Facebook Ordered To End Its Real Name Policy In Germany 471
An anonymous reader writes with a blow to Facebook's policy banning accounts under pseudonyms. From the article: "A German privacy regulator ordered Facebook to stop enforcing its real name policy because it violates a German law that gives users the right to use nicknames online. 'We believe the orders are without merit, a waste of German taxpayers' money and we will fight it vigorously,' a Facebook spokeswoman said in an emailed statement."
Re:typical (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:typical (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a waste of *taxpayer* money. For facebook, though, it isn't a waste because it means their ads are worth less because of the German law, so spending money to ensure that they have high-quality data to sell advertisers is worth it. Remember, it's good for their customers if everyone can lead to a real person.
Of course, how long until Google's G+ falls under the same restrictions? After all, G+ linking your name is getting more insidious across Google sites now, like say, replying to a YouTube comment now uses your real name.
Of course it's without merit (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:typical (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:typical (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:typical (Score:4, Interesting)
Even then, they can still uniquely identify you by the fake name. But I think they've gotten into trouble with people using fake names and pretending to be people they aren't.
If you're friends with Cowboy Neal, but he's not on facebook, and I go and make an account under the name Cowboy Neal, take his photos and use that try and befriend you and get you to divulge personal information about your relationship with Cowboy Neal that's hard to prosecute (or police) without a real name policy. Because I have as much right to call myself Cowboy Neal as Johnathan Pater if we can all use nicknames equally. And how do you show that I'm not cowboy neal who just lost his account info.
Facebook is also trying to convert 'likes' and other marketing products into real tangible things. If you and I both 'like' borderlands 2 then gearbox can see that we liked the page. If we can be fake people that poses a problem. If they want to bill you for a service (points to be used in online games) they need a valid billing name to be able to charge you, and of course eventually they want you to be a paying customer.
Probably some of it is purely practical. Trying to keep track of one friend using a kind of fake name isn't so bad. Trying to keep track of several of them, that use names which have no relation to their actual name seriously limits the usability of facebook. I, now about 15 years out of highschool, have enough trouble trying to sort out women with married names (15 years and kids change appearance a lot) and a lot of times I can't really tell if it's a person I know or not. Facebook doesn't work if it's trying to be private but social, they are opposing goals. At least in the real world, and with people who only sometimes use facebook and where you can regularly have several hundred friends, all of whom are people you actually know and wish to keep in touch with. Facebook lives and breathes on your ability to find people, if enough people become impossible to find or keep track of it starts to lose its functionality. Of course that need to find the actual correct person is the greatest gift to stalkers in history. Unfortunately.
I have lots of my (university) students befriend me on facebook, and being in CS and engineering a lot of them are foreign students. Their names on paper are usually names appropriate to their country of origin. But they then try and use western sounding names either part way through or after graduate. And quite honestly, 2 years after you were my student as Xi Li, now being David Lee, I have no fucking clue who you are. That's not even on facebook necessarily, that's just trying to keep track of records of who people actually are. Take a kid out of a classroom, feed him properly for 2 years, give him a real job and some decent clothes and then give me a thumbnail sized photo and I'm not going to to figure out which name I knew you under.
Re:typical (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm curious (really) if German ecommerce sites have to accept nicknames along with credit card numbers (and deal with chargebacks if there's fraud).
No need.
There is no need to even have a login at a site to be able to pay with your credit card. Or you could log in using your (real) name, and use the credit card of another person.
Those things are no problem for web sites, if only because the name as written on my credit card does not match the name that I normally use (my middle name is included, and the order is different).
Re:typical (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyway I think it's stupid to force such people to use their real name since there is absolutely no way to verify it is their real name. If I found myself forced to use a "real" name on Facebook I would just pick John Smith, Paul Brown or something so common that it is utterly useless information to either Facebook, or for the people they might hope for me to connect to. I would be literally lost in a sea of John Smiths. Tens of thousands of them, possibly hundreds of thousands of them. Short of them requiring all users to verify their ID with government servers or documentation, there is no way they can prevent it.
Maybe that's what Germans should do register their protest - register accounts using variations of the top 3 surnames, and boy/girl firstnames and render the service useless. I wonder how long it would be before the next time they logged in Facebook offered a "would you like to use a unique alias?" option.