Who Owns Your Social Identity? 190
wjousts writes "Who actually owns your username on a website? What rights do you have to use it? An IEEE Spectrum podcast reports: 'What happens if Facebook or Twitter or, say, your blog hosting service, makes you take a different user name? Sound impossible? It's happened. Last week, a software researcher named Danah Boyd woke up to find her entire blog had disappeared, and in fact, had been renamed, because her hosting service had given her blog's name to someone else.' And as important as they are, what protects our accounts are the terms of service agreements. If you read them — and who does? — you'd learn, probably to no surprise, that they protect the provider a lot more than they protect you."
Be careful... (Score:4, Funny)
What protects your social identity? (Score:3, Funny)
Why, the same thing that protects you if someone steals your identity in the real world.
Unicorns, vigilante superheroes and the goodwill of corporations like Mastercard - all in equal measure.
Re:money (Score:4, Funny)
I would like to buy the username Anonymous Coward.
Re:You own your domain (Score:4, Funny)
To put it another way: my username on my high school's servers was recently deactivated, probably since it has been several years since I was a student there. Would it be reasonable to complain about having lost that username?
Perhaps you should e-mail the Slashdot admins and see if they'd be willing to take away BadAnalogyGuy's username and give it to you, because you'd clearly do a great job with it.