountable for your actions in real life by using your real name on facebook? If pseudonyms are against their philosophy, being fully anonymous should be even worse.
And in any event, like it or not, anyone with tos can pretty much establish whatever tos they want within the bounds of the law. But again, I don't see a discrepancy.
On the other hand, as others will say, treat everything you say and do on fb as if it's broadcast and permanent.
It's also not really wide open for abuse either because at most it can happen once to one person, and then their details are on file and any future reports/flagging can be automated away/ignored.
To this day she has an account with her name misspelled.
If you are issued a document and then manipulate that document (especially if you do so with fraudulent intent and then pass it on as authentic), you are committing Urkundenfälschung ("forgery of documents") which can be punished with up to five years of prison or a monetary fine.
This applies to everything from government-issued identification to sick notes. The exact punishment likely depends on the intent and the type of document in question but forging government IDs is almost certainly a crime.
OTOH Facebook would have to obey certain laws if they want to check your ID, especially as they ask you to send you a full unredacted copy. Germany has a law book called the "Personalausweisgesetz" which defines who may ask for ID and how it has to be handled. That's aside from the privacy laws which already define rules for companies that handle or store personally identifiable information.
It's not entirely unlike having a friend show up in a fake police uniform to vouch for you.
There are edge cases like art or educational purposes, but using a fake ID to prove your identity to a third party is definitely fraudulent: you're saying "this authority attests that this is my identity" when the authority in question does nothing of the sort and the document claiming it does is forged.
If you're a threatened person, and yet you still need to be on Facebook...then the time it takes to Photoshop something will be insignificant to the apparent benefits you get from Facebook. For the troll? Not so much...getting to be an asshole is not the strongest incentive to jump through the hoops.
In The UK names are legally fluid. To the police you must tell them "the name by which you are known" not your birth certificate. So I can go to prison with less ID than I can post on Facebook.
I had used my old family name: McNutty and Facebook don't like that. Our family name was changed to Nutty and then Nutt as being Irish was a negative (the Mc) and then Nutty was slang for crazy. But I have gone back to our roots.
So I changed it to an even faker name, similar in tone to Mike Hunt, in order to log in that day. But after I pressed "yes I'm sure" they said "thank you, please note: you will never be able to change it" so I am stuck with a stupid name. Hahaha joke's on them.
You don't have free speech rights in a private venue. If you invite me to dinner at your house and I insult your mother, you have every right to kick me out.
Same reason why the EU can have such strict laws about Google.
The author should just go to the EU, here the author would have a better chance at succeeding.
The idea that one has not rights if one is on property one does not own is absurd.
In 1939, Justice Owen Josephus Roberts stated that "use of the streets and public places has, from ancient times, been a part of the privileges [...] of citizens." Facebook is a public place by all means. Proably even more so than a street.
And so Quora demanded I stop using "David Wildgoose" and insisted I use my real name. Which it is, of course.
Appeals pointing out that animal names were common and giving well known examples like Ryan Gosling and Michael J. Fox got me nowhere and so I told them to delete my account.
Only then did they relent and accept I was using my real name.
EDIT: e.g. jjaredsimpson's downvoted comment would probably not be downvoted if this article was about a "racist" post being removed from facebook.
If you're trying to say that there should be no consequences to expressing awful ideas or opinions, I couldn't disagree more.
I agree that Facebook isn't the government. Facebook can't throw me in jail. But the internet is supposed to be more than that. The promise of the internet was that anyone, no matter how crazy their opinion, would have a relatively equal voice and could publish their opinions using the same tools as thosed used by the powerful. With Facebook's policies, we're going back to the old pre-Internet media landscape, where a small cloistered elite gets to decide whose voice gets amplified and whose fades into silence.
Meet the new media elite, the same as the old media elite.
This is why I don't use Facebook as a primary online presence. I don't give them all my data, and locations, and relationships, and baby pictures, etc.
Author is just making a play at getting special treatment if her whiny article goes viral.
Don't depend on things you don't control.
There are certain services — currently centralised — that are large enough to start to be thought of as utilities. My family, friends, and colleagues are 100% bought in to Facebook. Family reunions, and literally every social event I go to (except weddings) are coordinated via Facebook. Friends and families announce engagements, deaths, and major life events through it. I don't know the email addresses and phone numbers for many of my friends, because it all goes through FB Messenger. I don't live in the same city as many old friends, and I travel a lot, and I know when they're in town and vice versa through FB.
This is not my choice. This is th collective choice made by friends and family. Stepping away from Facebook would mean my in-person social life would significantly diminish. I understand that some people's lives don't work that way, or they have fifteen friends from high school and three family members who are the only people they coordinate with regularly. Family alone accounts for 50 connections for me, and people I see in person at least once a month another 200.
There comes a point where we figure out that Facebook and Twitter are monopoly utilities, and need regulation as such. I can't sever my ties with Facebook in any meaningful way, and it seems odd that they should be able to do the same to me; my water provider can't cut me off, and my electricity provider can't either without legal recourse — that Facebook can seems odd.
But how to practice self-control and etc. is tangential to the OP's point. It's a little more complicated than that but I think much of it does boil down to cost and security. The pseudonym policy cuts both ways: it inconveniences those who have good reasons to not want to be easily found. But it also inconveniences those who use anonymity to abuse people. And when you're targeted by such people, you'll appreciate that flag button.
So Facebook has to deal with both kinds of flagging. How does it do that so that it's not just a flimsy process that a troll can dodge, and yet not be overly burdensome to the innocent? Well, the answer is not (well, not yet, anyway), "more machine learning". The OP wants a (more) human decision and FB apparently thinks such a process is too burdensome to scale.
That said, while I don't think the OP is wrong to feel upset or worried, but what she wants can be done without equal unintended negative consequence. A couple things stuck out:
1. When Facebook took one user’s pseudonym away, an abuser showed up to events that person had RSVP’d to before the name was changed
2. Perhaps the most frustrating part of this is that the person who flags your account is afforded more privacy than you are. Even when it’s a matter of personal safety, Facebook will not reveal the accuser.
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1. This is easy: don't RSVP for public events. Or don't do so in such a way that requires Facebook. Though I concede that there may be some events that logistically require Facebook login (through some 3rd party service, like Eventbrite)...I guess, don't go to those? Or privately call the event? Either way, the OP describes a drastic situation in which a stalker is so committed that he/she kept searching for the victim, even after early searches returned no results (because the victim had a pseudonym). OK, besides the possibility that, just maybe, the situation has elevated to the point where police should be involved...the more disturbing part is that the victim thinks a pseudonym is sufficient security-through-obscurity. No. Just no. If you have a pseudonym, and you insist on using a recognizable photo, and just a few of your friends have their profile public enough to show listed friends...then a committed stalker has everything they need to find you.
2. And this is an easier objection to rebut: the OP sees no downside to Facebook exposing the identities of accusers? Really?
[1] http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2014/12/24/inadvertent-alg...