
Global coalition to Facebook: “Authentic names” are dangerous for your users - DiabloD3
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/10/global-coalition-facebook-authentic-names-are-authentically-dangerous-your-users
======
morgante
I wish the EFF and others who are against using real names would at least
acknowledge the drawbacks of pseudonyms and the proliferation of fake accounts
and fake names which comes with them.

The real name policy has huge benefits. I'm not constantly bombarded by fake
friend requests like I am on Twitter, Skype, or any other platform which
allows random usernames. Even more importantly, I can easily find the people
in my life without having to go through an awkward song and dance. If I'm
working on a project with someone, I can immediately find them and message
them without worrying that it's some random imposter or some such.

Facebook is a platform designed for digitizing your real world relationships,
not for accumulating thousands of "followers." There's a reason they limit you
to 5,000 friends. People who are trying to disconnect their Facebook identity
from their real world identity are not using Facebook the way it's meant to be
used and should probably just leave it.

That being said, Facebook could definitely do a better job of making it easier
for people to prove that a name is their everyday name even when it's not
their legal name.

I fully expect to lose a lot of karma over this comment, but I'd love to hear
an _argument_ over why access to Facebook is a right together with your down
vote.

~~~
gurkendoktor
> People who are trying to disconnect their Facebook identity from their real
> world identity are not using Facebook the way it's meant to be used and
> should probably just leave it.

Some people use their pseudonym (usually a nick name) in real life as well,
except for work, and I think separating work from Facebook is _exactly_ how
Facebook should be used. (There's always LinkedIn for work...)

Another thing I see a lot in Germany are (heavily) abbreviated names, so that
all your friends know who you are in their stream, but stalkers/your boss
cannot find you as easily. Tellingly, my female FB friends are _much_ more
likely to obfuscate their names (and get blocked for it).

> I'd love to hear an argument over why access to Facebook is a right together
> with your down vote.

Complaining about bad policies is how public discourse works, no matter if one
has a right to better policies or not.

~~~
Swizec
> Tellingly, my female FB friends are much more likely to obfuscate their
> names (and get blocked for it).

This is the part of Facebook that's really creepy. As a guy who used to date
around a lot, I was surprised by how well the "find user" function works.

You connect with someone on Tinder, and meet up in real life. You have no
friends in common, no digital connection other than a week-old Tinder
conversation consisting of 5 messages. Neither of you checks-in to the
restaurant you met up at.

But when you type the woman's first name into Facebook (you don't know her
last name), she will be the first suggested result.

I don't know how they do it. But they do it. I'm assuming geo-tracking of
phones and noticing that you spent X hours together the previous night.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _I don 't know how they do it. But they do it. I'm assuming geo-tracking of
> phones and noticing that you spent X hours together the previous night._

My boss and I were wondering the same thing after spending few days at
client's site in another country, after which Facebook suggested the client as
a friend to my boss, even though they never interacted electronically by means
other than company e-mail. We thought about geo-tracking, but then concluded
that it's more likely Facebook must have identified both of them were
connecting to the same Wi-Fi network at the same time.

~~~
Swizec
Somehow the Wi-Fi network theory sounds even creepier than geo-tracking.

Also in my example, I didn't usually connect to any Wi-Fi because I have LTE.
But of course I don't turn off wi-fi when I leave the house so my phone still
does network discovery.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Does it now? By Wi-Fi tracking I'm thinking of SSID matching (which are public
information), not pinging devices inside a single network.

Your data point about on-but-not-connected Wi-Fi supports both geotracking and
SSID tracking. We need more data!

~~~
techdragon
Facebook harvests a mountain of data about you when you use the new Messenger
app. I swear the only purpose it has as a separate app is to be far worse than
they think they can get away with the main Facebook app being.

It's probably from the messenger data that they correlated your proximity.

------
dredmorbius
One of the best commentaries I've seen on the matter of "authentic" or "real"
names policies comes from Yonatan Zunger, chief architect of Google's Google+
social network.

I've had plenty of disagreement with Google and Yonatan over many aspects of
G+, and have given both the company and him much grief on multiple counts,
including Real Names (Google's varient of Facebook's policy), though I'll also
note that Yonatan's generally heard me out quite patiently. But his comments
strike me as wise and hard-won, painful knowledge:

[https://plus.google.com/+YonatanZunger/posts/WegYVNkZQqq](https://plus.google.com/+YonatanZunger/posts/WegYVNkZQqq)

 _In practice, the forced revelation of information makes individual privilege
and power more important. When everyone has to play with their cards on the
table, so to speak, then people who feel like they can be themselves without
consequence do so freely -- these generally being people with support groups
of like-minded people, and who are neither economically nor physically
vulnerable. People who are more vulnerable to consequences use concealment as
a method of protection: it makes it possible to speak freely about
controversial subjects, or even about any subjects, without fear of
harassment._

That's quite an evolution of opinion. I respect Yonatan deeply for both
conceiving of, and publicly stating it.

~~~
soft_dev_person
Not to trivialize his opinion, but I always thought it was a wide spread
notion that not allowing anonymity will lead to only "politically correct" or
"harmless" opinions to surface.

I made the same argument when one of the Norwegian newspapers I somewhat read
regularly (online) started requiring full names in the comments sections. The
comments sections are now completely boring and predictable, and any really
important but sensitive issues that would really need a minority voice in the
debate are just not debated at all.

At least not on a civil level. There are always those who blurt out anything
even under their full name (although possibly fake), but these tend to be the
same people who are not really able to articulate a sensible and constructive
argument for their case.

Personally I have opinions I would not like to link to my real name, since I
need to work for a living in a place where we have customers and such...

~~~
dredmorbius
The "Facebookification" of public discussion -- steering to safe topics and
views -- _is_ one that's been noted.

There are reasons I use this identity for my own more probing (though not
_most_ provocative) commentary.

------
junto
I use Facebook as a developer using a completely fake but real looking
identity. I have to have a developer account because of my job. Otherwise I
wouldn't touch the site with someone else's bargepole.

Thank you [http://www.fakenamegenerator.com](http://www.fakenamegenerator.com)

If that account gets blocked then I'll just have to create another fake one.

~~~
oniTony
Why not use actual Test Users for development?
[https://developers.facebook.com/docs/apps/test-
users](https://developers.facebook.com/docs/apps/test-users)

~~~
jleehey
I believe you're required to have a real, verified account in order to create
and modify test users, and I think there are certain features that are blocked
for test users.

~~~
nathancahill
More generally, to access and edit app settings.

------
otto
I was recently kicked off of Facebook for lack of an "Authentic Name."
Humorously my name was my legal name.

Getting kicked off of Facebook was the best thing to happen to my productivity
and mood. My only frustration is that there are several people on Facebook I
have no easy method of giving alternative contact info to.

------
1ris
And in fact illegal in Germany and probably a hell lot of other places. I
wonder if that gets enforced anytime soon.

~~~
jawns
I'm sincerely curious ... how is a social network like Facebook, which is
built around connecting you with your real-world friends and acquaintances,
supposed to work if you can't require users to identify themselves in a
meaningful way?

The little "people you may know" widget is really useful, because it shows me
names I recognize from my offline life. If it's just a random stream of
pseudonyms and online handles, there's no way I can find my long-lost friends
and former co-workers and classmates.

~~~
greggman
I know several people online by pseudonyms only. If I wanted to add them on
facebook I'd add their pseudonym. I also know people who don't go by their
real name in real life. I know John's that go by Sean. I know Richard's that
go by Dick. I know another Richard that goes by Greg. I suspect that 95% of
his friends don't know his "real" name is Richard. I also know 2 Cyrils that
go by Rocky and I suspect only their very closest friends and family know
their real names are Cyril the 3rd and Cyril the 4th.

I honestly don't understand why this matters to facebook. In the best case
people make multiple accounts. One for friends and family, one for business,
one for their sexy side, one for their hacker side, whatever. Now facebook
gets to claim 4x the people and advertisers can better target ads to each
account for each situation.

~~~
morgante
> I know several people online by pseudonyms only.

Facebook is explicitly designed to primarily be a platform for "real world"
relationships, not digital connections with strangers. There are plenty of
other places on the web to talk to strangers.

> I know another Richard that goes by Greg.

Then that's the name he can and should use on Facebook. Facebook's policy is
_not_ that you have to use your legal name. It's that you should use the name
you go by in everyday life, not a pseudonym you invented for online
publishing.

~~~
JoshTriplett
> Then that's the name he can and should use on Facebook. Facebook's policy is
> not that you have to use your legal name. It's that you should use the name
> you go by in everyday life, not a pseudonym you invented for online
> publishing.

Your statement contradicts Facebook's actual policies in practice, which in
many cases attempt to mandate the use of a name backed by government-issued
ID.

~~~
morgante
If you read some of the linked documents, they admit that their process isn't
currently perfect and are working on finding better ways of verifying identity
without depending on government IDs.

~~~
30183839
...and in the mean time their current process continues to shut down the
accounts of people who are using their "authentic" names but don't have proper
documentation. It's disingenuous for them to be calling this an "authentic
name" policy when they have no intention of enforcing it as such.

------
pdonis
While I sympathize with the underlying sentiments of this, I have to disagree
with what it actually says. If the EFF were really trying to help users, it
wouldn't be trying to get Facebook to change; it would be trying to get users
to stop using Facebook. The problem is not that FB needs to improve its name
policy; the problem is that we have a single centralized social network for
everybody. What we should have is a way for people to build their own
independent social networks, so that someone who wants to be able to connect
online with friends while avoiding their creepy ex can do so. Why isn't the
EFF pushing for that?

------
kristopolous
It's to decrease the perception of click fraud.

Facebook's real name policies have to do with how people perceive the
plausibility of the numbers reported for their a-la-cart paid advertisement
customers.

This policy doesn't actually decrease fake shell accounts. It's an
intentionally ineffective ceremonious anti-fraud campaign.

Facebook knows that third parties conducting click and follow fraud for paying
advertising customers brings them a lot of money.

They came up with a policy that gives the perception of combating it ...
actually closing real human accounts. However, all the fake bot accounts are
and have always been named like "Jane Doe" and "Bob Smith" ... they remain
untouched.

What's the effect? The paying customer _thinks_ that Facebook is making an
effort to combat fraud but in truth they have every interest in keeping the
fraud around and creating a false perception that things are changing - like
the oil and tobacco companies; like nike and nestle; like fast food - like
every other billion dollar company ever.

You don't amass $30 billion by being an honest Joe.

------
Spooky23
I hate Facebook, but I think they are right about this policy.

If you're a person at risk due to many of the issues described here, you don't
belong on Facebook. If you're a domestic violence victim avoiding a dangerous
person "liking" the wrong thing or somebody's innocent repost can put you in
danger, pseudonym or not.

The transgender situation is similarly tragic, but it's an issue that trans
people run into when presenting ID to buy beer as well. We should get states
to provide some sort of transitional ID or something.

~~~
OldSchoolJohnny
I'm stunned by the defenders of this policy I'm seeing here.

Not singling you out in particular this is for everyone who doesn't seem to
get it due to youth, lack of experience, very privileged life, complete
inability to empathise, I'm not sure what exactly in each case but it's ugly
at times and Hacker News seems to be ground zero for a lot of this stuff.

I suspect like many things I see on here there is a huge lack of life
experience informing opinions.

Luckily on HN you don't have to use your real name so these immature opinions
won't come back to bite you as a well adjust adult with life experience.

~~~
Spooky23
Who are you to judge me?

If you are a domestic violence victim, you need to think about opsec while
your tormentor is walking free. Sorry if that offends you, but preserving you
and your children's life and health is more important than futzing about on
Facebook. For extreme cases, states like New York actually provide state
managed postal mailing addresses to prevent inadvertent disclosure by banks or
other companies. This is a real issue that I take very seriously.

My employment contract features an ethics clause that leaves me personally
vulnerable even in some fairly benign circumstances, so my Facebook page
consists mostly of "happy birthday", pictures of my kids and community events.
Does that suck? Sure, but my career is more valuable to me than Facebook
commenting, and unfortunately I can be subject to the whims of thin skinned
people.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
> preserving you and your children's life and health is more important than
> futzing about on Facebook

Not having Facebook may cut you off from your support network.

------
seiji
Isn't it kinda obvious the long game of facebook is to become the single
globally mandated identity service? Governments will contract with them to
maintain your official citizen ID records. Game over.

~~~
junto
You should read "The Circle". It is basically that and more.

~~~
qznc
I found The Circle entertaining.

As an argument against Facebook (or Google,Amazon,etc) it just sets up a
strawman. Not realistic enough. That politicians can be pressured into 24/7
live streaming is ridiculous. The Circle has no serious opponents, while in
reality there are more powers which would acquire or destroy Facebook if they
attempted something like that.

~~~
seiji
You may be a little oblivious to how Facebook has "like" buttons, which are
also javascript tracking beacons, on basically every site online. Well,
"Facebook" doesn't have them there, the site owners include them willingly,
serving up the privacy of their users in exchange for "engagement." Billions
of tracking beacons spread around the Internet give Facebook a real time
click-by-click bread-cumb trail of almost your entire thought process and
Internet experiential reality (reminder: use uBlock Origin with everything
enabled).

Google has the email of probably over a billion people. Sure, there are
safeguards to prevent employee naughtiness (supposedly there are now, after
years of "lol, i'm a sysadmin and i'll read the email of my ex" abuse), but if
they wanted, they could do a lot of damage and there's nobody capable of
stopping them.

Heck, let's not even include google analytics. Sure, they say there is a
"corporate firewall" between the global analytic record of every web user
alive and the rest of the company, but we just have to trust them.

Trust Google. Trust Facebook. Trust VW. It's only software created by and data
retained by for-profit corporations in constant competition who must meet
growth targets or else the market will punish them. What could go wrong?

(Amazon doesn't have a bird in this fight.)

Old quote (from [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUXh-
GPa5dI&t=36m00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUXh-GPa5dI&t=36m00)):

 _" In some respects, it's pretty clear that we are sleepwalking into
nightmares. Absolutely. And the most distressing thing is how hard that is to
explain to anybody.

The way in which people will give away their personal details in much the way
as in the child history books about colonialism. You had native chieftains who
handed over mineral rights in return from some baubles from some canny
imperialist. All that stuff is happening but it's very hard to explain to
anybody."_

------
personjerry
I've only heard of the issue from the LGBTQ stance, and I'm not very clear
here. But I'm wondering, for these people, why not just legally change your
name?

~~~
kuschku
Take for example Germany: Photocopying your ID is a crime, and changing your
name is impossible (unless you get a court verdict that there is an actual
need for you to change your name).

So Facebook’s Real Name policy forces me to get a court verdict and commit a
crime? Great...

------
smoreilly
You guys should really understand the policy before ripping on it. There are
tons of other ways to have your name verified.
[https://www.facebook.com/help/159096464162185](https://www.facebook.com/help/159096464162185)

~~~
30183839
I think you misunderstand. The only way for me to verify my authentic name as
a transgender individual if I understand the page correctly is for me to go
and take out a magazine subscription (to match with my mail and another non-
matching photo ID). The other identification options are all required to match
my legal name.

------
cwyers
Pseudonymity is a double-edged sword; it enables people to hide from abusers
online, but it also enabled a lot of online abuse (Twitter is rampant with the
stuff, not that Facebook is immune). I don't know which side is right, and I
wish that there was some way to combine the best of both but so far nobody's
struck that balance or even really come close. But if that balance is struck,
I don't think the sort of stridency the EFF is engaging in here is going to be
part of the solution.

------
xacaxulu
TheLastPsychiatrist explains expertly why the whole form of this argument is
wrong in a post questioning Randi Zuckerberg. It's well worth reading,
especially if you are considering the benefits of opting out of Facebook (and
I strongly recommend you jump in, the water's find :)
[http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2014/01/randi_zuckerberg.html](http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2014/01/randi_zuckerberg.html)

------
Kiro
I've supported everything EFF has done so far but this is a really bad idea.
Have people forgotten the chaos of MySpace and other social networks before
Facebook?

------
PhasmaFelis
I wish to God that Google+ had done the right thing on names during their five
minutes of relevance. They might have actually lasted as a viable Facebook
competitor.

~~~
LordKano
Google needed Facebook to have a MySpace moment to open the door but their
insistence on real names, binding all of your accounts (Gmail, Youtube, etc)
to your Google+ account and Google's history of unceremoniously dropping
support for services if they under-perform kept me and millions of others from
going there.

------
rwhitman
There has to be some sort of middle ground, where people who need to mask
their identity for various reasons can be allowed to without tipping the
scales towards platform abuse. This doesn't have to be a black or white issue.

FB simply needs to figure out a fair way to validate identity but allow a user
to use a sanctioned alternate identity. I think this is what the EFF action is
really about

------
steve_taylor
Facebook beat all other social networks because it is the best at connecting
people who already know each other. And its most effective tool to connect
these people is its search functionality whose effectiveness requires that all
its users use their real name. It is unrealistic to expect Facebook to risk
its very existence just because the EFF demands that it do so.

------
warewolf
People just need to stop using Facebook. Join Twitter and be Happy #JackIsBack

"I don't make the rules, I just pick which rules I follow"

------
Slushpuppisan
How do you get blocked? I changed my account to a ridiculous name and I know a
couple of people that have changed their equally ridiculous pseudonyms
multiple times. Maybe they only block you if you have a real-sounding name?

------
strommen
I don't understand why people feel entitled to use Facebook in this way.
Facebook is a place to communicate with your friends and family, not a
publishing platform.

If you want to write anonymously, then get a free account on any number of
other platforms that are designed for anonymous publishing.

------
alansmitheebk
This petition strikes me as painfully naive. It should be obvious to anyone
that Facebook's user data is what makes it a multi-billion dollar company.
That data is worth fuck all if it correlates to superhero names and cat
pictures as opposed to real people.

------
yuhong
I dislike real name policies, but I do want the problems with using real names
to be fixed if possible.

------
curiousjorge
How does EFF get it's funding? I feel like they should be given more credit
for what they are doing.

~~~
aianus
[https://supporters.eff.org/donate](https://supporters.eff.org/donate)

------
vectorjohn
I don't understand why people make anything of "real names" policies. They
just want the users to have real _looking_ names. They don't actually have any
way to force real names. So it's a non-issue.

There's no oppressed person in a police state signing up for Facebook that
reads a EULA and concludes "well, Facebook said I have to reveal my true
identity, I guess that's the way it is."

~~~
acabal
Exactly! I have a similar policy at the community I operate. Members have to
sign up with a real- _sounding_ pen name. I'm very flexible on that too. All
that means is you can't sign up with a pen name like "CRaZzE BlOgGeR". I don't
care if your pen name is your real name or not--it just can't sound like a
dumb made-up internet username. And yet people still email me daily, enraged
that they can't sign up for a professional online community with the pen name
of "BitterDoll SweetBear".

This kind of policy goes a long way towards the perception of professionalism
at any web site. You're probably not going to take a person named "Spazmo
Jones" as seriously as you would "Amy Wong". It's a sort of broken window
theory.

(And yes, all of the examples above are pen names people actually tried to
sign up with!)

~~~
gknoy
> This kind of policy goes a long way towards the perception of
> professionalism at any web site.

Does it, though? Looking at HN usernames, some are clearly names (mine,
yours), and many are probably not (patio11, JupeterMoon, hackuser, on__3, to
use some from the comments of a neighboring thread). I don't think this
detracts at all from the professionalism of the discourse here, nor from the
perception thereof.

Similarly, I wouldn't weigh the professionalism of a hypothetical
StackExchange user differently if their usernames were 'SparkleMermaid',
'ArmadilloRocketeer', or 'Iheartpython' \-- I notice the content of their
writing before I notice their name. Heck, the sandwich-themed name of your
company shouldn't make one pre-judge the communities you've built, or the
perception the work you've done to build them.

Am I that much in the minority that I don't care if your username is your
initials + favorite 3 digit number, your real name, or a reference to your
favorite Star Trek episide? Is this because I grew up in a time when handles
were either assigned-by-name or completely made-up, depending on what system
you had joined? Maybe it's the influence of having been a lurker on Slashdot
and HN, where clever nicknames were commonplace, yet one's choice of nickname
nearly never was the basis for judging value of contributions.

