"You have one identity. 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 … Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity."
It's not a lack of integrity - what people say and how people act is always based on the context it's in. There are things you'd say to your friends that you wouldn't say to your family or even other friends. It's always been this way, and it's pretty arrogant for Mark and, consequently, Facebook to assume otherwise.
This has actually pretty much pushed me off Facebook, as the only stuff I post is what falls in the relatively small subset of stuff I'd tell to my family, coworkers, boss, friends, and people that I know online.
The lack of understanding Zuckerberg has about image is rather amazing. I think the fact that he has never had a real job - one where he could easily be fired for messing up, has a lot to do with this.
You learn very quickly when you or someone else gets hell rained down upon them from a boss who decides they did or said something inappropriate - no matter what the context or meaning was. I know I've seen people get fired, or come close to it, for saying something that I never before would have given a second thought to, but I definitely did after that.
So when it comes down to it, there is no way I'm going to risk my professional career by letting my Facebook identity be my public persona. Hell, I even have a rule against having family members friend me on Facebook.
It's not about being a different person in each setting, it's about being able to act appropriately in each setting. --Being someone who is viewed as a dependable, professional expert at work, being able to have a serious discussion with my father about my mother's Alzheimer's at home, or being able to relax and let out my inner child a bit with friends. These are all parts of me, but there's a time and place for everything. Zuckerberg doesn't understand that.
I have a nephew who works for Menard's. Facebook gives Menard's specific privileges and tools to monitor the accounts of their employees. One of their rules is that management and floor employees can't socialize. At all. Well, my nephew, a floor employee has a friend who is now a manager. By which I mean that the friendship predates the employment.
They're smart enough never to post anything on Facebook about anything they do together, but a few months ago they went out for an evening on their motorcycles, and the friend and my niece posted about riding bikes on the same day.
Management talked to both of them the next morning, and pointedly threatened my nephew's job.
That is the world Mark Zuckerberg is proud of. That is the world he considers to have integrity. Instead of decrying the spread of petty fascism, he figures he can get rich selling the tools. The man is a sociopath.
Do you have any more information or links referring to the Facebook-Menard's deal? That sounds scandalously interesting, but I can't find anything discussing it.
A careful read of their terms of service reveals no such language - so perhaps (gasp!) my nephew is going a little conspiracy-theory on me on that point.
But while I wipe this egg off my face, allow me to reassert that Menard's definitely does do this monitoring, even if Facebook doesn't specifically enable it - and that's the basic problem with this notion of abolishment of all anonymity.
I made some comments last week pooh-poohing the "single point of failure" aspect of Facebook identity management - but Zuckerberg's ambition certainly seems to be the single point of failure of society as a whole.
I'm sure Zuckerberg gets this -- it is a pretty blatantly obvious concept. But addressing this technically is hard to do, and likely to be unsuccessful.
Think about your own rules that you posted about. How is Facebook going to successfully deal with them? What happens when you decide that some friends get to see the "inner child" and some don't? There are probably ways to accomodate these things, but they are complicated, and 80% of the hundreds of millions of users will screw it up and blame Facebook.
So Facebook deals with it by pushing it down to you and making your problems your problem. Don't want your boss to see the pictures of you doing body shots on Spring Break? Don't want your parents to know your sexual orientation? Fine -- don't post it on Facebook, or don't invite people to read it.
It's not that Facebook doesn't get it -- they just choose not to get involved.
Sure, it's not 'simple', but Livejournal had that feature before I even heard of Facebook. Dreamwidth took that concept and made it even more sophisticated.
Which is part of why I use Dreamwidth. Under a pseudonym, of course. :-)
What happens when you decide that some friends get to see the "inner child" and some don't?
In Appleseed, you create an "inner child" friends circle, and post it only to them. Nobody else would know that friends circle even exists.
It's a challenge, from a UI/UX perspective, but if I could fix it in a way that is generally intuitive, with barely any funds, working in my spare time, then surely Facebook, with all it's engineers and funding can do the same.
I'm sure the engineers could hack something up, no problem. The problem is that Facebook's market defines mass-market -- the unwashed masses need to be able to figure out how to do stuff. That's hard.
I tried to have a rule against having professional relations as friends on Facebook, and keep my profile for my friends and family. That failed: My school and professional relationships have a Facebook presence, and try to interact via Facebook.
Anyone trying to beat facebook should read that quote every day.
People should, in an ideal world, behave with integrity. But it's not an ideal world. My boss shouldn't care what I'm doing in my own time, but he might. The military shouldn't care if a potential recruit once tried pot at a college party, but they might. No employer should care about sexual orientation, but they probably do.
It's not about integrity. It's about living in a hypercritically judgemental society.
Choosing to remain slightly anonymous is one way to maintain your integrity. It's better than treating every statement like a PR release. Like Mark does, if he has the integrity to say everything using his own name, like he tells us to.
I think that's missing the point of how wrong it can be. That quote frames it as a moral issue. Different ways of acting in different contexts is not a moral issue unless you're deliberately going out of your way to hide something you don't want others to learn about you because you know it's immoral (or whatever). Most differences of behaviour in most contexts is not an issue of morality, whether or not other subjects in said contexts learn about those differences.
You state a lot of things that people shouldn't do. Isn't it kinda sad that the one thing we shouldn't be doing, being ourselves, isn't on that list? That's what this discussion is essentially about. Freedom to think what we want, be who we are?
Maybe the goal shouldn't be to hide from everyone, but to expose everyone for who we all really are? Maybe if everyone realizes how messed up everyone really is, we'll stop being so judgemental? So maybe the best way to do that is have a single identity, a single being. Sure, how you act might be different between different social groups, but that doesn't change who you are.
Maybe this is an idealist outlook, but isn't it an ideal we should be working for, not hiding from?
Would you want every conversation you have with your spouse/child/parent to be available to every single other person you know?
Regardless of how sincere and honest those conversations may be?
If not, then this idea that "the days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know" is very much not over.
The fact is, people have private interactions with other people all the time and they expect it to be private and society accepts that it's perfectly alright and natural for this to happen.
When I'm with someone else and they get a call from someone close to them, I excuse myself from the conversation in some way. That's just the polite thing to do.
This idea that all this is coming to an end is just wishful fantasy on the part of the owner of a site who's existence and popularity probably depends on this being true.
The argument is valid, but doesn't apply in this case.
> Would you want every conversation you have with your spouse/child/parent to be available to every single other person you know?
No, of course not. However, this is forcing private stuff public. Nothing is being forced here. Certain sites will require you to log in with your Facebook identity. You choose to interact with them in this manner, or you choose not to. If you comment in Facebook comments, you are doing so in a public forum.
> The fact is, people have private interactions with other people all the time and they expect it to be private and society accepts that it's perfectly alright and natural for this to happen.
This doesn't change anything. The proposal isn't to share your private life. Simply to make public comments just that, public. If you want things to remain private, keep them private.
Basically, you're arguing for something that isn't a problem.
Often people are discouraged to talk their mind until they feel that enough people thinks the same way. Anonimity allows that. You first see that there's a lot of people of your same opinion, then you "come out":
> Often people are discouraged to talk their mind until they feel that enough people thinks the same way.
This is the case because people are so judgemental. As I posted in my original comment, eliminating the judgemental attitude of the majority of people would help with this.
Why do you call it "devil's advocate"? I agree! I agreed to your previous comment too. "Coming out" seems to has been very useful for gays' rights. Maybe the question is in which point a controversy is. Is the controversial option legal? Or even are there laws that protect it?
Current revolutions or cannabis are counter-examples.
I'd also suggest to think about the asymmetry of responses. You might express your opinions in public, but someone could choose to anonymously not to hire you because of them.
Statictype, to be fair this isnt intended to post every conversation with your spouse/family/whatever online for every one to see...unless you happen to do those things on forums and product-review sections of online retailers.
This incorporation by Facebook, to my understanding, is just a way of legitimizing these mediums of communication. It will help keep spammers at bay and maybe discourage people from reviewing a product as "a stupid piece of shit" and instead contribute something of value.
I agree that the vision of Facebook becoming a worldwide identity database is unsettling, but this particular development makes some sense. Remember that not ALL conversations need to occur online and we can still use the phone or even gasp speak face to face. On what grounds should a person posting to a public space not be held accountable for what they are saying? Besides, in this case the only comments your boss would gain access to are ones like "The Toast-Matic is a fantastic toaster, and I like it for the following reasons: blah blah...". If my boss really wants to waste time sorting through that crap, party on.
I understand what you're saying. My point was that the comment made by Mark Zuckerberg are clearly false (unless they were lifted out of context). There clearly are many situations where you do want to maintain different identities.
On the other hand, I agree with the sentiment that comments should have a public identifiable handle attached to it for the reasons you've said.
I think it is not even an issue of the society being judgemental. In the real world, if you say something, you always say it in a certain context (family, friends, coworker, etc...). It looks like Facebook is trying to remove that context.
Facebook is trying to be that douche' friend who takes something out of context you said in front of a couple of friends and goes babbling it to everyone they know you know.
I don't think FB is making itself a good app when it's actively trying to make itself the bottom of a social circle. Not the foundation of a social circle, but the scum sucking parasite that's only in your social circle because it just happens to be in everyone else's too.
>People should, in an ideal world, behave with integrity.
any proof?
>Choosing to remain slightly anonymous is one way to maintain your integrity.
or just my personal choice to utilize such a freedom. The freedom to have multiple personalities. Internet provides the ability to have such virtual personalities, the ability the real world clearly lacks.
Multiple identities are real, online and in meatspace. You all see a different 'me' than my wife or kids see, or my oarents see, or my coworkers.
I manage different identities online, depending on what I've got invested in the community. Some places, I'm the voice of reason, such as it is. Some places, I'm anonymous, because there are not entirely sane people and its a local forum, and people could know where I live. It's not dishonest, it's real. I do try to avoid having multiple personalities in one community though, since that's just rude.
So, I'm not using facebook's facet flattening system.
Right, try telling that to the tour guide I met in Burma last week whose real opinions about his country's government could get him put into a work camp (and who is a facebook user, like almost everyone we met in Burma).
Agreed. In fact, this is a big part of why I dislike Facebook: the public nature of conversation distorts it.
I have wonderful, deep conversations with my wife. I also have deep conversations with my best friend. I love them both, and I'm not hiding anything from either one. But the intimacy and tone of either conversation would be ruined by the presence of the other person. This isn't about duplicity; it's about the nature of friendship. The sense of humor between us, the shared memories, the references we don't have to explain - those are all different.
Public conversation like wall posts lacks all of that. It's not inimate; it's self-conscious. It inherently lacks depth because it's dumbed down to the lowest common denominator for everyone who will see it. It's more like performance art than real conversation.
That's why I'll take email over wall posts any day. I want to hear what you have to say to ME, not what you want everyone else seeing you say to me. It's not about secrets, it's about real, personal contact.
An interesting contrast to Eric Schmidt's view while he was CEO of Google:
"every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends' social media sites."
"It's not a lack of integrity - what people say and how people act is always based on the context it's in. There are things you'd say to your friends that you wouldn't say to your family or even other friends."
Exactly. Some people say "Google does not get social", but this Google UX researcher, at least, got it:
Comments like these make me wonder to what extent Zuckerberg is a two-dimensional figurehead. Maybe not as incompetent as some of our politicians, but nonetheless now the focal point for a lot of significant activity that is, at the least, outside his domain of expertise.
(How much of it is still him, and how much (to what extent) is he, at this point, simply along for the ride?)
"Two identities = lack of integrity" is the kind of simplistic statement most often used by fascists, racists and other small minds. Unfortunately, this approach is often very persuasive for those who don't stop to think about what it really means.
Stop and look at some of the simple, dumb statements you see in a typical advertising or political campaign.
Bad start-up idea: a website that lets people control multiple Facebook accounts as if they're one account with different "friend contexts". Or, something that makes lists on Facebook useful.
The value of Facebook's users is that the overwhelming majority of them are real. People use their real names, and hook up with their real friends, resulting in a real social graph.
But if Facebook becomes the single-sign-on provider, the identity provider, for a majority of blogs and forums and other venues where people today participate anonymously, then Facebook will start seeing a huge number of fake profiles appear as people make multiple identities to preserve their privacy and anonymity, and the more those fake profiles are used, the less the real userbase will be worth, which ultimately threatens their bottom line.
You have one identity. 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... Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.
This sounds awfully like:
Mr. Anderson, it seems that you've been living two lives. In one life, you're Thomas A. Anderson, program writer for a respectable software company. You have a social security number, you pay your taxes, and you... help your landlady carry out her garbage. The other life is lived in computers, where you go by the hacker alias "Neo" and are guilty of virtually every computer crime we have a law for. One of these lives has a future, and one of them does not.
Ever get the feeling that the web is suddenly trying to profile you? Every upvote you make, every comment you leave, every article you read... Until one day they start knocking on your door for having negative thoughts, being unhappy, being prone to rebellion, not being conformist, or whatever category some data mining app applies to you.
Of course the web is trying to profile you. If it's not Google and their advertisers then it's Facebook and their government friends who plug all your comments into NSA supercomputers to check for terroristy thoughts.
We all have profiles in some NSA database somewhere, just waiting to be expunged and used against us when someone important decides we're a Homeland Security threat.
I think you mean "extracted" or "opened," not "expunged" (expunged means sealed or erased, the opposite of what I assume you intend).
That being said, I work on anti-abuse systems at Facebook and I'm pretty sure we don't "plug all your comments into NSA supercomputers." What evidence do you have that indicates we do such a thing?
You don't need to plug them into the NSA. Since Facebook pays your salary it wouldn't be your job. NSA employees would do all the work.
I'm sure they have circumventing the privacy measures down to a well oiled system by now. The NSA loves to illegally wiretap everything. This is their obsession. Justification: all the foreigners who use Facebook being a potential national security threat. All the communication on Facebook (e.g. Egyptian revolution) being invaluable data to CIA analysts. Etcetera. It's naive to think that these agencies don't have large teams focused solely on extracting value from Facebook.
Zuckerberg, being the guy with control over everyone's data now, is way too friendly with the various alphabet soup agency heads to believe that Facebook is hindering their never-ending investigations. You don't see FBI directors kissing the feet of Larry and Sergey.
Interesting, my feeling is that we're being profiled, but not for the purpose of homeland security - I mean let's face it, we're not characters from 'minority report' ... I do however feel that our profiles are commodities, and it's very valuable for companies to have this information about us. They sell shit, we buy it ...
In any case, it looks like facebook are trying to monopolise the internet, and that in itself is a bad thing ...
As an addition to that last question, about the Eygptian protestors, I also often wonder how different Mark Zuckerberg's positions on privacy, anonymity and identity would be if he were gay...
Or if he ever had to to apply for a job, after getting caught calling other students "dumb fucks" for trusting him.
I mean what I say, but I can't rely on every stranger out there to treat me rationally afterward, so I intentionally limit who knows it was me. In venues like Facebook (and now linked forums), solely because I can't do that, I never say anything beyond the inoffensively vacuous when I bother to use them at all.
This is a very good point, one that I thought about noting in a response where I discussed my identities online, but chose not to. --Luckily I'm at a point in my life - both physically and mentally - where I don't have to hide who I am to others. So to that extent, I don't feel that I have to try to either hide or specifically state that I'm gay in any normal social interaction.
Unfortunately many people - even in the US - don't have this luxury. I saw the way the one person in my high school was brave enough to come out was ostracized, and given that I was already a target, I knew there was no way I could put up with what he had to go through. For Facebook to be working this hard to strip away the ability for people to have one image in public and another in private, well, it could end up hurting a lot of people.
Nothing stops one creating a fake Facebook profile. Choose a reasonably human sounding name, crank the privacy levels way up, and comment. FB is unlikely to figure out it's fake.
There are some disadvantages. Your fake identity will probably need to be reused across sites, since creating a new account involves getting an email address, which takes a few extra minutes per identity. But choose a generic enough name, and it is less of a problem...
You would have to be behind a proxy or something though, otherwise if you say something that can be remotely miss-interpreted you might end with a gps tracking device in your car anyway (like that guy on Reddit).
Now Google is requiring users to verify new gmail accounts with a text message sent to a mobile phone. I can only assume that it will soon be prohibitively difficult to create fake email addresses to use to create other fake accounts. I fear that anonymity will likely die soon, whether we like it or not.
Um. You know Google is not the only free e-mail provider, right?
Anonymity and privacy are like punk rock. People have been saying it's dead since its inception, but look around and you'll find it all over the place.
Though I really don't want to create a fake Facebook profile. I don't want to resort to being dishonest with Facebook, and I still don't want all my comments to go through Facebook. Also, it's not easy to be logged in to Facebook with multiple identities at once.
Try using a page as Siegler did http://www.facebook.com/pages/MG-Siegler/106690852693356 . But see if you can tune the settings on your original profile to prevent people from viewing this page and then you can name your alter-ego to whatever you please.
Though this is different from users who intentionally impersonate others, never really understood that ... especially when no humour came from it.
The only thing I put in my FB feed is funny pictures. No politics, no computer stuff, nothing that might be construed as being controversial.
Why? Because I am a "fake" person? I mean heck, I post a lot more than that over here.
Nope, because my FB feed includes stuff like friends of my grandmother, or my 14-year-old son, or my HS buds. Each of these audiences has completely different standards and measurements of civility.
The concept of having your "real identity" associated with comments is very similar to the recent issue with the gaming company Blizzard. There was an announcement a few months ago stating that a poster's full name would be displayed on the battle net forums (this was prior to the release of WoW Cataclysm and SC2).
There was an online petition and a massive cry of dissent from the users. There was even a moderator who tried to justify Blizzard's position by posting his real name and saying he "didn't care". Much of his personal life information was displayed and if I remember correctly he had to change his FaceBook account due to all the trolls.
Blizzard did not put this idea into effect.
Associating identities with views online can have massive repercussions regardless of how much "integrity" that person has. Trolls and stalkers would have an absolute field day due to the loss of anonymity.
And now, for some humor to wash down the pessimism, s/fb/blizzard or vice versa:
I've chosen to out-opt of Facebook for a variety of reasons that aren't really germane. To assist with this, I use a Chrome extension called "Facebook Disconnect" to basically remove FB from my daily web experience.
So for me, TechCrunch doesn't have a comment system anymore. That's too bad, as I liked the previous system and found the commentary interesting. I'm not alone -- 4,000 people a week install this browser extension.
The end result for TechCrunch is that a small, but growing minority of readers will be less engaged with the site. In the grand scheme of things, not a big deal for them I suppose.
A problem with that article is fundamental, but unfortunately not uncommon, misunderstanding of free speech.
A website is a private property.
You have no more right to leave a comment on my website than I have to come to your house and bore you with a speech on politics.
My free speech rights allow me to publish my thoughts on my blog or publish them in my newspaper. Free speech, however, is not about allowing me to publish my thoughts on your blog or giving me right to publish an op-ed in New York Times, anonymously.
So saying:
"But to force all comments into the realm of "single real identity" public exposure -- as Facebook now appears intent on doing -- is unacceptable, reprehensible, dangerous, and utterly at odds with basic free speech rights in the United States at least."
,as dire and dramatic as it sounds, is, frankly, utter bullshit.
Today we have unprecedented ability to exercise our rights to free speech, anonymous or otherwise, so let's not fall for demagogy of people who want to pollute web with worthless comments while hiding behind principles of free speech (while completely misunderstanding those principles).
Normally, I would agree with you. However, there is an exception I make for hegemony. When a private entity becomes powerful enough, I think there are similar arguments to be made about as there would be for governments. Maybe "censorship" and "free speech" aren't accurate terms, but that doesn't negate the discussion itself.
This might be a valid point except that TechCrunch made a business decision to use FaceBook's comments in an apparent attempt to improve the user experience by limiting trolls.
In no way is any government or monopolistic entity forcing them to do this.
The comment attributed to Zuckerberg, really shocked me. It has the ring of a pronouncement made by a despot, or an out of touch royal detached from the real world. It scares me that this guy and those around him, are able to try to shape world according to such twisted world views.
Even if this really was a question of integrity, why does he feel the need to enforce it on our behalf?
This for me is a pronouncement that is fit for a dictator.
Everyone did notice that Facebook's comment system allows you to login via an essentially anonymous Yahoo! account as well, right? When/if they add Twitter and Google those will be equally anonymous and the trolling / spamming will return to normal levels.
In Season 5, Episode 17 of House, a guy loses his inhibition which causes him to speak his mind having no control over what he says. Now if you watched this episode (or read the recap), I hope you would understand the difference between stating a comment because you take notice of those around you versus saying the first thing that comes to mind.
No it is not the best example. Yes it is not real. You are concentrating a bit too much on the first sentence which has a little (if not anything) to do with the second (which is my fault ... I needed something to associate with). The point being raised is that sometimes some are quick to comment when under anonymity (no inhibition) rather than use their reasoning to go through what they are going to say. Though the first comment might be true, intelligent etc.. be wary of who that affects (because the people who read are real and they have feelings). Anonymity for some, skips that wary stage and leaves it up to the reader to either feed the fire or salvage.
The related discussion from ramchip (though a great read) is only weakly related again to the first sentence. I could tell my girlfriend I love her very much or I can tell her every ounce of annoyance she gives to me, first comment versus what you actually want to impart to produce a constructive and stable relationship. I want to be thoughtful and sincere not quick to the punch (Nothing at all to do with with whether the medical condition is real or not because the morals and values are learned).
In case this derailed, I am talking about users who leave the first thing that came to mind and had no thought of the consequences since under anonymity.
I know the affliction is real, I'm just questioning the wisdom of using the portrayal thereof by a TV show as a basis for argument. The gracious commenters provided good links to expound on the fallacy.
Like most, I disagree that having multiple identities are coming to an end. But I think it is a good thing that Facebook comments are being used on other sites because it will promote integrity. Not every site will use Facebook comments so when we want to dawn a different, anonymous personality, we can close the Techcrunch tab and open a different site that allows anonymous comments. Each site will have its own environment and purpose. I think it is a good thing that we are moving from an almost completely anonymous Internet to an Internet that allows you to be anonymous or not depending on the situation.
We can all pull the "Mark never walked in our shoes" line, but what he is trying to say is that transparency is inevitable as we march forward into the information age. So we might as well accept our convictions and live with them.
As for the people in Egypt there will always be outlets for anonymous communication. However, it won't be found on some tech blog.
Putting faces behind the comments provoke people to consider their opinions more carefully, just like we do in real life. And if you are one of those people who want to lash out, but don't have the guts to do it in face then you should just tell your best friend or keep it to yourself.
It's only inevitable if you give up on it. Technologically speaking the tools are there for it to go either way. That's why you see these technology CEO's that make their money on tracking and surveillance making statements like this. They have to convince you to stop caring and shift societal norms.
I admit it doesn't look good for privacy for now. But 20 years ago, a lot of smart forward thinking people, including global intelligence organizations, thought it was going the opposite direction. What they didn't anticipate is that we'd all be convinced to voluntarily give it up ourselves.
>Putting faces behind the comments provoke people to consider their opinions more carefully
You're absolutely right. KGB and Stasi had achieved a lot of success in putting faces behind the comments, and as a result people were considering their opinions extremely carefully.
Easy to take everything out of context isn't it? Also you would have to assume that the people hosting the comments where either KGB or Stasi... Are you referring to Techcrunch?
yes. It is one of the reasons people may like to remain anonymous - to avoid dealing with consequences when comments are taken out of context, incorrectly interpreted and/or understood. Why should i spend extra effort dealing with morons who aren't able or inclined to understand a simple logical idea?
>Also you would have to assume that the people hosting the comments where either KGB or Stasi...
not necessary. Just reading/listening to have been enough.
I agree that using a real identity forces people to be more deliberate. Also, idealistically, I agree that we should own our convictions.
Realistically, people's convictions change over time. The internet on the other hand is mostly undated. A Google search doesn't return a persons online activity in reverse chronological order. In a traditional environment the absurd things we might say as a result of past convictions will fade as time goes by. Consequently the perception people have of us is biased towards the present. This isn't true for the internet and anonymity is the only way to keep our identities from stagnating.
Putting faces behind the comments provoke people to consider their opinions more carefully, just like we do in real life.And if you are one of those people who want to lash out, but don't have the guts to do it in face then you should just tell your best friend or keep it to yourself.
I am curious, why do you think that transparency is the future? I can't think of a significant reason why that would happen. The only people that think this way are the ones that would benefit from it, and for the regular user, there is not much good. I can see alot of downsides though, like many here have mentioned, out-of-context interpretation.
Possibly the only people benefitting from this are companies, especially those with good CRM systems. And don't jump to the idea that being anonymous is no good either. Imagine sites would begin to ask for your identification before you were allowed access to content or features, like commenting systems. Imagine you are a kid again and were trying to access hacking information that were behind a over-18 wall, or just trying to post a comment on HN, but you have to be either a hacker or an entrepreneur to do so...
Also, transparency will never stop hackers or crackers from doing what they do, neither it will stop terrorists, piracy or <insert-your-digital-threat-here>. Hopefully, transparency will fail.
As long as website owners are aware of the consequences, it seems to me to be up to them to use this or not.
I'm guessing the main attraction is to have the comments automatically propagated to the commentator's Facebook friends (that IS how it works, right?)
Personally I'd like to see a similar system for Hacker News - you'd get a much better comment moderation while keeping the discussion in one place and not having to worry about running a commenting system yourself.
However, before you do, ask yourself: would you have the same opinion if you were gay and 15 years old in a fundamentalist family? In a middle eastern country? If you were transgendered but only in the beginning stages of transitioning? If you were polygamous in a community that disapproved?
How about if you were conservative in a liberal university?
How about talking about how you had an abortion? That's an important view, with policy implications, but you never know who would fire you if they knew.
Should everyone with non-normative views be forced into silence?
> Should everyone with non-normative views be forced into silence?
Absolutely not, and I agree with you. But help me out - isn't the root cause of all the examples you list a lack of information? Case in point of many: don't people in general become less bigoted the more educated they become?
Call me a naive idealist, but I wonder if the information barriers erected by people to protect themselves, are, on a wider scale, actually what keeps bigotry and hatred alive?
Zuckerberg isn't a saint, so I'm not suggesting that there is any altruistic motive behind his moves. I'm just questioning if greater transparency is inherently a bad thing.
That's how I live my life. I also have white male privilege and a wonderful family who embraced me coming out and the ability to choose my employers due to my skills as a developer. That's why I live out of the closet, precisely for the reasons you mention.
That doesn't hold for a kid in a religious household, the same exact kid who needs to find a community in which she or he can be heard. It was that anonymous community that allowed me to find the resources I needed.
Now, to be fair, the LGBT community is largely going to know better than to force people to name themselves, and the blogger always holds the choice. I'm more concerned about the overarching issue. I'm concerned about governments forcing their citizens to blog and comment using their own names. And Facebook's move is exactly the type of thing that will give them ideas.
You might have one identity, but you probably have many personas - and personas are what most people put forth on the web. That's a pretty fundamental fact, and it seems like Zuckerberg is dead wrong on this.
This might be an unpopular statement... but IMO, Google seems to get this on some level (even though they haven't figured out a way to package it.) There is a recurring theme in the occasional bits that leak out of Google about their high level thoughts on what they could contribute to the social web around understanding and helping people separate their personas -
I have more of an issue with the lack of control that I have between my friends, family, coworkers and their social networks.
I had a coworker arrested on some very serious and character destroying charges. It was hard enough to having to relay that privately to our executives. I couldn't imagine that spiraling out on my network and remaining there forever.
A former coworker now has a very interesting business, that isn't very PC. Should I screen her because of what that will look like to business and/or community contacts?
No, in both contexts I wish to shape how others reflect on my identity. I shouldn't be constrained to one very public identity.
And concerning Zuckerberg, how does a billionaire, twenty something have a clue about a normal user of his system? And besides does he really sounds like a press release to his friends in real life?
People, it's time we create a "contextual persona" toolset for social networking. This is the widest crack in Facebook's armor that a rival could exploit...
Old idea (Google had some presentation on this), but it quickly encounters problems such as UI complexity. Single identity is simple to manage and control, but multiple identities aren't. And when the worst thing possible happens - the identities start to partially overlap (and they really do!) - it becomes a nightmare.
Depends what you are trying to achieve, if we are talking a simple level about controlling what "side" of yourself your friends see I think the browser plugin is fine. If its about hiding your identity for security reasons then sure its not going to work, and also of course FB could use the techniques outlined to discover when you are doing this and block you.
Not only for facebook, but the same applies to Google and other trackers. Many sites link to your Google account. This is possible because your cookies can be shared/accessible by scripts communicating between sites (and checking referers).
To isolate them you'd essentially need something like firefox profiles -- isolating cookies and credentials per persona. But to be more usable it needs to be more integrated into the browser somehow, and more lightweight, as running multiple firefox profiles is a bit clunky.
Perhaps the problem is that we've grown accustom to lazily broadcasting our thoughts to all our friends when we should be broadcasting what we have to say to only a select relevant few?
Facebook already has friend lists that allow you to accomplish some of this. Unfortunately you can't control the privacy settings of others in whose photos you are tagged.
It seems to me that there is a solution to these type of identity problems, although it's a bit non-ideal: don't mix business and personal networks on sites like Facebook.
A hacker in their early/mid 20's with supposedly poor social skills who's quickly become a multi-billionaire for making what is essentially just an profiles/feed website, went to Harvard, and who seems to have never had a real job in his life is, I dare say it, going to have a rather skewed and limited perspective on what's realistic in life for the vast majority of people. For the majority of folks who must or desire to maintain separate work/personal or friends/family or public/private identities, or who belong to oppressed groups, are clearly not going to be able to relate to it. People without FUx1000 money in the bank (like Mark clearly does) are going to have a hard time relating to it, because without FU money one does have to be much more careful and arguably afraid of what happens when the wrong people see the wrong thing and do something that hurts you down the line.
That said, despite his perspective, he clearly has a financial motive to turn Facebook further into the dominant identity system in the web. Actually, I'll take that back, it's not clear to me that he has any motive personally to make it any more dominant, because he's now into the discretionary billions range of wealth. Perhaps his motive is to increase ROI for all the sub-one-percent shareholders. I dunno. I've just never gotten this whole sort of unbounded ambition that thinks it's not good enough to be the 3rd best thing in the entire world -- we're talking the entire world here, it's not like coming in 1000th place, and it's not even truly a race. If anything, it's a race to stand still, and then you die, no matter what.
It's interesting to think that there are now more people with a Facebook identity than most meatspace nations have citizens. More Facebookians than Brits, for example. Than French. Japanese. I don't know the exact count of total Facebook users offhand but I wouldn't be surprised to find it's already surpassed the number of US citizens as well.
> I've just never gotten this whole sort of unbounded ambition that thinks it's not good enough to be the 3rd best thing in the entire world -- we're talking the entire world here...
Reminds me of something...
I have no spur
To prick the sides of my intent, but only
Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself,
And falls on th'other.
I recall that there are half a billion facebook accounts (wikipedia says 600 million active users). The USA has around 307 million people. North america has a mere 352 million, while Latin America and the Caribbean have 589 million. Europe has 733 million[1]. So yeah, way more people on facebook than in the US, as long as the average number of accounts per person is less than two - active accounts aren't the same thing as real people, after all.
Wow, a lot of hate directed towards Zuckerberg. I understand why the auther can be sceptical og facebook and his comments, but degrading it into namecalling is just not keeping the debate at a serious level (in example, calling Zuckerberg a manchild).
Wow, is this really how bad the hate for Facebook and Zuckerberg has gotten on HN? To say that someone like Zuckerberg, whether you agree with him or not, has "no redeeming features" is simply ignorant. I'm all for reasonable debate about the privacy issues Facebook brings up, but can we please avoid this personal attack nonsense?
I somewhat agree, but suggesting anyone who prefers to be anonymous lacks integrity is pretty insulting. A lack of integrity is certainly a motivation for secrecy, but to generalize from that is a fallacy and makes Zuckerberg look foolish:
All criminals crave anonymity
Socrates craves anonymity
Therefore Socrates is a criminal
I think the point Zuckerberg is attempting to make is that in an ideal society, Socrates would have nothing to fear and thus no reason to crave anonymity. But fear is only one among several legitimate reasons to speak without identity.
One might wish others to evaluate facts or arguments on their own merits, rather than by the reputation of the speaker - this is one reason the Economist newspaper does not print the names of its writers. One might wish to get frank opinions uncolored by social norms - hence the many stories about gods and monarchs who disguise themselves to learn what people really think of them. One might wish the simple freedom to be wrong when exploring a new concept.
Zuckerberg has fallen into a common pitfall of the well intentioned (and one I've spent time in myself) which we might call a militant consequentialism. His conception of Facebook is essentially a 21st century version of Bentham's panopticon. It's not so much that the idea is inherently bad or unworkable, as that for it to work everyone has to adopt the same ethical standard as the person advocating the idea. It might well be a better world if we all had the same ethical standards as Zuckerberg currently happens to hold - no joke or sarcasm intended. The problem is that if your vision of a better world depends on everyone adopting a new pattern of behavior before the rewards appear, then it won't happen. It's like communism; it might actually be a great system if everyone were honest and unselfish, and once we could see the benefits people would want to empower each other as fully as possible because of the potential gains. But in reality everyone is inclined to hedge their bets, and attempts to implement communism across whole societies quickly end up in failure or repression.
Consequentialism itself has its place; without it, leadership or personal morality aren't possible, and one is just an obedient automaton, mindlessly enforcing some religious or legal or social code. On the other hand, the reason codes exist in the first place is because we tend to have extremely limited foresight in most regards, perhaps especially in ethical matters. If the people who don't share your consequentialist vision can only be brought into compliance by inflexible rules, then you tend to end up with a nonlinear feedback system. These tend to lurch to abrupt extremes, or else display periodic or chaotic behavior.
tl;dr attempts to legislate morality fail, usually ignominiously.
Seems kind of odd to me I can get a negative score for saying it and you can have a positive one for asking again. I have yet to see anything redeeming about him, he is one of the most influential people in the world but he isn't mature enough to use it properly. In fact, he seems to go the extra mile to piss off everyone about privacy, usability, whatever. His company is changing the world, but his personal ethos is making that world less and less a place I want to be.
Anonymous communications have an important place in our political and social discourse. The Supreme Court has ruled repeatedly that the right to anonymous free speech is protected by the First Amendment. A much-cited 1995 Supreme Court ruling in McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission reads:
Protections for anonymous speech are vital to democratic discourse. Allowing dissenters to shield their identities frees them to express critical, minority views . . . Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority. . . . It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights, and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation . . . at the hand of an intolerant society.
The tradition of anonymous speech is older than the United States. Founders Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay wrote the Federalist Papers under the pseudonym "Publius," and "the Federal Farmer" spoke up in rebuttal. The US Supreme Court has repeatedly recognized rights to speak anonymously derived from the First Amendment.
Please, tell us you were trolling. Please. Unlike the tech culture geniuses at AOL, I'm okay with "trolls", but I like to know them when I see them. I'm hoping no one is really that ignorant.
So small business owners trying to prevent their forums from become cesspools of curses should be considered "Nazis"? This post illustrates the same alarmist tone that trolls normally do.
He's trolling people because they're trying to stop trolling.
Requesting real accounts for comments on personal business websites isn't a violation of the Freedom of Speech. It's the equivalent of asking politicians to reveal what bills they voted for. Transparency means accountability, not the destruction of everything good online. Geese.
It's not a lack of integrity - what people say and how people act is always based on the context it's in. There are things you'd say to your friends that you wouldn't say to your family or even other friends. It's always been this way, and it's pretty arrogant for Mark and, consequently, Facebook to assume otherwise.
This has actually pretty much pushed me off Facebook, as the only stuff I post is what falls in the relatively small subset of stuff I'd tell to my family, coworkers, boss, friends, and people that I know online.