
Facebook's real-name-only approach is non-negotiable - davewiner
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/08/faceboo_real_names/
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gyardley
Play a social game on Facebook - any of the ones that grant you additional
advantages for inviting your friends. (In other words, 100% of the successful
ones.) There's _so_ many obviously fake, for-games-only accounts loaded up
with completely unconnected for-games-only 'friends'.

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

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

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

~~~
freakwit
_Aren't these accounts precisely what generate Facebook's revenue?_

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

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

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

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

So I don't really see an issue here.

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

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

~~~
jrockway
It is an American passport.

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

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

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

I don't know about the US, but I made a series of Freedom of Information
requests in the UK to find the answer to exactly this issue there, and was
somewhat surprised to find that (in Northern Ireland at least) supposedly
_any_ Unicode character is valid: [http://nothing.tmtm.com/2008/11/irene-and-
irene-and-%D0%B0%D...](http://nothing.tmtm.com/2008/11/irene-and-irene-
and-%D0%B0%D0%BD%D1%8F-and-%E5%AE%89%E5%A8%9C/)

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

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

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

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m0nastic
When my girlfriend made a Facebook account about a year ago, I was curious to
see how this would unfold.

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

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

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

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

~~~
m0nastic
I think she originally adopted it when she was dancing (which is pretty
common), and is pretty security conscious (paranoid) in general, so she kept
using it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

