The little "people you may know" widget is really useful, because it shows me names I recognize from my offline life. If it's just a random stream of pseudonyms and online handles, there's no way I can find my long-lost friends and former co-workers and classmates.
I honestly don't understand why this matters to facebook. In the best case people make multiple accounts. One for friends and family, one for business, one for their sexy side, one for their hacker side, whatever. Now facebook gets to claim 4x the people and advertisers can better target ads to each account for each situation.
Facebook is explicitly designed to primarily be a platform for "real world" relationships, not digital connections with strangers. There are plenty of other places on the web to talk to strangers.
> I know another Richard that goes by Greg.
Then that's the name he can and should use on Facebook. Facebook's policy is not that you have to use your legal name. It's that you should use the name you go by in everyday life, not a pseudonym you invented for online publishing.
Good thing the developer can't control how people decide to use their software. I don't understand this obsession with wanting to force people to not use a pseudonym and only add friends who they know in real life. How does it affect you negatively to know that others use the service in a different way than you?
Your statement contradicts Facebook's actual policies in practice, which in many cases attempt to mandate the use of a name backed by government-issued ID.
Also, how do you prove to Facebook that this is "the name you go by" if they challenge it?
That seems like a pretty solid filter for me.
> But meeting someone doesn't necessarily mean you know their full name
Which is why Facebook's policies and technology is so great: I can easily find and add a new friend who I just met even if I don't have their last name yet.
> neither does it mean that they want you to know it
I can't plausibly imagine any real world scenario where I would willingly share my first name but not my last, but maybe that's just because my name is pretty identifiable.
> Also, how do you prove to Facebook that this is "the name you go by" if they challenge it?
That's the difficult part, and what Facebook is trying to find a good answer to.
"Hey, Steve, what's your Facebook name?" "Goku35179." "Cool, I'm friending you."
If your long-lost friends and former co-workers and classmates do not choose to be findable, that should be their decision to make. But that was always only a secondary use case for Facebook.
It seems to be quite useful for generating spam-mails, I'll give it that...
For instance: you register using your real name/"authentic identity", but you select a restrictive privacy option that says that your profile won't show up when people search for your name on Facebook; nobody can friend-request you; and all your posts and other info is visible to friends only.
Voila, you now have a private profile, but the people whom you are friends with on Facebook don't have to create a user script that replaces your pseudonym with the name they actually know you by.
I'm quite comfortable with the pseudonyms of my friends. Some of them are known by pseudonyms IRL, and one or two have names that don't match their ID but are the name they use in life and at work. More women than men; pseudonymity is a useful defence against ubiquitous harrasment.
And for Facebook’s Caller ID this API endpoint is still existing.
My full name exists less than a dozen times on Facebook in all of Germany, and the name does not occur anywhere in the world outside of northern Germany.
This is quite an issue.
Name plus city plus one other piece of data (approximate birth date, school(s) attended, former employer(s), a few other associates/contacts, profession) are very often enough to uniquely identify an individual, even with an otherwise common identity.
Yes, but you can set all of those to private and thus effectively delist yourself from Facebook Search. The only thing that really has to be public nowadays is your name.