I have noticed that some of my friends (mostly Germans) use a fake name on social networking sites. This started a few years ago, when it became clear that a) the security of these sites isn’t exactly Fort Knox and b) their business model includes selling your data. I assume therefore that the fake names are meant to protect your private information. While I understand the sentiment, I think this is futile, and just makes it harder for your friends to find you. Here is why.
The basic problem might be anthropomorphizing companies. If we assume that social networking companies use the same approach to searching for our information as you and me, a false name could throw them off. (It would be tempting at this point to speculate about the age-old belief that knowing somebody’s name gives you power over them, but that’s beside the point here)
However, these companies don’t use humans to search for your data―they use machine learning. And for that, a fake name is just one little piece of data. One of many…
Say you just opened an account and put down a nickname. Can you ensure that all your friends will address you with that name, mention you with that name, and that you will sign all messages with it? Are all your stated relatives using the same moniker? If you ever found a long-lost friend on the site and wanted to contact, can you avoid to sent a message saying “Hey long-lost friend, this is really Dirk Hovy, I am using a nickname, but I would like to re-connect.”?
If you answered “no” to any of these, all you managed is to make it a little harder, but not impossible, to get your real name. You more or less openly provided a decryption key that voids all your attempts at keeping your name safe. Just because you put something into a private message does not mean it is invisible. It’s just data, after all.
Even if you managed to keep all of your communications under control: are you sure your account is not linked to any other sites that contain your name? Did you not sign up with this account when you bought something, have you not liked something with it, or linked it to some other account that contains your true name? If you have done any of the above, it will be the easiest thing in the world to find your true name and link it to your data. It is all a matter of connecting the dots. There are whole industries and research branches devoted to it, and the more dots there are, the easier it gets.
I’m not trying to sound Orwellian, and I don’t mean to imply that those companies are evil by their nature. But their―more or less publicly―stated objective is that in exchange for letting you use their service, they get your data and sell it for profit. They are not in it for philanthropic reasons. They have bills to pay. You implicitly bought into that model when you signed up. You might have even explicitly agreed to it, provided you read all 25 pages of the end user agreement and were able to decipher the legalese. One can object to that model, but one cannot ignore the fact that it is reality.
The most secure option is obviously to not use any social networking sites, or the internet, for that matter. While this is 100% safe, it is also not very realistic.
So in the absence of that option, it is probably better to be more aware of what we put out there, and how easily it can be found. And if it is out there, it will be found and used. Don’t try to hide from a person if a machine is looking for you.
Using a nickname just makes it hard for your friends to find you.