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“You have one identity,” he emphasized three times in a single interview with David Kirkpatrick in his book, “The Facebook Effect.” “The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly.” He adds: “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”
Ironically, one of the reasons I have a second, fake facebook profile is that I don't trust the integrity of the facebook privacy settings so I want to see what my profile and posts look like from a non-friend 3rd party.
> I don't trust the integrity of the facebook privacy settings

LOL.

I use fb as a completely public forum. I assume everything I post can be seen by anyone. That is the only sane way to use it. fb has repeatedly shown that they don't give a s*it about your privacy or the settings you pick for it.

The chap with a bit of blind luck, who lives off the personal data of others, accuses anybody of a lack of integrity? The chap who runs the website with constantly changing, fantastically obfuscated privacy settings?

I'll have as many faces as there are people who face me, thank you.

This made me do a spit-take. No sane individual should take advice or direction on _integrity_ from Zuckerberg.
The logical extension of that is that we should all expect him to tell the public all the same things he tells his wife..

I suspect it is one of those ideas that would fall apart very quickly if he was actually put in a position where he was called out on it every time he himself demonstrated such supposed lack of integrity.

To me it indicates he'd never seriously thought about how people actually interact, and that's quite scary.

Bullshit. How does having several online identities differ from wearing different social masks every day? I do want my boss to see me differently than my close friends, my family to see different than friends etc. I like having as many online identities as I see fit and don't see how that's "coming to an end pretty quickly". It's not like pretending or lying, just the same person seen from different angles with different emphasis. Of course, it would be convenient for Zuckerberg and the like to have a single entry for every person in a db, but I'm not going to buy it.
One more to add to Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names (http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...): Real names don't contain combinations of normal words like 'creeping bear' or 'lone hill'...
The only rules I've ever entered regarding real names... is at least two characters, though I tend not to allow numbers, but /([a-z][a-z' -]{,48}[a-z])/i generally speaking... even then, I had to bump that up from 25 characters once.
Can't Chinese last name consist of a single Hanzi character?
Yes, actually they almost always do. Two-character last names are pretty rare (and of those, many are transliterations from other languages).
I don't think [a-z] covers hanzi anyway...
Which is honestly still pretty restrictive. I can immediately think of two cases you'd be throwing out erroneously.
People have names outside of [a-z]. (Me, for example.)
I was just about to say this too... Even in Europe it's common to use accents or diacritics:

http://www.kidspot.com.au/chloe-renee-andre-need-apply-accen...

Not just accents or diacritics, but different characters. E.g. Æ, Ø, Å in Scandinavia.

And we of course don't use just latin character sets in Europe (Greek and Cyrillic scripts are both even official scripts of the European Union), even excluding immigrants.

I know someone who has a last name "I". His first name starts with H so his work email address was hi@company.com.
You've never met a Zoë?
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Or clauses, "Parmelee Kills The Enemy".
This is a fantastic write-up. Would like to add that some South Asians also do not have last names (that would totally break US systems--wonder what those guys do if they take up American citizenship, like get a last name? Form-generated letters, Dear Mr. <<null>>:)
For a brief period some dumb project had decided no New Zealanders could have a passport if they had a two letter surname.

Given one of the more notable sports stars of the last few years is Lydia Ko I'm surprised that made it into production.

And Indonesian I once knew said that she had that problem in many places and usually split up her name, which was convenient because the first half happened to be "Susan".
Many Asians make up (or transideolate) a westernised name and use that name in English-speaking countries.
God, I know. Try explaining this to SagePay, whose API requires you provide a firstname and surname. This also falls down if the account belongs to a business. Businesses also do not have first names and surnames.
This isn't really too surprising; this is the kind of problem you have when you try to automatically enforce real name policies. When you try to create a system which separates real names from made up ones, it's a lot harder when real names can have common English words which aren't ordinarily found in names.

Google+ had similar problems, if I remember right, and they ultimately solved the problem by getting rid of the real name policy entirely.

Do people not realize that _all_ names are "made up" by someone?
>Native Americans Say

That's an odd phrasing for something that should be very easy to verify.

I think Dylan's point is that the headline could be something like this:

"Facebook Is Disallowing Native American Names"

Yes. Is there another way to read my comment? I'm a bit confused by the downvotes.
I don't see another reading, but perhaps people are misunderstanding you to mean that you don't believe the Native Americans. Perhaps if you suggested an alternative title?
I imagine it's getting downvotes from people who tire of the tendancy of a chunk of the HN commentariat to dismiss anything as "not a real problem" if it doesn't impinge of straight white guys, and have assumed your response is a thinly-veiled version of that.
Pedantic complaint about the headline, rather than engaging with the article? Ample reason for a downvote in my book.
Newspaperese much prefers to construct everything out of statements that other people have said. Rather like wikipedia.
I'm reminded of being unable to schedule Genius Bar appointments because my last name was a banned name. Given my Cantonese romanization, Jason Hung was apparently denied AppleCare support from geniuses.

(I do understand why'd they regex for bad names since at one point Apple publicly showed who was enqueued for support, but not very helpful to tell someone their last name isn't good when they already need help! Not trying to be sensational, but they could have just flagged it for human review to see if the name was an obvious joke, or better yet, not display names publicly)

Edit: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1491462

"Hung" is a pretty common name. You'd think it wouldn't be on the list for that reason alone.
>regex for bad names

This is why you don't use something as simplistic as regex to do your automated moderation. Automated moderation is a pretty tricky area and requires something at least as sophisticated as naive Bayes.

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I used to have a problem with a Google contact form because of part of my surname ("Cocks"). I posted a screenshot here and a couple of people very politely offered to help and it is, I think, fixed now.

I have no idea how often my name causes communication to be silently dropped.

Gah. Apple has a database of their own customers. I'm surprised they don't use that as a whitelist of known good (recognized) names.
Solution: don't use FB. Create your own social network.
its so easy to create a social network huh?!!
A social network is really just the web of personal connections in real life. We all should have one.
Its not easy to build one with all the FB features. We do have some CMS like Ning which comes close but making your family friends join same is not that easy task.
Meanwhile, my Facebook profile is entirely faked, with clearly false data and the name of a literary character; I've never been questioned about it once. Beyond an attempt to combat impersonation (which is likely going to be impersonation of real names anyway), where do Facebook or their users even benefit from the real name policy?

It seems like a lot of hassle to try and automatically enforce an obviously difficult problem with little upside. Human behaviors, try as we might, are never going to conform to rigorous standards. :)

Racking my brain, I can think of two reasons: preventing anonymity (people are less of a dick on the internet when their real name is there), and findability (finding your friends while not knowing their internet moniker is hard)
Plus, of course, Facebook's actual "users" - by which I mean their paying customers - like to be able to tie Facebook's product (yeah, you and me and your mom) to their credit card names reliably...
I'd say the first one isn't proven (Oh great old one) and the second one is moot - if you want to connect with friends, exchange the name via side channel or use the 'friend of friend' links to connect?
"Are you a gift shop? Our shop sign up is over here." - no, I'm not, thank you very much. It is German and means something I'd like to use on you if you don't stop bothering me ...
"It looks like that name violates our name standards" != Accusing native americans of using fake names
Ok, they accuse them of having true but unacceptable names.

How is that any better?

It does come across to me as accusing people of using fake names, in part because the immediate remedy they suggest is to send in scan of ID to prove that it's your real name. If they just didn't like the name, vs. suspecting it to be fake, why would they want a scan of ID?
The real name policy on Facebook is a load of bollocks, IMO. I have a friend who has to use a fake name to keep her stalker away (he threatened to abduct her son and stuff like that), and she's legally required to both keep a low profile on the internet and to report any and all possible interactions with the guy to her solicitor. I know Facebook probably has its reasons (mostly having to do with money, I'm sure), but they have to make exceptions.
Your friend clearly has her priorities straight. One would think that if someone really had a good reason to not be found online, the first thing they'd do would be to not be in FB rather than use some fake name.

Then again, maybe things aren't quite as dramatic as incinuated :>

Perhaps they don't want to let some arsehole stop them from keeping in touch with their friends?
True, but then again this is a moot point, since the person in question seems to struggle with distinguishing friends from arseholes, right?
Wrong. She's clearly identified him as an arsehole. You can tell because she's reports interactions with him and tries to hide from him.
Blaming the victim, how progressive.
This is a clear issue of having your cake and eating it too. Being a victim is irrelevant and shouldn't be a reason not to call them out on their stupidity.
What's stupid about wanting to use a mainstream website to keep in touch with friends while also being able to avoid the attentions of someone who is abusive?
(1) That it's a website specifically engineered around bringing you into the attention of anyone you've ever known

(2) That there are other ways of staying in touch with friends

(3) That given the situation, if everything is in fact true, it seems the wrong compromise has been made. Maintaining the safety of your family should trump being able to always have someone/something to chit chat with.

So clearly one should cut oneself off from social interaction because of an individual?

I do not use my "real name" on Facebook, or elsewhere online apart from in a professional capacity, and this is precisely the way I want it. If you know only my real name, not the one I have been using for the last 10 years, then you are not someone I want to be in contact with.

>she's legally required to both keep a low profile on the internet

Just curious, but why is she legally required to do that? I understand why she would as a safety precaution, of course.

It's not a "real name policy". It's rather a policy against names which look a certain way.

See, "real name" means "the name which is actually yours". The set "real name" and "name that looks good to Facebook" are different, intersecting sets.

If you want to evade a stalker, you can use a fake name which looks good to Facebook: a "realistic" name, let's call it.

On any web site that insists on banning certain names, you can easily pick a name that is not banned, yet that is not your real name.

Some members of my family have the same problem. Their surname is Money and none of them can use it on Facebook.
Same problem here; Stalker is my surname and I had to send in a scan of my drivers license to create an account.
They could try and use an alternative form like Cash, Bond, or Banks.
My last name is the name of one of the largest phone companies in Brazil: Vivo.

Facebook didn't allow my name either as it assumed I was somehow trying to harm the company. It allowed me to register with a fake name though.

This was many years ago. I decided to just not care about Facebook and never used it anymore.