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I know several people that misspell their own name on Facebook for this purpose. I imagine that if people still want to be unsearchable, this is what they'll d

I know several people that misspell their own name on Facebook for this purpose. I imagine that if people still want to be unsearchable, this is what they'll do.

psbp 13y ago
Or,you know, just stop using facebook. The degree to which users are accommodating Facebook's increasingly onerous privacy policies is becoming ridiculous.
- recursive 13y ago
  If you stop using facebook, then you also lose the benefits of facebook. Some people want to use facebook, but not be searchable by name. It is not difficult to change one's name on facebook, so I hardly think it's a ridiculous response.
  - psbp 13y ago
    The benefits of facebook? What, that they're holding my relationships hostage behind a wall? Again, the lengths that users are going to so that they can use a basic utility without being manipulated and taken advantage of is ridiculous.
    - pavel_lishin 13y ago
      Nearly all of my friends use Facebook for scheduling events. If you can tell me how I can convince them all to switch to another service, I'll delete my Facebook account. Ideally, this plan will also work for when that service becomes a burden, so I can continue asking my friends to switch to new services. Also, I know I could just talk to my friends more often, and ask them regularly if there are events they've forgotten to invite me to, but that will make me sound needy and pathetic, much like someone refusing to own a telephone, and instead showing up at their friends' houses unannounced, just in case they had something to communicate.
      - rwallace 13y ago
        If you refrain from using Facebook for anything but receiving event notifications, you solve that problem while avoiding most of the harm.
      - thex86 13y ago
        I do it over email. Or even text. Or voice even. It works just fine. Really, it is entirely possible to schedule events without Facebook. It was possible to do so when FB was not there, and it is possible to do it now :)
        scott_s 13y ago
        You can't control how other people schedule events.
        pessimizer 13y ago
        You don't. People change the way they schedule events, or more likely they make an exception for you. A lot more people do that than people who just don't invite me to things. They want me there, so why shouldn't they make an effort? If they don't want me there at least that badly, why would I want to be there? Luckily, I don't have that problem - people text me, or email me, or try to run into me or something.
        scott_s 13y ago
        Which is fine - people make an exception for you. But the original point was that other people use Facebook to schedule things, and the response was "Well, I schedule things over email and text." Which misses the point, because we're talking about other people's behavior, not your own.
        glomph 13y ago
        Yeah, but the question is how do you make other people do that.
      - antimatter 13y ago
  - chrsstrm 13y ago
    So real question: I've changed mine a while back and removed all the vowels - not machine readable but still human recognizable. At one point they did have my actual name and I imagine they still do. What is to say they don't tune their search to include previous names used on a profile? I also remember last time I changed my name I had a hard time getting around their validation. Any hints on how to defeat that check using an alias? I just checked and it seems they have also limited the number of times you can change your name. Apparently I only have 4 changes left.
    - minor_nitwit 13y ago
      They do keep previous names, so that if you search for someone who was married, you'll still get their result.
- brymaster 13y ago
  Agreed. I find it pathetic and depressing that people are making phony excuses for not deleting themselves from an internet website that continually subverts their privacy and data. This has been Facebook's history since the beginning. "Won't get invited to events." What? Pick up the phone, text, email, IM, irc, smoke signals, TALK ffs! Or instead, be honest and admit you're hooked like any average user.
  - yaeger 13y ago
    Wow, what a narrow minded view you have. >Pick up the phone, text, email, IM, irc, smoke signals, TALK ffs! Here is a cute notion. Something you apparently are incapable of thinking of. Acquaintances. Friends. Not bffs. Just friends. And people you want to stay in contact with. How many do you have? By your talk, I am guessing none. And if everyone would be like you then yes, no need for facebook because we all could just "pick up the phone" and talk to the one friend we all have. It may sound strange to you, but many of us have a lot of friends and acquaintances. People we are still interested in to learn what is going on in their life but at the same time people we don't want to call as if we were bffs. So, given that situation, what do you propose? Making like it is the 1990s and start mass emailing all these people what you normally just put up on facebook? Everyone in bcc so they don't see each other? Keeping the tone of the post as general as possible cause you can't mention any names? Great stuff. Especially since that is grad a spam as not everyone might want to read your stuff. But they will if you keep stuffing their inbox. When they go on facebook, they want to check up on everyone they added. When I go check my email I want to check my email and not start treating it like my facebook newsfeed! So why don't all you mindless bashers pack it in, leave the internet altogether and start using your proposed smoke signals and enjoy your hipster elitism and privacy heaven. Just so you know, if I am seeing smoke, I am calling the fire department. So you might want to pick something even more private.
    - brymaster 13y ago
      This is literally the worst comment I've read on HN, full of ad hominem and other logical fallacies. Don't worry, we won't take your facebook away! It's gonna be okay! You sound like a junkie.
dclusin 13y ago
Same here. Most of my friends that do this are either teachers or clinicians of some sort that don't want their pupils/patients finding them. This is a much simpler approach than the privacy morass Facebook has intentionally created.
antocv 13y ago
I know several people that are quite bright in real life but only post cat pics and unfunny quotes on facebook, then like random useless uninteresting crap. They are ruining the "experience of facebook/social networking" for everyone on their friend-list willfully as a slow sabotage. That is kind of the best thing one could really do to subvert the facebook. It isnt enough to change name, or to misinform or deactivate etc, the best thing is really to offer the lower the quality of everything below crap, to drive others away too. To more fertile and free lands of networking. Whatever that is, it will be somewhere soon enough.
- sillysaurus2 13y ago
  ... What? Wouldn't people just block your posts?
  - antimatter 13y ago
    If enough of your friends did this and you had to block all of them, you'd have no use for a facebook account.
    - lmm 13y ago
      Which would be different from if the same people just didn't sign up for facebook accounts how?
      - antocv 13y ago
        When we signed up long time go when we trusted the tech community and facebook, we went in with good intentions. But then facebook breaks our trust and sells us out to anyone who is willing to pay, something they explicitly said they wouldnt do when we signed up. Slowly and carefully like a psychopath working its victim, facebook is removing any sense of control and privacy from its users. Like for example removing this feature in the headline. Back in time I remember we users had control of our news feed, we could actually stay in touch with friends, these days we have very little control of what gets shown the news feed, we dont even know how the algorithm works. Far too often we miss important information because facebook decided to post ads was more important. Well. Bring it on facebook, here is more inane crap.
ancarda 13y ago
I would be horrified that people have to go to those lengths to preserve privacy but then again, we're dealing with Facebook. I'm barely surprised, all I can think of is "That's a good idea. Why didn't I think of that?"
- lelandbatey 13y ago
  I guess, but what is this loss? It seems like being non-searchable is effectively "security through obscurity", not any kind of actual information restriction (like not giving data you don't want known to FB in the first place). What's the tangible badness in this?
  - ancarda 13y ago
    You have a point. You could find someones profile by entering their username or their ID but that's impractical. After thinking about it, ultimately it doesn't make a lot of sense; if you have a Facebook account, you should be able to find people using friends-of-friends or by other means. I guess the primary use-case is to help prevent cyberbullying?
jstalin 13y ago
I see more and more friends just completely changing their name on facebook (myself included).
- yannk 13y ago
  which is against the TOS as far as I can remember.
k3n 13y ago
I was just considering transposing some of the characters in my name with Cyrillic characters -- I wonder if that'd work? E.g. replace "a" (97) with "а" (1072).
- koenigdavidmj 13y ago
  Their searching does transposition too. I'm able to search for Russian friends of mine who use their Russian-spelled names by typing in transliterated English.
  - k3n 13y ago
    Damnit. Well, thanks for saving me the trouble.
- 8_hours_ago 13y ago
  Facebook won't let you use characters from multiple alphabets, so you'd have to change all the letters in your name to their Cyrillic equivalents.
philip1209 13y ago
I use a GMail plugin that looks up social media accounts attached to a given email address, and I'm always amused by the misspelled names that appear.
8_hours_ago 13y ago
I, and other people I know, replace a letter in our names with an accented one. As long as you stay in the UTF-8 Latin alphabet, Facebook won't complain about the name change; and as far as I can tell this completely removes me from searches containing my real unaccented name.

I know several people that misspell their own name on Facebook for this purpose. I imagine that if people still want to be unsearchable, this is what they'll do.

psbp 13y ago

Or,you know, just stop using facebook. The degree to which users are accommodating Facebook's increasingly onerous privacy policies is becoming ridiculous.

recursive 13y ago
If you stop using facebook, then you also lose the benefits of facebook. Some people want to use facebook, but not be searchable by name. It is not difficult to change one's name on facebook, so I hardly think it's a ridiculous response.
- psbp 13y ago
  The benefits of facebook? What, that they're holding my relationships hostage behind a wall? Again, the lengths that users are going to so that they can use a basic utility without being manipulated and taken advantage of is ridiculous.
  - pavel_lishin 13y ago
    Nearly all of my friends use Facebook for scheduling events. If you can tell me how I can convince them all to switch to another service, I'll delete my Facebook account. Ideally, this plan will also work for when that service becomes a burden, so I can continue asking my friends to switch to new services. Also, I know I could just talk to my friends more often, and ask them regularly if there are events they've forgotten to invite me to, but that will make me sound needy and pathetic, much like someone refusing to own a telephone, and instead showing up at their friends' houses unannounced, just in case they had something to communicate.
    - rwallace 13y ago
      If you refrain from using Facebook for anything but receiving event notifications, you solve that problem while avoiding most of the harm.
    - thex86 13y ago
      I do it over email. Or even text. Or voice even. It works just fine. Really, it is entirely possible to schedule events without Facebook. It was possible to do so when FB was not there, and it is possible to do it now :)
      - scott_s 13y ago
        You can't control how other people schedule events.
        pessimizer 13y ago
        You don't. People change the way they schedule events, or more likely they make an exception for you. A lot more people do that than people who just don't invite me to things. They want me there, so why shouldn't they make an effort? If they don't want me there at least that badly, why would I want to be there? Luckily, I don't have that problem - people text me, or email me, or try to run into me or something.
        scott_s 13y ago
        Which is fine - people make an exception for you. But the original point was that other people use Facebook to schedule things, and the response was "Well, I schedule things over email and text." Which misses the point, because we're talking about other people's behavior, not your own.
      - glomph 13y ago
        Yeah, but the question is how do you make other people do that.
    - antimatter 13y ago
- chrsstrm 13y ago
  So real question: I've changed mine a while back and removed all the vowels - not machine readable but still human recognizable. At one point they did have my actual name and I imagine they still do. What is to say they don't tune their search to include previous names used on a profile? I also remember last time I changed my name I had a hard time getting around their validation. Any hints on how to defeat that check using an alias? I just checked and it seems they have also limited the number of times you can change your name. Apparently I only have 4 changes left.
  - minor_nitwit 13y ago
    They do keep previous names, so that if you search for someone who was married, you'll still get their result.
brymaster 13y ago
Agreed. I find it pathetic and depressing that people are making phony excuses for not deleting themselves from an internet website that continually subverts their privacy and data. This has been Facebook's history since the beginning. "Won't get invited to events." What? Pick up the phone, text, email, IM, irc, smoke signals, TALK ffs! Or instead, be honest and admit you're hooked like any average user.
- yaeger 13y ago
  Wow, what a narrow minded view you have. >Pick up the phone, text, email, IM, irc, smoke signals, TALK ffs! Here is a cute notion. Something you apparently are incapable of thinking of. Acquaintances. Friends. Not bffs. Just friends. And people you want to stay in contact with. How many do you have? By your talk, I am guessing none. And if everyone would be like you then yes, no need for facebook because we all could just "pick up the phone" and talk to the one friend we all have. It may sound strange to you, but many of us have a lot of friends and acquaintances. People we are still interested in to learn what is going on in their life but at the same time people we don't want to call as if we were bffs. So, given that situation, what do you propose? Making like it is the 1990s and start mass emailing all these people what you normally just put up on facebook? Everyone in bcc so they don't see each other? Keeping the tone of the post as general as possible cause you can't mention any names? Great stuff. Especially since that is grad a spam as not everyone might want to read your stuff. But they will if you keep stuffing their inbox. When they go on facebook, they want to check up on everyone they added. When I go check my email I want to check my email and not start treating it like my facebook newsfeed! So why don't all you mindless bashers pack it in, leave the internet altogether and start using your proposed smoke signals and enjoy your hipster elitism and privacy heaven. Just so you know, if I am seeing smoke, I am calling the fire department. So you might want to pick something even more private.
  - brymaster 13y ago
    This is literally the worst comment I've read on HN, full of ad hominem and other logical fallacies. Don't worry, we won't take your facebook away! It's gonna be okay! You sound like a junkie.

dclusin 13y ago

Same here. Most of my friends that do this are either teachers or clinicians of some sort that don't want their pupils/patients finding them. This is a much simpler approach than the privacy morass Facebook has intentionally created.

antocv 13y ago

I know several people that are quite bright in real life but only post cat pics and unfunny quotes on facebook, then like random useless uninteresting crap. They are ruining the "experience of facebook/social networking" for everyone on their friend-list willfully as a slow sabotage. That is kind of the best thing one could really do to subvert the facebook. It isnt enough to change name, or to misinform or deactivate etc, the best thing is really to offer the lower the quality of everything below crap, to drive others away too. To more fertile and free lands of networking. Whatever that is, it will be somewhere soon enough.

sillysaurus2 13y ago
... What? Wouldn't people just block your posts?
- antimatter 13y ago
  If enough of your friends did this and you had to block all of them, you'd have no use for a facebook account.
  - lmm 13y ago
    Which would be different from if the same people just didn't sign up for facebook accounts how?
    - antocv 13y ago
      When we signed up long time go when we trusted the tech community and facebook, we went in with good intentions. But then facebook breaks our trust and sells us out to anyone who is willing to pay, something they explicitly said they wouldnt do when we signed up. Slowly and carefully like a psychopath working its victim, facebook is removing any sense of control and privacy from its users. Like for example removing this feature in the headline. Back in time I remember we users had control of our news feed, we could actually stay in touch with friends, these days we have very little control of what gets shown the news feed, we dont even know how the algorithm works. Far too often we miss important information because facebook decided to post ads was more important. Well. Bring it on facebook, here is more inane crap.

ancarda 13y ago

I would be horrified that people have to go to those lengths to preserve privacy but then again, we're dealing with Facebook. I'm barely surprised, all I can think of is "That's a good idea. Why didn't I think of that?"

lelandbatey 13y ago
I guess, but what is this loss? It seems like being non-searchable is effectively "security through obscurity", not any kind of actual information restriction (like not giving data you don't want known to FB in the first place). What's the tangible badness in this?
- ancarda 13y ago
  You have a point. You could find someones profile by entering their username or their ID but that's impractical. After thinking about it, ultimately it doesn't make a lot of sense; if you have a Facebook account, you should be able to find people using friends-of-friends or by other means. I guess the primary use-case is to help prevent cyberbullying?

jstalin 13y ago

I see more and more friends just completely changing their name on facebook (myself included).

yannk 13y ago
which is against the TOS as far as I can remember.

k3n 13y ago

I was just considering transposing some of the characters in my name with Cyrillic characters -- I wonder if that'd work? E.g. replace "a" (97) with "а" (1072).

koenigdavidmj 13y ago
Their searching does transposition too. I'm able to search for Russian friends of mine who use their Russian-spelled names by typing in transliterated English.
- k3n 13y ago
  Damnit. Well, thanks for saving me the trouble.
8_hours_ago 13y ago
Facebook won't let you use characters from multiple alphabets, so you'd have to change all the letters in your name to their Cyrillic equivalents.

philip1209 13y ago

I use a GMail plugin that looks up social media accounts attached to a given email address, and I'm always amused by the misspelled names that appear.

8_hours_ago 13y ago

I, and other people I know, replace a letter in our names with an accented one. As long as you stay in the UTF-8 Latin alphabet, Facebook won't complain about the name change; and as far as I can tell this completely removes me from searches containing my real unaccented name.