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Facebook Wants You To Snitch On Friends Not Using Their Real Name
- rsync 14y agoI was going to say that I can't believe Salman Rushdie stooped so low as to mail a copy of his passport to some website. But it's harder to believe that he had a facebook account in the first place.
- unabridged 14y agowhy? the man loves attention, haven't you seen his twitter account: http://twitter.com/SalmanRushdie http://twitter.com/SalmanRushdie
- Karunamon 14y agoFTA: Indeed, under the terms of the Snoopers Charter, it wouldn’t just be Facebook who could access this kind of information: the authorities could potentially set up a filter to gather data on people who don’t confirm the names of their friends Yes, and I could potentially sprout wings from my ass and become a travel carrier. The rest of this article is nothing more than a ton of thinly veiled fallacies, slippery slope and appeal to emotion the least of the two. Is the feature dodgy? Perhaps. Did you agree to the rules of the party before joining? Yup. One of which is: "Use your real name". Should you be surprised if you get called out on it? Nope. You're more than welcome to protest unfair policies (whether saying you'll put truthful info on a form is "unfair" is left as an exercise to the reader), but much like civil disobedience, you have no right to complain once you are found to be breaking the law/policy and are punished for it. This is a website. Let's try to keep perspective here.
- law 14y ago> Did you agree to the rules of the party before joining? Yup. One of which is: "Use your real name". I signed up for Facebook in September 2004. I most certainly did not agree to that rule, because as far as I can recall, no such rule existed at the time. You may make the argument that my continued use of their service implies assent to any subsequent modifications to their terms of service, but that's an issue that would need to be litigated.
- tedunangst 14y agoUnless you had some agreement in place that the original tos was perpetual, I don't think you can do much about updated terms.
- yafujifide 14y agoWhat's a "real" name? The one on record with the government? What if no on calls me by that name?
- asr 14y agoAgree with your larger point, but your tone is a bit argumentative. Also, civil disobedience doesn't mean what you think it means: much like civil disobedience, you have no right to complain once you are found to be breaking the law/policy and are punished for it Civil disobedience is all about breaking the law in order to maintain the right to complain. "Under a government which imprisons unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison." http://www.gutenberg.org/files/71/71-h/71-h.htm http://www.gutenberg.org/files/71/71-h/71-h.htm
- Karunamon 14y agoIt's argumentative because poorly constructed appeals to emotion usually have the opposite effect on me. Anyways, by the comment about civil disobedience, I meant that, if you willfully break a law you feel to be unjust, what comes with that is a reasonable expectation of the punishment for breaking that law to be meted out. I see it kind of like a button that says "By clicking okay, you will be punched in the face". The people that click okay don't have any reason to complain, they were warned. Replace "punched in the face" with any possibly negative thing. If you are told that X will happen if you do Y, and you do Y, and X happens, don't complain.
- civilian 14y agoYou'd make a great henchman in a totalitarian regime.
- Karunamon 14y agoAbove: An example of a weak appeal to emotion
- chris_wot 14y agoYou'd make a great persecutor in a totally liberal regime. Honestly, I don't think that. But could you try to focus on the argument and not the person? Your ad hominem attack has contributed nothing - just like my first sentence contributed nothing either!
- quesera 14y agoThis is not a website. This is a massive web of communications, past and present. This is not a wire tap without a permit, this is a permanent archive of every sniffle. Guys with warrants and/or guns get what they want, and Facebook has what they want. Does Mark Zuckerburg strike you as the kind of fella who will go to prison to fight for your privacy?
- Karunamon 14y agoThis is not a wire tap without a permit, this is a permanent archive of every sniffle Uploaded willfully by the people concerned. What is hard to understand about "don't put something online you don't want others to have access to"? (Values of "others" change with the service involved.. but you'd have to be frankly, moronic to put something on a social network site and not expect it to be accessible to others, as well as authorities if they come knocking)
- quesera 14y agoWell, that's a very simplistic view, but I'm not up for the challenge presently. If all Facebook users were legal adults, you'd be on less shaky ground. However, I was thinking more about private messages and chats, tracking cookies, etc. Also pernicious: being tagged in other people's content. Tying a real name to private data can have repercussions, even for responsible law abiding adults -- especially when the data is archived indefinitely, in one convenient central location.
- jodrellblank 14y agoWhat's so hard about it is that few individual things feel like "something you don't want others to have access to", yet in aggregate the individual things and the connections between them can become such. On top of that you are putting the responsibility on people to "think of every bad use of this information which could happen, and if you are still happy, then post it". Which is an impossible task. Much better to enumerate what can happen, what it will be used for, which can be made a limited set of things, and then if you are happy with that, post it.
- fleitz 14y agoWhat is a "real" name vs. one that is not "real"? Did you mean legal name? And if so does that exclude legal aliases? What about Madonna, is that her 'real' name?
- joezydeco 14y agoUm, yeah. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madonna_Louise_Ciccone http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madonna_Louise_Ciccone
- Karunamon 14y agoAre you called "fleitz" in real life? No? That is not your real name then. It is a pseudonym. This isn't rocket science.
- jlgreco 14y agoWhat if people call me "T-Bone"? The divide between "real name" and "pseudonym" is very fuzzy as soon as you step outside the "engineer box" and look at real world data. Many people in this world go by names that you would never expect to see on their driver license or passport, both of which seem to be things Facebook asks users provide to "prove" their "real names". And lets not even get started on the fact that facebook is in fact part of real life. If people call you a certain name on facebook, they are calling you that in real life. Different names for different social situation is far from unheard of. Which is "real"?
- caf 14y agoWhat's not real about Facebook?
- vidarh 14y agoMy ex goes under 3 first names. Her legal name is an African name that few people in the UK can pronounce. Two largely non-overlapping sets of her friends call her by two different English names that are "close" to her legal name. Only some people in her family usually call her by her legal name. Which is her "real" name? Most people use one of the English names. She responds the same to all three. If she had to use her legal name everywhere, most of her friends would be unable to find her, as few of them even know her legal name. What makes her legal name more or less "real" than the others (which are used more, by more people)? Why?
- jerf 14y ago"The rest of this article is nothing more than a ton of thinly veiled fallacies, slippery slope and appeal to emotion the least of the two." I agree, and it's a pity that's the route chosen, because the point about what kind of atmosphere it creates is enough to carry the argument. It isn't hard to emotionally read that dialog as "Please select who you are more loyal to: A. Facebook B. Your friend C. I just can't decide! D. Why are you asking‽" I can't imagine that in the longterm this is a gain for Facebook, even if they somehow squeeze a short-term bounce out of this. (Though I can't help but feel that both the advertisers and Facebook may be overestimating the value of "really" reaching the real "people" they think they are. So very, very much behaviour information leaks into every minute of interaction with Facebook regardless of whether you are in your "real" account or not that I bet the ad algorithms still mostly work even on the "fake" accounts.)
- clobber 14y agoThe problem is that it has turned into more than a website now where people get denied jobs for not being a member (see my previous comment in this thread). This is wrong.
- civilian 14y agoI'm a rational anarchist. Make all the laws (and policies) you want, and I'll follow the ones I like.
- thenomad 14y agoSo, just to confirm here - you don't think there's anything wrong with your friends being encouraged to anonymously betray your trust by giving information to a third party that may cause you social and emotional harm? (And records of whether that information was given subsequently being recorded.) The article's points on "snitching" seemed sound to me. Encouraging people to inform on one another and betray trust is generally societally harmful.
- jedbrown 14y agoIf the responses are actually anonymous (as they claim, but I don't believe it's actually anonymous in their database), it would be easy to generate enough false positives to spoil the system.
- quesera 14y agoThere is a 0% chance that Facebook does not record your response to every request.
- latimer 14y agoIf it turns out it isn't anonymous and they are shutting down accounts over it, can there be any repercussions for them lying like that or is it just "unethical"?
- qwertzlcoatl 14y agoI personally had my name in Russian letters, so that it resembled my real name with symbols. Facebook got aware of this and blocked my account and forced me to upload a scan of my ID card. After a heavy dispute because I was not willing to hand out my ID to a foreign company (and various other reasons) I gave into their request, uploading a fake ID of me with fake data.
- tyrmored 14y agoIf nothing else this might help put the kibosh on the intensely annoying way Facebook users tend to use cutesy fake names so that you don't know who the hell they are when they comment on your posts.
- Evbn 14y agoOr you could unfriend people you don't like to hang out with on Facebook.
- michaelhoffman 14y agoI'd rather have Facebook fix the problem.
- jrtashjian 14y agoThe only problem with forcing real names that I've recently encountered are family members who work in prisons. They use a modified name as to make it difficult for an inmate to gain knowledge of them and where they live. Personal and family protection in a way with the ability to still use Facebook to connect with distant friends and family members. Anyone else run into this instance?
- maxerickson 14y agoIt seems like it would be more sensible for them to use modified names inside the prison. Of course, they probably don't get to choose what name to use in the prison.
- w1ntermute 14y agoSeems to me that guards using fake names should be a matter of course in prisons.
- fl3tch 14y agoI think judges have more to fear than prison guards.
- qq66 14y agoI think that both guards and inmates should be assigned fake names in prison, or addressed simply by number, to avoid prison interactions spilling out of the prison and affecting prisoners' families etc. Of course, the danger with this is that abuses within prison would become harder to track and account for.
- fl3tch 14y agoI going to guess that referring to inmates by numbers would be widely criticized as inhumane by many human rights groups. It would be an uphill battle to keep something like that going.
- brackin 14y agoThey'd love a database full of confirmed names, which advertisers could buy into. With Facebook the '900m users' are all real people not just accounts created.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- w1ntermute 14y agoThis could be a good way to hasten the departure of users from Facebook. If you get the accounts of all your friends using fake names suspended, they might be more willing to move to Google Plus.
- notatoad 14y agoIt might hasten the departure of users from Facebook, but if they're leaving because of facebook's real name policy, I doubt they're going to find G+ more attractive.
- Smudge 14y agoEnforcing real names has pros and cons. For Facebook as a business, the pros certainly outweigh the value lost when accounts can't be mapped directly to real people. Names are a key part of that mapping. In general, I prefer an option for pseudonymity, because it is much more inclusive (allowing certain people at the fringes to feel more comfortable joining in -- victims of abuse, political dissidents, etc), and is much less messy than total anonymity (which wouldn't really work for something like Facebook, not that there isn't a place for it elsewhere on the web). That said, pseudonymity can still get messy, so I see why Facebook might want to keep it in check. One can also make the argument that the level of discourse is much higher on services where people are more personally accountable for what they say, and where confusing or offensive usernames don't get in the way of conversations. But I would say that the actual level of discourse sometimes found on Facebook throws that argument into question.
- nodemaker 14y agoOne can also make the argument that the level of discourse is much higher on services where people are more personally accountable for what they say, and where confusing or offensive usernames don't get in the way of conversations. Based on the level of discourse here on hacker news and even on reddit, I don't think one can reasonably say that.
- Smudge 14y agoI don't personally agree with the argument, but I've seen it come up numerous times, first on Google Plus and now on Facebook.
- andreasvc 14y agoIndeed, it seems much more sensible to directly do Q/A on messages, instead of on the names being used. I think the argument simply confuses a correlation with causation.
- prodigal_erik 14y agoWhat Facebook and Google+ gain in politesse, they lose in depth and honesty. I can't assume I'll be held "accountable" in a just way by every prospective employer, apartment manager, or lover I'll ever meet, so these venues get empty pleasantries from me, certainly nothing controversial in any way.
- idunno246 14y agoI always wondered why google+ got all that bad press and facebook didn't for real names
- fl3tch 14y agoI'm guessing it's because a culture and expectation of using real names had already been established on Facebook by the time the masses arrived, while privacy-conscious techies were the first G+ users.
- at-fates-hands 14y agoWrot wrow, the gig might be up for myself. Hopefully none of my HS friends will out me. If so, I'm going to have to close my account. Not that I use a lot anyways. . .
- mkjones 14y agoHey folks - I work on the Site Integrity team at Facebook. We work to keep people safe from scams, spam, fake accounts, and having their account taken over. We're always looking for ways to better understand how people represent themselves online and improve the design of our service. We look at the results of this kind of experiment in aggregate - the responses doesn't have any impact on the user account or that of their friends.
- Baba_Chaghaloo 14y agoIs there also a team that sits around and thinks up ways to make Facebook even creepier? They're doing a good job.
- joe_the_user 14y ago1) The idea of people giving out information about their friends to an anonymous entity such as Facebook is going to result in a considerable increase in paranoia no matter what you say. 2) The claim that real identities result in either greater safety or greater civility has been debunked here quite a number of times here. After all, probably the largest number of people who are using pseudonyms are doing so out of a desire for safety.
- psbp 14y agoThen why the other three options? Why not just "I don't know this person" or "Ignore this message"?
- marshray 14y agoThat doesn't mean what you're doing is not inherently sociopathic.
- cantbecool 14y agoI sure hope your response is authentic. You might not use that information now, but you may potentially at a later date, i.e., warn a user to use their real name and if not you're account is suspended until doing so. Facebook's in the information business and now that you're a publicly traded company, the higher ups want to look good on the balance sheet and search is your organizations next step. This seems like a slippery slope to me.
- clobber 14y agoWe're setting a really bad precedent for the future here and these sorts of things need to stop now. Unfortunately, people don't seem to want to fight this. Now we have people getting turned down for jobs because they DON'T have a facebook account[1]. What's next? 1. http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/109ipi/no_facebook_no_job_interview_is_this_seriously_a/ http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/109ipi/no_faceboo...
- Smudge 14y agoNo social media presence? Clearly you are a psychopathic recluse unfit for normal work. We only want employees who do normal things, like obsessively refreshing a particular website all day long.
- eyevariety 14y agoBrilliant!
- clobber 14y agoHaha I love it. This stuff really is disturbing though - society is getting worse as a result.
- psbp 14y agoFacebook is possibly the most dangerous social construct created. And no, it's not because privacy or information are too sacred to be utilized, but because personal identity is so easily perverted with market, institutional, societal interests. It's not hard to imagine a near future, if not a present, in which a person's identity is entirely evaluated, shaped, and determined by a monolith such as facebook.
- cynest 14y ago> It's not hard to imagine a near future, if not a present, in which a person's identity is entirely evaluated, shaped, and determined by a monolith such as facebook. I don't think this is entirely correct. I think that facebook is better described as a catalyst for those who would do the evaluating, shaping, etc.
- VeejayRampay 14y agoEveryone has people they don't like and vice versa. People that know your real name. I suspect it wouldn't too hard to crowdsource "identification" to the audience of Facebook so that they can monetize their idiotic platform better.
- ivany 14y agoEvery time fb does something scummy, and people act surprised, I am surprised. They've proven themselves to have the morals of a used car dealer. Why would you trust them, or be surprised when they act untrustworthy? "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." No?
- vidarh 14y agoUsed car dealers presumably have that reputation because they still manage to fool people, otherwise the immoral ones would quickly go out of business. Part of the skill is to manage to convince people that things are different with you and them.
- mikiem 14y agoOh excellent. I can help those poor neutered friends stuck as half of user like "Susan N Steve Smith" because their significant other created that account.
- propercoil 14y agoWhere is the X button? "leave me alone" ? i'm deleting my account right at this moment i had enough
- denzil_correa 14y agoThere's a reason why people do not want to use their real names. Currently Facebook does not keep up with such promises. What has changed to make me have a leap of faith on Facebook?
- ari_elle 14y agoI don't really think the connection that he tries to make between Facebook's real name policy and the need for anonymity for whistleblowers/oppressed regimes is really fair. Facebook wants to be a social portal were you feed your desire to be seen and make stupid updates about your life and contact your friends when you go out with them. I don't really think that Facebooks policies are crucial for whistleblowers :D What should be done? Stop using Facebook. Everybody has e-mail, it's quick enough, it's fun and people tend to think before they send off an e-mail (something i miss with instant messaging). The niveau on facebook has been hiding under the table since i don't know when and that is true for their policies and for how people use facebook, so instead of trying to force the niveau to come out, how about giving up already? If Facebook is such an important part of one's life that even while being unhappy with their policies you can't give up on the service, then that's just sad....
- brador 14y agoRumors on Reddit that employers are asking for a Facebook presence pre-interview. What then?
- ari_elle 14y agoThen use it for exactly that. The point is if i use facebook for having a profile cause my employer wants me too then i can afford to (mostly) ignore facebooks policies on privacy or real name policies, because i want my real name to begin with and don't give them every crappy detail about my life... or explain to your employer why you don't use facebook and see how he reacts! I read once about some security expert who had to deny connections to hackers as part of his job and then instead of doing that explained to his employer that he is part of the hacker community and is speaking at hacker conferences etc and what he considers to be a hacker etc and it turned out to not be such a big deal as he thought in the beginning....
- gaius 14y agoI do not believe that for one second. As someone who has interviewed hundreds of candidates, there are many things a prospective employer really, really does not want to know. Religion, sexual orientation, veteran status, the list goes on... A company that finds out these things and rejects a candidate for any reason, even a legitimate technical one, is begging to be sued. That is what LinkedIn is for...
- fauigerzigerk 14y agoMaybe it's a kind of Milgram experiment.
- tokenadult 14y agoI have been on online networks of one kind or another since 1992. I am 100 percent behind the idea that people using their real names (the rule of some networks I have been on) promotes better online community and people taking more responsibility for their personal behavior in the community. That said, I do have some friends who have long established pseudonyms that have most of the good effects of real names, because those friends still try to build up reputation for those pseudonyms. (You'll have to be the judge of how well I'm doing here building up the reputation of "tokenadult," a screen name I brought here from two other online communities where pseudonyms rather than real names are mandatory but changing names is difficult so that reputation still accumulates for each name.) That said, I refuse to "out" my niece's dog, who has a Facebook profile. It's important to have amusing counterexamples out there so that people don't invest too much trust in Facebook. In the last week or so a Hacker News participant (I don't know his real name [smile]) suggested that Facebook could monetize by being an online payments platform. For consumer-to-business transactions, I don't trust Facebook as a payment platform because its engineers have the attitude "Don't be afraid to break things," which just doesn't appeal to me for a network that handles my financial data. For user-to-user transactions, I also don't trust Facebook because I don't trust the users unless I know them in person--my Facebook community is enjoyable because it really consists of people whose real identity I know, and who know me. If I want to do business with strangers, I occasionally do that through Amazon Marketplace, but that is because Amazon has built up its own reputation for standing behind transactions there. AFTER EDIT: Several comments in this thread are along the lines of It's not hard to imagine a near future, if not a present, in which a person's identity is entirely evaluated, shaped, and determined by a monolith such as facebook. But most people in the world still are largely stuck with the reputations distorted for them, before they can develop their reputations for themselves, by their family or their classmates in some small community. Facebook is LESS of a "monolith," because it is made up of hundreds of millions of users, than any small town anywhere. A lot of people find it liberating to find online communities based on shared intellectual interests (Hacker News works for this too, of course) rather than just being stuck with their current group of in-person acquaintances.
- quesera 14y ago> Facebook is LESS of a "monolith," because it is made up of hundreds of millions of users, than any small town anywhere. You inadvertently bring up a strong counter argument. Suppose, in your small town, you are outed (rightly or wrongly) as <insert marginalized subgroup here>, and ostracized. Normally, after much introspection and reflection, you or your family could decide to move away, if the social effects were severe enough and unfixable. With a real name policy and a permanent archive of the psychodrama, you cannot start over elsewhere without all of it following along with you, ripe for the next group of maladjusted simpletons to harrass you with. Not everyone can move to tolerant cultures, not all marginalized groups can find reliably-safe new places.
- FellowTraveler 14y agoIn Mexico, bloggers are disemboweled and strung up from bridges as a warning to others, by cartels. In Syria, government snipers murdered bloggers to silence them. In China, bloggers are imprisoned at hard labor. In the United States, the Federalist Papers were released anonymously in order to protect the lives of their authors. It is only the spoiled, rich and free countries who make such naive and irresponsible statements such as, "I am in support of people using their real names online." A better question is, what actions are Google, Apple, and Facebook taking to protect our vital ability to remain anonymous online?
- v0cab 14y agoGreat post. I am in South Korea. I could be imprisoned for the the things I have written here about Samsung and their owning family.
- luriel 14y agoIn Thailand you could be imprisoned if anything you say can be misconstrued as a criticism of the King. This kinds of laws that make all kinds of utterly harmless speech a very serious risk are very widespread. See also what happened to some poor guy that made a joke in Twitter about his trip to the US. People in favor of "Real Names" are the same kind of people who say "If you have nothing to hide, why do you care about privacy?"
- ktizo 14y agoIn Thailand you could be imprisoned if anything you say can be misconstrued as a criticism of the King. I've heard that is also true in Memphis.
- starpilot 14y ago…but you haven't.
- minikites 14y agoWouldn't an even better question be: how do we build the kind of society where people can express their thoughts attached to their names without fear of reprisal?
- pasbesoin 14y agoTime to call it: Jumped the shark. Is there anything more "anti-social" they could have done? Betrayal. Or... maybe they're just trying to make it more realistically social? Seriously, it's another instance of not listening to your users. Strong-arming only works as long as you are strong...
- Meist 14y agoI work with Matt at Facebook and wanted to reaffirm his comment below. This survey was a small anonymous test designed to improve the systems we use to keep the site safe for everyone. And, we have already confirmed that the responses collected will have zero impact on people's accounts. We believe a real name culture is core to our mission of making the world more connected and helps us to provide the best possible experience for our users. PS One thing I did want to note is that we offer Pages where the individual admins are not listed and have been effectively used in the past by a wide variety of groups, movements, brands, and individuals.
- fudged71 14y agoThis is really bad. A lot of educators aren't allowed using their real names on social networks.