Facebook Wants You To Snitch On Friends Not Using Their Real Name

That assumes that people don't ignore the constant surveillance and largely do whatever they were going to do anyway. Most non-geeks seem to do just that.

(Whether that is a good idea is another matter. Also, I still don't like Facebook.)

> It's not hard to imagine a near future, if not a present, in which a person's identity is entirely evaluated, shaped, and determined by a monolith such as facebook.

I don't think this is entirely correct. I think that facebook is better described as a catalyst for those who would do the evaluating, shaping, etc.

I do not believe that for one second. As someone who has interviewed hundreds of candidates, there are many things a prospective employer really, really does not want to know. Religion, sexual orientation, veteran status, the list goes on... A company that finds out these things and rejects a candidate for any reason, even a legitimate technical one, is begging to be sued.

That is what LinkedIn is for...

It came out as an ad hominem but what I said does attack the argument. Karunamon puts the rule of law above all other considerations, and that's a bad position to hold. People better their lives every day by breaking laws, and when laws at senseless and when your action is not hurting anyone, then breaking the law should be considered as a real option.

Let's take illegal immigration. Yes, there is legal immigration, but it's limited by draconian max quotas and a preference for the educated. But the US is still a great opportunity to find decent jobs and help support one's family. I feel for illegal immigrants in our country and if I had any way of supporting them (beyond just voting for pro-illegal and amnestey measures) I would! And I want to make the law and government as toothless as possible against.

Millions of people break drug laws. For some, it is damage themselves and the people around them, and encouraging them to be more dependent on the state and to resort to thieving.

But illegal drugs help a lot of people. There are possibly some various benefits for cannabis, and at the least it acts as a pain reliever. MDMA helps treat PTSD and potential has use in couples therapy. Mescaline, LSD, mushrooms and ketamine provide satisfaction to spiritual soul-searchers. Adderal and other amphetamines boost some forms of productivity.

Our founding fathers disliked taxes and were essentially smugglers and tax evaders. They had moral arguments against the law placed on them-- Karunamon would have them following the law anyway.

Karunamon has no empathy for the human reality of law breaking. If our political process does not find it convenient to de-criminalize actions that help humanity, how can we respect that law?

And so, I stand by my statement that Karunamon would make a great henchman. I can imagine him now, shouting at the criminals: "UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES AND MORALITY ARE OF NO CONCERN, THE LAW IS THE LAW."

This comic sums up how I feel about the law: http://asofterworld.com/index.php?id=469

I am using many appeals to emotion, but I've still demonstrated that: following the law blindly is not a good strategy for the improvement of humanity.

I have been on online networks of one kind or another since 1992. I am 100 percent behind the idea that people using their real names (the rule of some networks I have been on) promotes better online community and people taking more responsibility for their personal behavior in the community. That said, I do have some friends who have long established pseudonyms that have most of the good effects of real names, because those friends still try to build up reputation for those pseudonyms. (You'll have to be the judge of how well I'm doing here building up the reputation of "tokenadult," a screen name I brought here from two other online communities where pseudonyms rather than real names are mandatory but changing names is difficult so that reputation still accumulates for each name.)

That said, I refuse to "out" my niece's dog, who has a Facebook profile. It's important to have amusing counterexamples out there so that people don't invest too much trust in Facebook. In the last week or so a Hacker News participant (I don't know his real name [smile]) suggested that Facebook could monetize by being an online payments platform. For consumer-to-business transactions, I don't trust Facebook as a payment platform because its engineers have the attitude "Don't be afraid to break things," which just doesn't appeal to me for a network that handles my financial data. For user-to-user transactions, I also don't trust Facebook because I don't trust the users unless I know them in person--my Facebook community is enjoyable because it really consists of people whose real identity I know, and who know me. If I want to do business with strangers, I occasionally do that through Amazon Marketplace, but that is because Amazon has built up its own reputation for standing behind transactions there.

AFTER EDIT: Several comments in this thread are along the lines of

It's not hard to imagine a near future, if not a present, in which a person's identity is entirely evaluated, shaped, and determined by a monolith such as facebook.

But most people in the world still are largely stuck with the reputations distorted for them, before they can develop their reputations for themselves, by their family or their classmates in some small community. Facebook is LESS of a "monolith," because it is made up of hundreds of millions of users, than any small town anywhere. A lot of people find it liberating to find online communities based on shared intellectual interests (Hacker News works for this too, of course) rather than just being stuck with their current group of in-person acquaintances.