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Based on the responses here on Hacker News, it seems like some of you didn't get it. This article is about social privilege, and how different the life circums

Based on the responses here on Hacker News, it seems like some of you didn't get it. This article is about social privilege, and how different the life circumstances of the founder of Facebook are from many of the people using his product. It's underscoring the fact that Graph Search could only be built by someone who doesn't understand the sometimes life-or-death importance of privacy, who has never had to fear any real consequences from any expression of identity or presenting the same face to all people. A large segment of the readers of Hacker News have the same blind spots as Mark Zuckerberg, and this comes out whenever any question of social privelege as it relates to technology comes up here. This is a problem. The products we're building have huge, and usually unexamined, social consequences, and I don't think ignoring those consequences will work long term. This is true in other fields that claim "neutrality" the way technologists do. Most working U.S. journalists, for instance, work for pro-government, pro-Capitalist news outlets. We call this "objective". Any deviation from that norm is "bias". Keeping identifying information in a centralized location that is subject to subpoena by law enforcement is a norm now, too, one that has serious social consequences. So your decision to roll your own auth system and saying "fuck it, I'll just make them log in through Facebook" is about a lot more than how many keystrokes you have to enter and how much maintenance you're going to have to do down the road. We should start factoring social consequences in to our technical decisions, like, ten years ago, and I'm afraid it's going to take a lynch mob empowered by Graph Search for people to get this.

yuhong 14y ago
I prefer people post under their real name if possible, but know that it is not always possible. I do want these problems fixed eventually if possible too.
- cynest 14y ago
  But is that truly de-anonymizing? I share my legal name with several famous people, and numerous SEO'd professionals. Barring more specific searching knowing specific details I am relatively hard to identify. Same with just about anyone who fits the (common first name, common last name) paradigm. On the other hand (rare first name, rarer last name) is relatively easy to uniquely identify.
  - michael_miller 14y ago
    For most purposes, it is de-anonymizing. There might be several famous people who share your name, but is there more than one person with your name who is currently an undergrad at Caltech studying CS? In most cases, a name combined with a little bit of context will identify an individual.
    - vidarh 14y ago
      The difference, for me at least, is effort. There's a vast difference from if people can do a search for your name, and get page up and page down of stuff from every forum you might post on, vs. if people need to track down your nym's. In my case, my HN id is trivially easy to connect to my full name, but unless you go to the effort, these comments won't show up. My Reddit comments are still easy to connect to my full name if you try, but it does not reflect my name directly, and it will take more searches for most people. I don't care if people who know me figure it out - I've e.g. often made clear statements that identify me in comments there, by e.g. replying in threads when posts from my blog has been posted there. I don't care if the odd person here and there make the connection, with or without my help. I don't care if people who care enough to put effort into figuring out the connections figure it out (though I'd find it rather creepy if someone thought that worthwhile) - they'd find other avenues to get information about me anyway. But I do somewhat care that off-hand comments I make that are more like a casual chat than a serious debate or public statement does not end up ranking at the top of a Google search for my name. I "curate" my online life that way, by deciding what I post and what usernames I use, depending on how much or little I care about tying a specific service to my public identity.
      - icebraining 14y ago
        But you can only do that because HN, Reddit and other sites - unlike Facebook and Google+ - allow you to create that chasm between the two identities. There's nothing wrong with an individual choosing to use his legal name in his profile, but we should be weary of making that decision for others. Personally, I won't join any service that maintains such policy.
philwelch 14y ago
It's not that the critics of this article didn't get it, it's that there's nothing there to get. If anything it's a Rorschach test that commentators like you and kevinalexbrown can read their own thoughts and biases into.

yuhong 14y ago

I prefer people post under their real name if possible, but know that it is not always possible. I do want these problems fixed eventually if possible too.

cynest 14y ago
But is that truly de-anonymizing? I share my legal name with several famous people, and numerous SEO'd professionals. Barring more specific searching knowing specific details I am relatively hard to identify. Same with just about anyone who fits the (common first name, common last name) paradigm. On the other hand (rare first name, rarer last name) is relatively easy to uniquely identify.
- michael_miller 14y ago
  For most purposes, it is de-anonymizing. There might be several famous people who share your name, but is there more than one person with your name who is currently an undergrad at Caltech studying CS? In most cases, a name combined with a little bit of context will identify an individual.
  - vidarh 14y ago
    The difference, for me at least, is effort. There's a vast difference from if people can do a search for your name, and get page up and page down of stuff from every forum you might post on, vs. if people need to track down your nym's. In my case, my HN id is trivially easy to connect to my full name, but unless you go to the effort, these comments won't show up. My Reddit comments are still easy to connect to my full name if you try, but it does not reflect my name directly, and it will take more searches for most people. I don't care if people who know me figure it out - I've e.g. often made clear statements that identify me in comments there, by e.g. replying in threads when posts from my blog has been posted there. I don't care if the odd person here and there make the connection, with or without my help. I don't care if people who care enough to put effort into figuring out the connections figure it out (though I'd find it rather creepy if someone thought that worthwhile) - they'd find other avenues to get information about me anyway. But I do somewhat care that off-hand comments I make that are more like a casual chat than a serious debate or public statement does not end up ranking at the top of a Google search for my name. I "curate" my online life that way, by deciding what I post and what usernames I use, depending on how much or little I care about tying a specific service to my public identity.
    - icebraining 14y ago
      But you can only do that because HN, Reddit and other sites - unlike Facebook and Google+ - allow you to create that chasm between the two identities. There's nothing wrong with an individual choosing to use his legal name in his profile, but we should be weary of making that decision for others. Personally, I won't join any service that maintains such policy.

philwelch 14y ago

It's not that the critics of this article didn't get it, it's that there's nothing there to get. If anything it's a Rorschach test that commentators like you and kevinalexbrown can read their own thoughts and biases into.