Global coalition to Facebook: “Authentic names” are dangerous for your users

> Still, problematic as it is, that's just bad luck. We can't all live in fear of evil strangers sending death threats to us. There is no way a normal person can reasonably protect themselves from an attack like this targeted personally.

I disagree. Protection of yourself is a multi-angle approach.

One of the very practical ways to not live in fear of evil strangers is to practice good online anonimity, pseudonymity and/or compartmentalisation.

Back when I first got regular Internet access in 1998, this was a no-brainer. Almost everybody did it, and even if you slipped up at first, it was often possible to just cover some tracks and start over with a new nickname.

I walked the web like that for years, until modern Internet made it a lot harder. I was forced to make some hard choices about my own privacy (and thereby automatically about other people's privacy too) versus the ability to stay in contact with certain (groups of) friends. Not for one-to-one messages, email still works fine for that in principle, and everybody still uses it. It's the group communications that were the real issue, forcing very hard choices on people that actually want to choose privacy. But I digress.

The point is, simple precautions like this used to be no harder than simple real-life precautions such as locking your door and not leaving your phone or wallet on the bar counter as you go to the toilet. Simple common-sense things such as not writing your street address on your key-chain label. Or in cases of "bad luck", if some creepy guy is being creepy, being able to safely tell the bartender, paying attention that he doesn't see where you're going as you leave, letting a trusted friend know where you are, etc.

No it doesn't offer 100% protection, but it helps a lot! Real-life precautions like the above are the "way a normal person can reasonably protect themselves" from these types of real-life attacks and threats.

Nobody, corporation or government, would consider making such real-life precautions harder to follow. Or if a corporation would leverage network-effect to turn such a real-life precaution into a social handicap or taboo, people would quickly ask themselves "wait, is this really what we want?", and as soon as the first victims fell, the corp would get a lot of flak for it.

I believe we should allow people to be able to afford the same sorts of easy-to-follow on line precautions, without forcing people to make the awkward choice between privacy (and sometimes safety) and partaking in social life without too much inconvenience to themselves, and importantly, their friends too.

I get it, but I think your examples are not equivalent. I agree that the real-life precautions you mentioned are easy to follow and important. But the equivalent of those on-line would be: not sharing your passwords (especially to bank and e-mail), not posting your home address on public forums, telling your trusted friend you're off-line so if they see any activity from you it means you've been hacked, etc.

The real-life equivalents to the on-line precautions you've mentioned would be not telling anyone your name, wearing masks in public, not leaving any trail of your activities, and relocating to another town if anyone accidentally discovered what's your first name.

Basically, I don't believe dangers on the Internet warrant such precautions for general population.

I also first went on-line around 1998 and in my part of the world, people were just playing around. Nicknames were created not because one needed them, but because mostly nobody asked for real names.

I suspect that myself, and there's a discussion I've had with him since.

As with other of his observations on human behavior generally, Yonatan's take here is both perceptive and nuanced. I have discussed with him (on G+) the point that it took so long for him to state this, his reponse being that Google itself never suggested he shouldn't, but that he wrote this when he felt the time was right. My sense is that there's self-censorship going on, and yes, I self-censor myself (under various identities, for various reasons).

Regardless of when he joined the project, Yonatan's used G+ heavily over the past four years or so and seems to have a pretty good sense of its strengths and weaknesses.

Well, I don't think he/she said "he can"t maintain friendships". The suggestion was that he needed closer friends.

And, I think it's reasonable to question how close his friendships are if they are dependent on Facebook.

But, that's probably true of society in general, wherein we seem to be trading quantity for quality where personal relationships are concerned. And the generation coming up now has almost no reference point as to any other way.

I'm really not sure what point you're making here. Everyone will be affected differently by these rules as subject to their scenario. There's no way to make a general statement by Facebook for their entire 1B+ user base.

I do believe for the vast majority it does make things safer but if YOUR particular situation is different, then yes, use privacy settings, or dont be on Facebook or dont be online at all.

All the blame here seems to be toward Facebook somehow exposing information when every single step of that information getting out there is completely voluntary and has a massive amount of privacy control available.

Failure to use the right service in the right way rests on the user, not the service.