Facebook’s Marketing Director, Randi Zuckerberg, stresses the need for tackling “Online Anonymity” for creating safer and better socialization. Discussion on “Online Anonymity” is not the first time we hear from Facebook. The same point was also raised by Eric Schmidt, Ex CEO of Google who mentioned that online anonymity is dangerous and if it is not addressed by social media network promoters, Governments may enter the arena with strict guidelines.
Well, Facebook is too sloppy all through these years. There might be many reasons for this stance. It might be its intention to just build huge repositories of names and email addresses and monetize the same with various commercial deals with corporate. After gaining the popularity and being in the number one slot in terms of active members and over all members, Facebook is trying to fill the loopholes or drawbacks in terms of security. As per the Alexa ranking, Facebook leads the social media bandwagon. There is and was severe criticism from its own users for lack of privacy and users’ information being exposed without their knowledge. On the other hand, Google’s attempt to present a clean platform for social networking by safeguarding their privacy to the maximum possible extent, has made Facebook to refine its social networking wheel by tightening privacy features.
The recent move by Google+, to use real names instead of pseudo names has invited mixed reactions both from the public and experts. It has already deleted large number of accounts which fall under this category. However, it is appreciated that Google offers ample amount of time to notify users to mention their real names instead of pseudo names. It is interesting to watch how Facebook is going to deal with this name change game!
Critics who are against the usage of the real names opine that by stipulating the usage of real names, users’ sensitive information will be in jeopardy. They argue that in this commercial world where everything and anything is looked in commercial aspect, how come they believe that their information is secure in the hands of social network companies. Social network sites are tempted to sell users’ data to make more gains. Second thing is, when a user becomes victim of cyber lobbying, it is possible to change pseudo name, so that the user is not much affected and can continue his or her online operations.
One of the interesting points raised by those who are against the usage of real names is, Facebook succumbs to corporate’s lure of purchasing real data with real names. If a corporate is able to access real names, they have more potential to make money out of all kinds of campaigns by purchasing the data from Facebook.
Whatever may be the force behind Facebook, it will be interesting to watch how Facebook goes ahead in this upward plane by being so sloppy all through these years!
