I haven't really seen a great deal of 'push back' against the practice.
What exactly happens if one uses a pseudonym at Facebook or Quora? Does Big Brother come to drag you off to Room 101?
Perhaps few people bother to push back against the Real Name policies because there's nothing much to push against. If I decide to use a pseudonym, I doubt that a site would rush to stop me: Better a user with a non-"real" name than no user at all. And even if they enforce the policy, I doubt that they expend much effort. How could they? As patio11 once pointed out at great length:
... the One True Personal Name problem is intractable. It's so difficult that entities which actually care about identity, like major governments, don't bother to solve it: They issue numbers instead.
The Real Name policies also aren't the big threat, IMHO. A company with a Real Name policy is actually being very above-board: Explicitly asking for your real name, and then visibly stamping it on everything you submit, is a clearer signal of a site's privacy policy than any actual written privacy policy. It's intuitive. People understand names, and pseudonymity, and anonymity as they apply in the real world. What they don't understand, and the source of the bigger problems, is that on the web the things that you type under a pseudonym can be traced back to you anyway -- by cookies or IP addresses or traffic analysis or cross-correlation of credit card numbers or mobile phone IDs or word frequency analysis -- and that companies like Google and Facebook are built around building those links and then selling the data. The problem with Facebook isn't the parts that are explicitly public; it's the parts that ought to be private but aren't.
My wife tried making a pseudonym Facebook account for helping me test FB integration on my site... Facebook refused to let her create an account with the name "Peaches Gnome"
Anyone out there who is actually named Peaches Gnome will need to prove it to Facebook. Imagine the troubles that the Zappa kids go through.
I did the same thing two days ago for the exact same reason, with the name "Aleph Zadik", and it worked like a charm.
Is there a human being deciding what looks like a real name or not, or is it algorithm-based?
FB started out when you had to give your "official" email address to sign up, which would usually be firstname.lastname@university.ac.uk (or .edu for Americans).
People who insist on using their "handles" are hankering back to the world where online and offline lives were mainly seperate. That just isn't true any more, it's as if you used a fake name in the phone book and wondered why no-one called...
I agree with you that using nicknames is hankering back to the "old" way, but I can't see why it wouldn't be possible anymore to separate on & off. Simply because a couple of IT moguls (Schmidt, Zuck and such) have predicted one future for us? We humans have enough talent and imagination to escape, distort and nullify those bleak predictions. AT least I hope so.
And yes, using a nick on FB means exactly this: you don't want anyone to call you. I simply don't want to network with my friends & family on facebook (better ways are available), but i needed access to the API ^^
Comments
I haven't really seen a great deal of 'push back' against the practice.
What exactly happens if one uses a pseudonym at Facebook or Quora? Does Big Brother come to drag you off to Room 101?
Perhaps few people bother to push back against the Real Name policies because there's nothing much to push against. If I decide to use a pseudonym, I doubt that a site would rush to stop me: Better a user with a non-"real" name than no user at all. And even if they enforce the policy, I doubt that they expend much effort. How could they? As patio11 once pointed out at great length:
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...
... the One True Personal Name problem is intractable. It's so difficult that entities which actually care about identity, like major governments, don't bother to solve it: They issue numbers instead.
The Real Name policies also aren't the big threat, IMHO. A company with a Real Name policy is actually being very above-board: Explicitly asking for your real name, and then visibly stamping it on everything you submit, is a clearer signal of a site's privacy policy than any actual written privacy policy. It's intuitive. People understand names, and pseudonymity, and anonymity as they apply in the real world. What they don't understand, and the source of the bigger problems, is that on the web the things that you type under a pseudonym can be traced back to you anyway -- by cookies or IP addresses or traffic analysis or cross-correlation of credit card numbers or mobile phone IDs or word frequency analysis -- and that companies like Google and Facebook are built around building those links and then selling the data. The problem with Facebook isn't the parts that are explicitly public; it's the parts that ought to be private but aren't.
My wife tried making a pseudonym Facebook account for helping me test FB integration on my site... Facebook refused to let her create an account with the name "Peaches Gnome"
Anyone out there who is actually named Peaches Gnome will need to prove it to Facebook. Imagine the troubles that the Zappa kids go through.
I did the same thing two days ago for the exact same reason, with the name "Aleph Zadik", and it worked like a charm. Is there a human being deciding what looks like a real name or not, or is it algorithm-based?
FB started out when you had to give your "official" email address to sign up, which would usually be firstname.lastname@university.ac.uk (or .edu for Americans).
People who insist on using their "handles" are hankering back to the world where online and offline lives were mainly seperate. That just isn't true any more, it's as if you used a fake name in the phone book and wondered why no-one called...
I agree with you that using nicknames is hankering back to the "old" way, but I can't see why it wouldn't be possible anymore to separate on & off. Simply because a couple of IT moguls (Schmidt, Zuck and such) have predicted one future for us? We humans have enough talent and imagination to escape, distort and nullify those bleak predictions. AT least I hope so.
And yes, using a nick on FB means exactly this: you don't want anyone to call you. I simply don't want to network with my friends & family on facebook (better ways are available), but i needed access to the API ^^
http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/14/quora-to-oddly-named-users-... is, what happens if you use your real name on quora...