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djphranq wrote:
Some people don't necessarily need a platform but they just want a place they can 'be'... but maybe G+ will pick up speed given the situation. I spoke to many friends... they're scrambling to collect their pictures/posts/writings/whathaveyou from facebook to move them over.

Seriously, if you "scramble personal data" from Facebook instead of any local device, you should not use social networks. At all.

 Ahtman wrote:
I'm surprised that people think Facebook is some sort of right or entitlement; it is strange to see.

What you're seeing is an aspect of the "Gimmie Dat™" culture.

 insaniak wrote:

 DarkTraveler777 wrote:
The argument that revealing real names could endanger members of the LGBTQ community is compelling considering the violence members of that community continue to face daily.

Is it?

Wouldn't it be more compelling to suggest that if people are worried about the things they are sharing publicly over social media causing them problems later, that maybe they should reconsider what they choose to share publicly over social media?

I don't think it is a black and white as you are suggesting. On one level I agree with you. In fact I agree with you so much I don't engage with social media because I don't want any of my private information floating around on the internet (as futile as that desire may actually be).

However, Drag Queens and other LGBTQ community members who are concerned about their private lives being threatened due to the public personas they adopt for business or lifestyle purposes should be able to shield themselves from threats of violence and the loss of professional and personal connections. if elements of our culture were not still hostile to the LGBTQ community then I'd agree with you 100%, but the sad fact is people are still fired from jobs, assaulted, or even murdered for belonging to that community. So isn't it irresponsible for Facebook to force those people to reveal themselves? All in the name of what? More accurate targeted advertising (not a strong argument for the policy in my opinion)? Transparency on the internet (a better argument, but still not strong enough for me to ignore the potential for harm the policy can cause)?

Again, I think Facebook could find a happy medium. Move the profiles to pages, or charge a premium to use an alias, or something. Just digging in and saying "no" seems shortsighted on Facebook's part.

Scramble personal data?

What I am meaning to say is that they are quickly trying to gather their data that they've posted so as to move it to another medium.

or perhaps you're trying to imply that they shouldn't rely on keeping something online? or at least on a social network?

Just throwing #thefappening in the room

I can only shake my head at everyone uploading personal stuff in a social network.


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 DarkTraveler777 wrote:


Again, I think Facebook could find a happy medium. Move the profiles to pages, or charge a premium to use an alias, or something. Just digging in and saying "no" seems shortsighted on Facebook's part.

Why should Facebook care for a specific population?

 DarkTraveler777 wrote:
However, Drag Queens and other LGBTQ community members who are concerned about their private lives being threatened due to the public personas they adopt for business or lifestyle purposes should be able to shield themselves from threats of violence and the loss of professional and personal connections.

And they can. By not sharing with the public any personal information that they don't want the public to have.

If people want to set up a profile for a stage character, then they can do so as a fan page.

if elements of our culture were not still hostile to the LGBTQ community then I'd agree with you 100%, but the sad fact is people are still fired from jobs, assaulted, or even murdered for belonging to that community. So isn't it irresponsible for Facebook to force those people to reveal themselves?

I must have missed the part in the Facebook terms and conditions that requires you to state publicly that you are gay.

 Sigvatr wrote:

Again, I think Facebook could find a happy medium. Move the profiles to pages, or charge a premium to use an alias, or something. Just digging in and saying "no" seems shortsighted on Facebook's part.

Why should Facebook care for a specific population?

 DarkTraveler777 wrote:
If Facebook's policies open certain Facebook users up to criminal activities Facebook has a moral imperative to minimize the threat of those activities affecting their customers.

Sorry, but I just had to laugh at your comment. "Moral imperative"

And in regards to the "worth": said community is really unprofitable for data-mining purposes.

 Sigvatr wrote:

And in regards to the "worth": said community is really unprofitable for data-mining purposes.

Citation please. The LGBTQ is not worth data mining? That community often has a lot of disposable income that advertisers desire. Unless I am misunderstanding your statement.

 DarkTraveler777 wrote:

 Sigvatr wrote:

And in regards to the "worth": said community is really unprofitable for data-mining purposes.

Citation please. The LGBTQ is not worth data mining? That community often has a lot of disposable income that advertisers desire. Unless I am misunderstanding your statement.

Realname Lgbtoq might have lots of disposable income that advertisers desire.

Fakename Worthlessdata is useless for data mining.

Your data is Facebook's profit. If you falsify your data then you are useless to them.

Useless data, combined with the legal challenges Facebook can face by letting people create fake accounts to harass/stalk/etc other people, could be a legitimate reason to demand that you use your real data when interacting with a website that relies on that data to make money so that they can continue to provide you with a free service.

 DarkTraveler777 wrote:

I have no dog in this fight, but it seems odd to me that your solution to this problem is to have people misrepresent a fundamental aspect of themselves in order to avoid an online alias

Yes, the solution to the problem of people not wanting everyone to know they are gay is for those people to not tell everyone that they are gay.

I don't know, that just seems pretty darn obvious to me.

Is hiding it behind an alias really any different to 'hiding' it by not telling anyone?


To be honest, I'm a little puzzled as to why someone's sexual orientation is even worth mentioning on Facebook, unless they're using it as a dating site. In which case, there are other sites that do a much better job of that.

From what I could tell from the sexual identity thread, it seems that being able to talk about it is necessary, to some people.

So are names the only data that Facebook mines? Because I thought they also tracked your likes, what products you discussed, what product pages you visited, ect. ect. And if all of that behavior is curtailed by users who are fearful of exposing their real selves on Facebook, then Facebook ain't mining gak off those "hidden" users.

Why does Facebook need a real name? Why can't a verified e-mail address, or a secured, hidden from public view, personal address, or any other identifying information that Facebook deems necessary to confirm identify, be used?

I have an extremely common first name and a fairly common last name. I am sure there a dozens of people with my name on Facebook, and yet those people can be sorted through other identifying means and targeted for advertising.






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 insaniak wrote:

 DarkTraveler777 wrote:

I have no dog in this fight, but it seems odd to me that your solution to this problem is to have people misrepresent a fundamental aspect of themselves in order to avoid an online alias

Yes, the solution to the problem of people not wanting everyone to know they are gay is for those people to not tell everyone that they are gay.

I don't know, that just seems pretty darn obvious to me.

Is hiding it behind an alias really any different to 'hiding' it by not telling anyone?


To be honest, I'm a little puzzled as to why someone's sexual orientation is even worth mentioning on Facebook, unless they're using it as a dating site. In which case, there are other sites that do a much better job of that.

I think you missed my point. Facebook sells information. You're suggesting that people hide information that Facebook can and does sell (we will use LGBTQ community related interests for the sake of argument here) which makes no sense from a financial stand point for Facebook. You don't think Facebook has advertisers specifically targeting the LGBTQ community? Of course they do, so Facebook has an interest in knowing about that aspect of its user's lives. If those same users don't feel safe divulging that information then Facebook is shooting itself in the foot by not encouraging its users to share as much of themselves as possible for Facebook to exploit.




*edit* Typos, typos everywhere.

I personally feel with the high rate of suicide of young people in the LGBT community, reducing safe areas for them to speak to others and rant on situations that those others can relate to and offer advice on is a bad thing no matter how facebook is twisting it.

 DarkTraveler777 wrote:
So are names the only data that Facebook mines? Because I thought they also tracked your likes, what products you discussed, what product pages you visited, ect. ect. And if all of that behavior is curtailed by users who are fearful of exposing their real selves on Facebook, then Facebook ain't mining gak off those "hidden" users.

Why does Facebook need a real name? Why can't a verified e-mail address, or a secured, hidden from public view, personal address, or any other identifying information that Facebook deems necessary be confirm identify, be used?

The holy grail is UNIQUE likes, and UNIQUE clicks, not aggregate. I could have 100 "verifiable" email addresses in a couple hours, and even more if I broke a captcha and automated it. Actually, I wouldn't even need to do that, I could just take my own mailserver and spin up as many as I wanted with a bash script, though they might get suspicious about a small time mailserver registering thousands of accounts at fb in a couple hours. Might be able to circumvent that with a bunch of DNS aliases, but that would be pretty transparent and expensive for what I'd get out of it. Email addresses are good for tracking email addresses, not people.

I could also verify (nevermind how you even do that?) at least 3 personal addresses between three different states, if I really HAD to. If I could sweet talk some coworkers into it, probably some out of country.

I have an extremely common first name and a fairly common last name. I am sure there a dozens of people with my name on Facebook, and yet those people can be sorted through other identifying means and targeted for advertising.

There sure are. For a last name that's not "Smith", my name is stunningly recurring as well. At least 8 or so of them in the US that I'm aware of. I'm not entirely sure how they separate them, though a hash of your friend's list, posting habits, and overlapping likes would probably do that job, not to mention that most people fill out what school they went to, personal information as mandatory security questions, and that kind of stuff. Real names would also help make all the rest of that more accurate, because I couldn't have "Brad", the "programmer that shares stuff with grandma", and "daedalus" the "trans-furry guy with that creepy fetish about getting eaten"*. You wouldn't be able to hide that stuff, so all your interests would be consolidated to you and they would know that the guy who is interested in the latest book on Java would also be interested in chairs that simulate getting eaten.**

* This is not a thing that I am, nor is it a profile that exists anywhere I am aware of.

** It might have been a joke, but I think this was something mentioned on SA a long time ago. Yup. "Vore" fetish, apparently, it is called. And it is a thing, apparently.

One day I will need to make a facebook account.... but not today

So, daedalus, if I am understanding your post (how computers work makes my brain go limp) names help as an identifier, but they aren't the end-all-be-all of identification on Facebook since Facebook uses other means for identifying people with identical names. Do I have that right?

Again, it seems Facebook could find a way to make everyone happy here. Do they have to? Of course not, but if not doing so leaves money on the table then they are being short sighted.

 DarkTraveler777 wrote:
So, daedalus, if I am understanding your post (how computers work makes my brain go limp) names help as an identifier, but they aren't the end-all-be-all of identification on Facebook since Facebook uses other means for identifying people with identical names. Do I have that right?

Well, yeah. I mean, I wouldn't call myself a data mining expert, but I dated a marketing major for a year or so back in college.

Seriously though, I see two goals at work here: establishing how many unique clicks happen, and building correlations on what someone might like based upon one thing that they are interested it and common things other people who also are interested in that thing like too. Clicks are proof that your advertising works, and money in the pocket, and provably unique clicks would be worth that much more. And also how much more a value add is it that you can say that people who bought product x also enjoyed product y, and then splash that all over the home page for people to see? Amazon does it all the time.

To achieve those goals, every bit of de-anonymizing data that can be gathered about you helps narrow it down. No one piece of the pie is essential, but names go a long way toward that.

Again, it seems Facebook could find a way to make everyone happy here. Do they have to? Of course not, but if not doing so leaves money on the table then they are being short sighted.

It's a cost-benefit analysis. If they can still keep enough people on the site who don't care about the policy, then they don't care about the ones they alienate. There's no comparable alternative to facebook at the moment, so I could see them going through with it anyway. If there starts to be a mass exodus, they renege on it as loudly as possible and then everyone hails them for seeing the light of day, and come back since everyone on earth is using it.*

*I don't use it, but that's neither here nor there.

Why should Facebook open themselves to liability because people want to be out of the closet without actually being out of the closet?

I do use my actual name for the one I use to connect with my family, but I have another one under a psuedonym that I use for other things, mostly liking anime pages and talking with friends I meet on the internet.

The only reason a lot of people even feel comfortable using facebook is because they can use a pseudonym. There is a certain amount of utility a facebook account provides, especially for logging into sites that allow it, without actually making everything you do apparent to your friends.

 d-usa wrote:
Why should Facebook open themselves to liability because people want to be out of the closet without actually being out of the closet?

Is there liability if one of Facebook's users is the victim of a hate crime due to content posted on their profile? I.e. Drag queen "Ronda Roundhips" is exposed to actually be Frank Deman, and poor Frank gets beaten to death by someone who visited his page. Is Facebook liable? Genuine question. You brought up legal challenges from people using fake accounts to harass others have those legal challenges actually happened or were they hypotheticals to make a point?

 daedalus wrote:
From what I could tell from the sexual identity thread, it seems that being able to talk about it is necessary, to some people.

And if they need to that anonymously, there are forums all over the place where they can do so.

If you don't want your friends or family to know about your sexual orientation, a website set up specifically for people to network with friends and family seems like an odd place to be making an issue of all of this.

It seems a little like complaining about not being able to go to a family Christmas gathering masquerading as someone else.

Hey, I'm just trying to rationalize it, not advocating it.

 DarkTraveler777 wrote:
Is there liability if one of Facebook's users is the victim of a hate crime due to content posted on their profile?

No, because facebook didn't choose to publish that information in a public location. The only way facebook could even possibly be liable for that kind of thing would be if they had promised to keep the information private and then failed to do so, and even then I can't see how they could be liable for more than breaking a contract. Murdering someone over information you find on facebook is so far outside of normal behavior that I can't see any reasonable way you could argue that facebook contributed to it.

Of course that wouldn't stop someone from suing facebook, and there's a non-trivial chance they'd get money in an out-of-court settlement because facebook doesn't want the expense of a trial. But that's a sign of a broken legal system, not legitimate liability.


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 insaniak wrote:
If you don't want your friends or family to know about your sexual orientation, a website set up specifically for people to network with friends and family seems like an odd place to be making an issue of all of this.

It's an issue when you want some of your friends and/or family to know, but not others. So I might have Peregrine the boring straight guy with a wife and 2.5 kids, which I use to network with my family and co-workers at my boring office job. And I might also have Peregrine2, where I keep all my gay BDSM activities and network with other people in that community and the friends I trust with my secrets. But I don't want those two groups to overlap, so I make one page with my real name and a separate one under a pseudonym that won't be found if someone in the first group of people goes looking for my name to send me a friend request.

Now, that doesn't mean that I have a right to use my pseudonym and second account, but as a customer I want that service to be available and I might stop using facebook if they remove it.

 Peregrine wrote:
It's an issue when you want some of your friends and/or family to know, but not others.

And that is Facebook's problem and responsibility because...? I know you say you would leave but other posts are positing it as some right or entitlement for Facebook to allow it, and I'm just not seeing it as either of those things.

 Ahtman wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:
It's an issue when you want some of your friends and/or family to know, but not others.

And that is Facebook's problem and responsibility because...?

And Facebook already lets you group your friends and family into different categories. So you are able to post content that you only want certain people to see by utilizing the privacy settings available to every single Facebook user, and you don't even have to change your name to do so.


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 DarkTraveler777 wrote:

 d-usa wrote:
Why should Facebook open themselves to liability because people want to be out of the closet without actually being out of the closet?

Is there liability if one of Facebook's users is the victim of a hate crime due to content posted on their profile? I.e. Drag queen "Ronda Roundhips" is exposed to actually be Frank Deman, and poor Frank gets beaten to death by someone who visited his page. Is Facebook liable? Genuine question.

The only somebody would know that Frank Deman is Ronda Roundhips would be if Frankd decided to share that news on Ronda Roundhips page.

You brought up legal challenges from people using fake accounts to harass others have those legal challenges actually happened or were they hypotheticals to make a point?

I don't know if there have been any cases.

A lawyer friend of mine has had to deal with people sending messages through Facebook to people who they were not allowed to have any contact with.

 Ahtman wrote:
And that is Facebook's problem and responsibility because...?

I didn't say it is. I was explaining why some of facebook's customers would consider it an important feature. Facebook obviously has the right to ignore their desires, but they shouldn't be surprised when they have a lot of unhappy former customers to deal with.

 Peregrine wrote:
a lot of unhappy former customers to deal with.

Is "a lot" synonymous for "a small amount" now?

Maybe there is something I am missing in this discussion, but I'm seeing somewhat of a disparity here. Facebook has implemented a policy that seems to disproportionately affect the LGBT community, in effect cutting people off from various support groups, advice pages, etc. to help and support those coming out, undergoing gender reassignment, etc. and we have posters here saying;
- "It's a private business, not some kind of mandatory government thing."
- as just a "potentially stupid business decision"
- that it's "It's their playground, it's their rules"
- that Facebook "isn't an essential service"
Yet when a baker refuses to bake a cake for this very same demographic because of genuinely held religious beliefs the cries of homophobia and discrimination start. It seems strange that the outrage over a cake far exceeds that of denying someone access to an emotional support network.