I'm sincerely curious ... how is a social network like Facebook, which is built around connecting you with your real-world friends and acquaintances, supposed to work if you can't require users to identify themselves in a meaningful way?
The little "people you may know" widget is really useful, because it shows me names I recognize from my offline life. If it's just a random stream of pseudonyms and online handles, there's no way I can find my long-lost friends and former co-workers and classmates.
I know several people online by pseudonyms only. If I wanted to add them on facebook I'd add their pseudonym. I also know people who don't go by their real name in real life. I know John's that go by Sean. I know Richard's that go by Dick. I know another Richard that goes by Greg. I suspect that 95% of his friends don't know his "real" name is Richard. I also know 2 Cyrils that go by Rocky and I suspect only their very closest friends and family know their real names are Cyril the 3rd and Cyril the 4th.
I honestly don't understand why this matters to facebook. In the best case people make multiple accounts. One for friends and family, one for business, one for their sexy side, one for their hacker side, whatever. Now facebook gets to claim 4x the people and advertisers can better target ads to each account for each situation.
> I know several people online by pseudonyms only.
Facebook is explicitly designed to primarily be a platform for "real world" relationships, not digital connections with strangers. There are plenty of other places on the web to talk to strangers.
> I know another Richard that goes by Greg.
Then that's the name he can and should use on Facebook. Facebook's policy is not that you have to use your legal name. It's that you should use the name you go by in everyday life, not a pseudonym you invented for online publishing.
>Facebook is explicitly designed to primarily be a platform for "real world" relationships
Good thing the developer can't control how people decide to use their software. I don't understand this obsession with wanting to force people to not use a pseudonym and only add friends who they know in real life. How does it affect you negatively to know that others use the service in a different way than you?
> Then that's the name he can and should use on Facebook. Facebook's policy is not that you have to use your legal name. It's that you should use the name you go by in everyday life, not a pseudonym you invented for online publishing.
Your statement contradicts Facebook's actual policies in practice, which in many cases attempt to mandate the use of a name backed by government-issued ID.
If you read some of the linked documents, they admit that their process isn't currently perfect and are working on finding better ways of verifying identity without depending on government IDs.
...and in the mean time their current process continues to shut down the accounts of people who are using their "authentic" names but don't have proper documentation. It's disingenuous for them to be calling this an "authentic name" policy when they have no intention of enforcing it as such.
People have been complaining about this for years and FB has yet to actually change their policy. This is a company that has "Move fast and break things" as a motto, and you expect us to believe that they cannot move fast with updating a company policy doc?
What's the measure for a "real world" relationship? Many people seem to use "I've met this person" as a criteria for adding someone one Facebook. But meeting someone doesn't necessarily mean you know their full name (neither does it mean that they want you to know it)
Also, how do you prove to Facebook that this is "the name you go by" if they challenge it?
> Many people seem to use "I've met this person" as a criteria for adding someone one Facebook.
That seems like a pretty solid filter for me.
> But meeting someone doesn't necessarily mean you know their full name
Which is why Facebook's policies and technology is so great: I can easily find and add a new friend who I just met even if I don't have their last name yet.
> neither does it mean that they want you to know it
I can't plausibly imagine any real world scenario where I would willingly share my first name but not my last, but maybe that's just because my name is pretty identifiable.
> Also, how do you prove to Facebook that this is "the name you go by" if they challenge it?
That's the difficult part, and what Facebook is trying to find a good answer to.
> I'm sincerely curious ... how is a social network like Facebook, which is built around connecting you with your real-world friends and acquaintances, supposed to work if you can't require users to identify themselves in a meaningful way?
If your long-lost friends and former co-workers and classmates do not choose to be findable, that should be their decision to make. But that was always only a secondary use case for Facebook.
You're being obtuse. Ask your friend their facebook name or send them a friend request + message rather than requiring the service to verify with certainty that they are who they claim to be. How is it supposed to work? Exactly how it has for the majority of users for 10+ years. If your long-lost friends and former co-workers and classmates wanted you to find them then they would make it easier to do so.
You can require users to identify themselves in a "meaningful way," even in the way that they go by to some of their friends and acquaintances. People aren't arguing that. The point is that the name that they go by doesn't have to have any relation to a _legal_ name. (You'd be surprised at how many people you know whose legal names are different than what they go by in real life.)
It seems like this sort of privacy control could be put in place without resorting to pseudonyms.
For instance: you register using your real name/"authentic identity", but you select a restrictive privacy option that says that your profile won't show up when people search for your name on Facebook; nobody can friend-request you; and all your posts and other info is visible to friends only.
Voila, you now have a private profile, but the people whom you are friends with on Facebook don't have to create a user script that replaces your pseudonym with the name they actually know you by.
Do you trust facebook to respect all those settings in the future, or are they likely to implement a change to the system that defaults everything open? What about selling it to advertisers and other organisations?
I'm quite comfortable with the pseudonyms of my friends. Some of them are known by pseudonyms IRL, and one or two have names that don't match their ID but are the name they use in life and at work. More women than men; pseudonymity is a useful defence against ubiquitous harrasment.
I'm pretty sure that you can already do all of this. I can't currently find the option to entirely de-list from search, but I thought I had it on before.
You can de-list pretty much all information about you - without a publicly visible profile picture and your current location (city/country), you're pretty much impossible to find among others who share your first and last name. And yes, Facebook has enough users now that if you live in a big city, it's likely you'll find a few people sharing your first and last name in the same city.
Unless you have a very uncommon name, or live in a smaller city. I live in a 280k city and everyone with my last name in the phonebook is related to me, and on Facebook only me, my sister, my uncle and my cousin have an account.
My full name exists less than a dozen times on Facebook in all of Germany, and the name does not occur anywhere in the world outside of northern Germany.
I know many people with highly distinctive, and, in a surprising number of cases, entirely unique names. Some rather surprisingly.
Name plus city plus one other piece of data (approximate birth date, school(s) attended, former employer(s), a few other associates/contacts, profession) are very often enough to uniquely identify an individual, even with an otherwise common identity.
> (approximate birth date, school(s) attended, former employer(s), a few other associates/contacts, profession) are very often enough to uniquely identify an individual
Yes, but you can set all of those to private and thus effectively delist yourself from Facebook Search. The only thing that really has to be public nowadays is your name.
