I'm just saying that if they do find out you're not who you pretend to be then your account will be closed. A primary reason for this would be to prevent identity theft (e.g. accounts that appear to be a real person and add a group of people who all work together/study together/went to the same school).
Changing your name on facebook is easy. I hear it is common when high school students apply for college. The site works best with your real social graph, imho, but it is easy to enhance your calm re: privacy
All name changes have to be approved before they go into effect, at least from what I remember.
They actually have human reviewers approve every change. If the name seems fake, they deny the request.
I read an article once about people with fake-sounding but real last names like Batman, etc. having their name change requests denied, and needing to convince Facebook employees of their own identity. They have gone to great lengths to ensure their data on you is tied to a real name.
Yes, they confirm name changes, but I don't think they're very strict about it. Some anecdotal evidence:
My Facebook middle name is Emacs. It used to be 'emacs'.
I have three friends who share a Facebook account, which is probably against the TOS anyway. They change the name rather frequently. Last month they were named Krishanu Coke Zero Austin Steve.
They actually have human reviewers approve every change. If the name seems fake, they deny the request.
I have a number of quite odd and very apparent pseudonyms among my Facebook friends. Most are married women with children, who have some well known reasons to desire more online privacy than young single men. I don't know how those names were approved. My entirely real name on Facebook took a long time to get approved when I initially opened my Facebook account, which I thought was quite silly.
My guess would be that they have a blacklist of well-known celebrity and fictional character names that gets your request flagged for further review. Misspellings might avoid triggering the blacklist.
What would that entail? I don’t think deleting all your submissions or all your comments is something that you should be able to do. That’s very disruptive and, well, HN never pretended that what you submit or write here would not be public. (That, to me, is the big problem with Facebook.)
Someone could, however, find out who is behind your username and that might be a problem. One thing HN maybe should allow you to do in such a case would be to replace all instances of your username next to your submissions or comments with “deleted”. No perfect – others replying to you might mention your username – but close enough.
That's cute but nowhere in the linked article does it accuse facebook of being evil. The article simply provides helpful information about how to go about getting a task done that some may want to have done.
edit: heh, just realized the page in question even has a "like" button. ;)
