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Facebook wants its users to snitch on their friends
It's probable that some of your #Facebook friends aren't using their real names. I know some of mine aren't. Guess what? Facebook wants you to snitch on them, as this dialog box shows:
Why is Facebook doing this? The reason they give is:
Facebook is a community where people connect and share using their real identities. When everyone uses their real first and last names people can know who they're communicating with. This helps keep our community safe.
This argument is bollocks, because anonymity often enhances safety:
- in 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
What Facebook really thinks is "We require real names so we can monetise you more easily. You're our product, not our customer."
So what can we do about it? One possibility would be if everyone, when asked this question, adopted a policy of:
- if the name is a pseudonym, always say it is real, and
- if the name is real, toss a coin and say it is false with a 50% probability.
If enough people did this, it would create enough false positives and false negatives to make problems for Facebook's automated snitching software.
(via Paul Bernal; discussion on Hacker News)