Websites asking for full name, web security experts say don’t
Some time ago, I wrote on my other blog, written in Portuguese, that Facebook was wanting all users to provide their full name as the profile name – a position understandable in certain ways, but these people that keep on telling us the risks of the Internet tell us “don’t. providing your full name on the web is dangerous”. So, what should we do? Stop participating on the Internet’s biggest social network (as of 22/06/2011 DD/MM/YYYY), which by the way, I don’t like (hate), but it’s where all our “friends” and family are “connected”. Stop participating on many other websites of interest? Bah… better provide your full name and sacrifice the “security” the “web experts” say you have by not providing it.
(Noticed the quotes on the word “connected”?)[Image not available anymore due to data loss that happened when forcibly changing servers on 1st December 2011]
Oh, and by the way, that thing of ”Alternate name” doesn’t allow me to put gbl08ma, it says it contains invalid characters (!).
Apart from Facebook, the web’s (and real life) giant Google now also wants us to provide our full name on their mini-social-network +1, where you can recommend pages to other users. When I tried to provide my webname “gbl08ma” as my profile public name, that will be visible to everyone, see below:
[Image not available anymore due to data loss that happened when forcibly changing servers on 1st December 2011]
Independently from being dangerous or not, providing our full name is not always necessary, so why should we? If we don’t, however, we aren’t exactly following the terms of Facebook, Google’s +1, and all those sites on the Internet (it’s not only Google and Facebook; I’m presenting those as an example because there are some of the biggest websites) that ask for your full name to be publicly visible – one thing is when your data is not going to be visible to nobody other than the site’s administrators and people of the same or more permissions as the admins, other is when it is asked to be part of your public profile that’s visible to everybody.
At least, on twitter I’m still able to put gbl08ma or just Gabriel as my screen name 🙂